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.

Troll Playing

Like most other self-styled conservatard "thinkers," Kevin Williamson is more concerned about being a "provocateur" than actually saying something. I probably fail more than I succeed, but the goals of any writer -- especially an opinion writer -- should be clarity and organization. By the end of any opinion piece, the reader should have a very clear idea of the specifics of the writer's opinion on the subject. Otherwise, what's the point?

So we have a general idea by now that Williamson is anti-abortion. Fair enough. As a basic rule of principle, if you are calling for the criminalization for something that is currently legal, you should at least be able to provide some level of detail as to the punishment for engaging in this (again, currently legal) activity. This is especially true for something as culturally volatile as abortion.

(Gun rights would be another -- for example, it turns out that the father of Waffle House shooter Travis Reinking gave him back his weapons after they were confiscated at the White House last summer. Unfortunately, that does not break any current laws, but if you were to pass a law prohibiting that, what should the penalty be? Should it be open-ended and connected to whatever the person you know is mentally unstable does with the weapons you give him, and prosecuted accordingly? Discuss.)

But given his already problematic history of saying "provocative" things on the subject, Williamson has a particular responsibility to clarify his earlier musings. He's had plenty of opportunity to do so, and yet he keeps playing this stupid game.

On tonight's episode of The Jim Jefferies Show, he goes to Ireland to discuss that country's draconian abortion policies, and chats for a few minutes with a virulently anti-abortion politician. To his small credit, the politician actually answers the "penalty question" quite specifically:  fourteen years in prison for the mother, death for the doctor. Okay then. For better or worse, a voter can actually make an informed decision with that.

Kevin Williamson, despite repeated entreaties, seems to think that the penalty question is just a cheap librul ruse. But it's central to the very question of repealing Roe v. Wade. Either you believe abortion should be legal (possibly with certain constraints), or you believe it should be a criminal offense. Given the pro-life movement's consistently strident rhetoric about it being murder, it's a fair question to ask whether they mean that literally, and would prosecute it as such if they got their way.

The fact that Williamson bleats that it's an unfair question, and resists every opportunity to clarify his previous published writings on the subject (right up to the end where he offers to write a paid article) reveals what everyone already knew about him, and the endless supply of "conservative" writers like him -- they talk a good game about first principles, but in the end, they're all just hacks and trolls. Under the bridge is where the money is.

Put a Cork In It

It's nice that Bob Corker has put His Travesty on notice that he's not taking any of his shit, but Corker was one of the "serious" Republicans that gave his approval to candidate Clownstick, and as such, is part owner of this shithead, no matter how much he tries to disown him now. When Corker actually does something concrete, then he can come out of his "go fuck yourself" corner.

They all try to hide behind the notion that they "reasonably" assumed that the gravitas of the job and the Oval Office and all that was going to transform Shit-for-Brains into a serious man. Someone needs to tell them that such a thing was never a reasonable assumption. Everyone except cheap hucksters and soulless political opportunists saw this coming.

Clownstick is who he has always been, and who he always will be. There is no other side. What you see has always been what you've gotten, and to his credit, he's never pretended otherwise. All along, media monkeys and common taters and other such unaccountable dipshits just assumed it was all bluster, hyperbole, showmanship, whatever. It's like it never occurred to any of them that maybe he's really just an asshole.

Now they know. Well, fuck them, and fuck Bob Corker. They all own whatever this monster has already done, and what he'll do in the days and weeks to come. War with Iran and/or North Korea, the corrosion of previously boilerplate free-speech rights; the incitement of rage, anger, hateful nonsense; the active pitting of Americans against each other in order to deflect from the constant, rolling incompetence.

Political realists from both major parties, people who would classify as more or less "true" conservatives and liberals in the heretofore conventional sense, saw all this happening, and correctly sussed Mister Man's temperament well before he suddenly became viable. The only surprise since then is that he's somehow managed to turn out to be dumber, crueler, more childish -- and very possibly demented and/or mentally ill -- than most people would have guessed.

But the people who chose to ignore what was right in front of them, what he was directly telling them over and over, thinking they could ride his coattails or diaper band or whatever bulges his fat ass out the way it does, they own it. All of it. It's up to them whether they want to step up now and do something to salvage what's left of their reputations. It's tough to imagine what's stopping them; it's not like he can turn them into a jack-in-the-box or send them into a cornfield. The money people who own him right now will find someone else to rent after he's gone, whether now or later. But they might want to get on the right side of this while there's still time.

Days of Whine and Poses

Edroso, as always, in on the right track here:

This goes back to something I've been saying forever about wingnut whining -- for example, when they complain that Yale and Harvard are prejudiced against them, I always say: Why not quitcher bitchin' and instead make Bob Jones and Liberty University the intellectual lighthouses to which the best students flock? Then you won't need to worry about Yale and Harvard! Bypass the gatekeepers! Be the star you are!

Similarly, why worry about the Times rankings at all? (Shoot, Regnery doesn't -- they say they'll stop using the Times rankings in their marketing which, given their bulk-sales-to-gomers approach, probably won't make any difference.) Conservatives having been saying for decades that the Times is untrustworthy and irrelevant -- why not instead lobby for the New York Post, Breitbart et alia to have their own lists, and then you can all enthuse that D'Souza's Liberal Fascism for the Even Dumber is #1 on the American Thinker Best Seller List?

The answer's pretty obvious: These guys don't really believe what they say they believe. They don't want the path cleared so they can be judged by the wide world on their own merits. What they want are the glittering prizes their enemies dispense, because somewhere deep in their blackened little souls they burn with desire for the approbation of the people they spend their days raging against, like spurned teenage suitors. And, if they can't have the prizes, they can at least retain the boogiemen -- Hollyweird! Eggheads! Shut Up and Sing! -- that they and their yokel supporters can invoke whenever they feel like having a good cry about how persecuted they are.

But I have to disagree, ever so slightly. "Conservatism" as we olds -- say, at least old enough to recall Saint Reagan's tenure clearly and in detail -- understood that word is long dead. It found itself temporarily supplanted by "neo" movementarian goons whose sole goal was to get us into Iraq (and this was before 9/11 gave us a convenient pretext). But one the neocons' war games became, well, inconvenient to their professed intemellectual strategery, the money guys got their Citizens United ruling, took a look around, and realized that what a nation full of reality-teevee-besotted retards really needed was some Real Housewives types to go to Washington, flip some tables, pull some weaves.

That engine is now being driven solely by full-blown, unapologetic reactionaries. And what reactionaries do more than anything else (as you might guess from the label) is complain. They react. And that's the problem with these assholes. They don't know how to govern, because they don't know how to take action. They only know how to rhetorically position themselves against what their sworn enemies do. They are not for anything, except destroying things. They don't have any true volition of their own.

I mean, Roy's base point is absolutely correct -- they are a bunch of fucking crybabies. And that's annoying. But the really scary thing is realizing that that really is the only song they know anymore. It was always a factor in how they defined themselves and differentiated themselves from, let's say, normal human beings. At this point, it appears to be about the only way they define themselves.

It cannot be pointed out too often how completely devoid of simple logic the conservatards' culture model really is. In their mythos, Evil Hollyweird, land of queers and jooos, forces their warped "values" on helpless reg'lar foke, who want nothin' more than good wholesome entertainment, like Hee Haw and such. (Never mind, of course, that the redder the state, the higher the divorce rate and the porn rate and the substance abuse rate, and on and on.)

Of course, none of this remotely squares with their endless jabbering about the Free Market and the Silent Majority -- or, in Dinesh D'Douchebag's case among so many others, Morality. In other words, per their pet theories, if the clear majority of the sainted 'murkin populace were really all that het up about the librul elites pushing them around at the box office, and the free market works its ineffable magic in response, then why aren't they putting these smut peddlers out of bidness, and putting their own stuff in?

I mean, did it ever occur to these culture monkeys why, of all the available networks, a show like (to cite just one notorious example) Family Guy airs on the network owned by the same asshole that peddles their propaganda on another of his networks? That maybe this is all just a long con, and they've always been the real marks?

Provocateur

It's been an interesting week for poor Milo, no? Having not been familiar with him except by name, until his appearance last week on Bill Maher's show, I didn't really know what to expect. By the end of the segment, I guess it was mildly surprising how utterly fact-free and hacky the guy really is. I thought there'd be at least some nugget of principle, some vague core conviction of contrarianism or something.

But he's nothing but a confection of queer-lib schtick and bratty hair-pulling third-grader. He's basically a gay British Bart Simpson, minus the charm. Even Rush Limbaugh is entertaining on rare occasions. The idea that someone like Milo has any impact on the political world should give one an idea of how far gone we are. This is just "think of the stupidest thing you can, make something out of it, and do it in character."

We Sold Our Soul for Schlock and Bull

Surely the least among us are unsurprised to find that MAN OF CONSCIENCE Cuban-Canadian Rafael Edward Cruz has decided to throw his 120 micrograms of political weight behind one Fuckface Von Clownstick, thereby eliminating the final shred behind which one might be able to conceal the notion that Cruz had any conscience or principle whatsoever.

Because Cruz was Drumpf's closest competitor in the primaries, and actually beat him in a handful of states, Drumpf's lobs at Cruz tended to be of a highly personal nature -- his wife was a dog (and had mental health issues), his dad helped Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK, etc. Politics ain't beanbag, but this was also the sort of stuff you don't forgive people for and move on.

And Cruz' endorsement is statistically meaningless; many of not most of his supporters were in the camp as much out of disdain for Drumpf as being for Cruz. The only thing that makes sense here is that Cruz thinks that by strapping on the kneepads, he has a shot at getting appointed to the Supreme Court when Texas bounces his worthless ass in 2018.

And you know what? He's probably right. One thing Drumpf prizes above all else is loyalty -- for a man who apparently has never had a pet, he's clearly a dog person. He just prefers his dogs in human form.

People like Cruz and Chris Christie, who talk a good game but who are utterly bereft of spine and character and actual principles, are more than willing to kneel and do tricks and let master balance a biscuit (at least we hope it's a biscuit) across their noses. They'll eat their own shit and sleep in the yard if that's what it takes. They'd toss the old man's salad in Times Square at noon if it got them the AG and SCOTUS seats they crave so. Their desire to damage this country is as unmitigated and unlimited as their sheer gall.

Scorched earth, people. These fuckers are cockroaches, be prepared to nuke 'em all. No quarter. Beat them like the mangy dogs that they truly are. The "free press" ain't gonna help, so we gotta beat 'em all at their own game, so badly that they can't come back.

Crapfest

There's a reason I rarely bother to venture onto Facebook anymore, and today is a perfect example of why, post after post after fuckheaded rant about how Colin Kaepernick should be "deported" or fired or what-have-you, for the high crime of expressing his opinion.

I think some people need to be reminded of what the great things are about this country. Perhaps the most important feature is that every citizen has the inalienable right to be wrong, and even to be a jerk about it. Without that basic right, nothing else matters, we would all just be slaves to the swirling winds of mob rage.

I'm just cynical enough to believe that Kaepernick, who had been on the verge of being benched in favor of Blaine Gabbert, is trying to get traded to a team that will start him, although there are certainly better ways to go about that. Perhaps Kaepernick is utterly sincere in his sentiments, in which case there might be better ways to communicate that. We don't really know, and it's not really important.

What should be important is that, after a year-plus of listening to Fuckface Von Clownstick paint this country as a festering hellhole for his adoring throngs, it's more than a mild coincidence that the most ardent of the anti-Kaep screamers are also the most devout Clownstick acolytes. This is the conservatard mythos writ small -- the conservative can complain about the gubmint interfering with his ability to make and keep his money, but the second someone complains about how they're treated by agents of that same gubmint, these people come unglued.

They loves them some Drumpf because he's sooo un-PC, but the fact of the matter is, these people are as PC about their own pet causes as the most tiresome SJW tweeting from their safe space. I tend to agree with them that their country is lost, but it's lost because they are moronic, intolerant rageaholics who probably need a diagram on how to wipe their asses properly.

Semper Lie

It makes perfect sense that a gaggle of inbred chickenhawks would have no idea what a Blue Star Service pin looks like or stands for. Why would they? This is the same brand of professional retard that bravely tries to whitesplain how well slaves were treated. It's all of a piece -- they can't even play a simple game of "gotcha" without stepping on their dicks.

This is what the party of Lincoln has fallen to. Sad!

Family Values

Not just the next time, but every time some what-about-the-children wretch crawls out from under their rock to lecture the rest of us on our louche morality, remind them that of the three main assholes who headed the last impeachment of a sitting president, two of them were cheating on their wives, and the third one sucked off teenage boys when he was a wrestling coach fifteen years prior.

I mean, seriously, fuck these people.

Everything's an Opportunity

The Ronnie Raygun hagiography heads into its epilogue with the passing of his widow Nancy, and of course her death, like everything that happens in our universe anymore, becomes a tedious cudgel with which to beat fictional apostates over the head.

Now, the predictable snark from smartass liberals focused on the well-known rumor about the deceased's talented mouth in her younger years, which may be a bit unseemly, but is not necessarily untrue. Near as I can tell, none of the people pushing that one around are motivated by hate or even dislike of Nancy Reagan. But given the incessant moralizing and slut-shaming of the Republican Party, it is at least humorous to note that the woman they insist was the classiest first lady since Jackie Kennedy was also renowned as an accomplished fellatrix. That's not necessarily an insult; maybe it's just me, but I tend to prefer women who enjoy giving blowjobs over women who don't.

More seriously, as first lady, Nancy Reagan did some indisputably silly and useless things:  ordered $200k worth of china for the White House in the midst of a recession; used an astrologer to run her husband's schedule; had a goofball teevee star serve as a flack for her nonsensical "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign. Certainly nothing terrible or catastrophic, but also nothing meriting the worship and adulation that, to be honest, comes mostly from managing to hang around for so long.

Bloc Heads

One of the most tedious features of political horse-race coverage is how inept it tends to be. Even the Monday-morning-quarterback hindsight assessments tend to be off, because they tend to be based on assumptions going in.

Last night's South Carolina primary is a good example of that. Conventional wisdom had it that "evangelicals" would go for Cruz, and instead they went for Trump. The media don't really know what to make of evangelicals, and when they ask them questions, of course the evangelicals spout a bunch of god-bothering jabber about their morals and values.

I saw a commenter somewhere -- a conservative Trump supporter, mind you -- recently say something to the effect that most of the southern evangelicals he knew had been divorced several times, used meth, oxy, and or alcohol, and usually could be found at a casino. He was not saying this disparagingly or admiringly, just in a matter-of-fact way.

Failed State

The term "failed state" or "hollow state" generally refers to a nation whose institutions do not or cannot govern anymore, due to collapse by a number of different means -- economic, resource depletion, natural catastrophe, war, internal strife, maniacal despot, etc. The wrong circumstances and the wrong people converge, and structures that were seemingly in place just a month or a year prior are suddenly no longer evident.

The same dynamic can happen to any sort of entity, of course, even (perhaps especially) a political party. So it is appearing more and more to be the case with the Republicans. Antonin Scalia's death over the weekend cast this into sharp relief, not just with McConnell's comically quick urge to show his entire hand when he had no need to, to the bizarre conspiracy theories suddenly surrounding Scalia's death.

No, whatever you do, don't consider the likelihood that a fat eighty-year-old man who kept his health concerns to himself, and whose enjoyment of wine and rich food was well-known, might have, you know, had a heart attack in his sleep. I know, try to contain your surprise. But the Michael Savage types out there pull the "that's what they want you to think, man!" card.

Kudos to Trump for falling for that one, by the way. Jesus, what a fuckin' maroon. He seems like he might just be dumb enough to, say, use junk bonds to fund an overpriced casino in a dying resort community, and have it go bankrupt in just three years.

Liars' Poker

In terms of making a mint from the internets, I frequently think I was born about 15-20 years too early (1967), maybe more. I think people born about 1990 or so, growing up with the modern toys we all take for granted now, are instinctively attuned in a way we older folk had to learn. I can definitely say that even mundane things such as Excel have made me think and process information differently than I did in the previous century, but they've grown up with those things, where we older folks learned them, implanted them on the old paradigm we grew up with, which was so different.

Having a teenager in the house is a constant reminder of how difficult it is to convey how much different life was before these wondrous things. Of course I have tried, by mentioning such oddities as rotary-dial phones and black-and-white TVs, but understandably I just get a blank stare. It would be like my great-grandmother trying to explain how music recordings were once played by wax cylinders.

Like many kids her age, my daughter wants to be a video game designer, which is yet another area in which I can only lamely attempt to tell her how things used to be. Games are as sophisticated as movies now, of course, and as such require not only coders but scriptwriters. I don't have any ironic nostalgia for Pong or Adventure or Pitfall or Pac-Man, as much fun as those games were back in the day, anymore than I would trade Breaking Bad for Dukes of Hazzard. Trust me, your Facebook friends posting memes about that shit are missing the boat.

Random Observations From Tonight's GOP Debate

Watching debates from either party is only possible with alcohol, and fortunately (or not) I stocked up for the weekend. Even so, I only hung in for blessedly brief portions, which were quite enough to get a feel for things.

All smackdown aside, this really is a fucked-up crew of moral degenerates, for the most part. When John Kasich and John Ellis Bush are the least objectionable contestants on your little game show, you know you have a problem.

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.

Children of a Lesser Clod

Speaking of business failures trying to bamboozle morons about their track records, abortion kidnapper Carly Fiorina lit up the Trump-less Gooper debate tonight swinging the chain at her fellow vagina-owning candidate. I am definitely no fan of Hillary Clinton, but really, Fiorina's just awful in every respect. I don't know if she's self-funded or not; I assume that after her monkey-fuck of a Senate campaign here in Cali, she's learned to fleece some other group of idiots out of their money.

Which makes me happy; on the one hand, as much as I despise people like Trump and Cruz (and indeed, the entire rest of the GOP bottom-feeders), at least it makes some warped sense why people might support them. They have some self-reinforcing viability.

But what's the motivation for someone willing to tell a pollster at this stage of the game that they support one of the "margin of error" candidates? What sort of maroon is actually telling someone, "Yeah, I'm still holding out for Huckabee?"

The eternal question remains:  What's wrong with these people? That's okay, I still believe sincerely that it is utterly wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

And yet, just as your average Breitbart comments thread turns into a pig-fucking contest before you scroll through a single screenshot, so too occasionally does your MoJo comments feed. I mean, these fucking people waste no time forgetting that the article is about what a shrill, nasty beast Carly Fiorina is, and instead devolve instantly into a Hillary vs. Bernie slugfest. Even with just two real candidates, Democrats waste no time in going full circular firing squad.

Autocannibalism

Although I suppose I read a lot more non-fiction than most people do, my usual intake is about 50-50 between fiction and non-fiction. And I don't really make distinctions between "popular" or "unknown" writers as a barometer of what's "good" or not; if it's good it's good. So I've been a huge fan of Stephen King's writing for most of my life, since probably about seventh grade, 1980 or so.

One of my favorite short stories of King's is Survivor Type, a perverse little number about a drug-smuggling surgeon who survives a plane crash and finds himself marooned on a remote Pacific atoll with nothing more than his wits, his surgical tools, and some heroin. Because it is Stephen King, you expect the natural goo and gore of a man slowly devouring himself, piece by piece, going mad the entire time.

What might be less expected, but is barely subtextualized, is how the demented drug-smuggling doctor tries to convince himself throughout, first as he amputates and eats a foot, then the other foot, working his way up each leg until he's eaten everything below the waist, that he will pull through this, that he can survive, that as bad as it gets, it is still worth surviving, that if a ship somehow came out of the horizon and pulled this raving half-man aboard, he could still rehabilitate himself and move on with the rest of his life.

Which brings us to the much-publicized anti-Trump manifesto released by National Review the other day. It's almost too sad and pathetic to watch, this marooned half-man thinking that there is some deus ex machina out there providentially about to restore his loss.

Trump and Trumper

You know, as much fun as it would be to watch Trumpalin blow up what's left of the GOP and defecate on the ruins, maybe it's time the grisly mama went home and took care of her kids, at least the ones who are still young enough to steer clear of their two oldest siblings' paths.

Nah, we're stuck with the fun, whether we want it or not. Might as well make the most of the tossed word salad.

It should be clear with every mention just who exactly these maroons represent -- other maroons. After letting her neglected "web channel" die of neglect (sure hope someone's back at the ranch making sure the younger Palins are getting fed), Miss Thang landed a gig at something called One America News Network. It does not require a particular gift for deconstructing agitprop code for that moniker to ring familiar bells.

Enough Is Enough

Can someone please explain why the feds have held off on taking any action at all against the (as Jim Wright poetically puts it) "bums with guns" at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. Two weeks into this and they've got people coming and going as they please, bringing and sending supplies, tearing down fences. And now you have environmental activists stepping up to confront these thieving peckerwoods, because their federal government doesn't have the fucking balls to do anything about this. Are they waiting for someone to get hurt or killed?

Playtime is over. We're two weeks into this now, and they're just digging in, like the parasites they are. No one wants a Waco, but this can easily be resolved without violence. But these assholes need to be taught that the law applies to them as well; whether they leave the refuge alive or dead is up to them, but they are not going straight back home either way. They are no longer free men. They are going to be taking an involuntary vacation in Club Fed for a while.

After the last couple years of urban rioting, some distinctions should be clear. Since rioters are typically armed only with things they can throw, riots get contained pretty quickly, and their participants are dispersed, truncheoned, and/or arrested within hours. Rioters that have guns typically get shot pretty quickly. Compare and contrast with the seizure of a federal building by a band of heavily armed lunatics with a bizarre political agenda -- something that, if it occurred in another country, would correctly be portrayed as extremism or terrorism.

The Outside Scoop

In order to continue with its premise of completely ignoring Senator Bernie Sanders and his Trump-sized crowds, as well as providing constant coverage of every little thing Trump does, the corporate media has to come up with other things to cover. This week's model revolves around putting Trump's current main rival for the coveted Iowa caucus vote, alien-in-a-human-suit Ted Cruz, under the spotlight. The idea here is to build up Cruz and then pit him against Trump. Spoiler alert:  they're both assholes.

Only in an ADD culture that no longer bothers to distinguish between has-beens and never-weres -- you know, the sort of interchangeable "hey, weren't you in...." saps that appeared on Trump's dopey fake-bidness show -- would it even be mentioned that a doddering cosplay hillbilly, whose stupid show jumped the shark a long time ago, is endorsing Cruz. So Phil Robertson thinks Ted Cruz would be a solid imperial custodian because Cruz believes in God and is willing to put on face paint and go duck hunting? Big fucking deal. Robertson also is on record as saying that liberals follow Satan and are worse than Stalin or the Nazis.

His idiot brother, whose schtick on the show is apparently to make people think he has a steel plate somewhere in his head, insists that atheists don't exist because they use the calendar and spend money. Yeah, if they HAD PRINCIPLES they'd live without money or knowing what day it is. Anyone taking advice from these goobers on picking good political leaders should be disenfranchised before they hurt someone. Fuck these morons in the neck with a rusty spoon.