American Standard

Jacob Bacharach has an interesting mini-thread here declaiming Obama as anything special as far as critical or "adventurous" thinking. It's worth thinking about because, as with the buffoons that preceded and succeeded him, as with every imperial custodian since the founding of the republic, Obama is simply a reflection of the people who put him there.

I can easily think of a dozen or more things right off the top of my head, in foreign and domestic policy areas, that Obama could have handled better. But he's still the "best" President of my lifetime, by a considerable margin, objectively on his job performance and certainly as a person. That he generally seemed intimidated or reluctant to confront the vituperation directed against him may be less of an observation on his character, and more a realization that as a black man, he always had to watch himself and his responses, check his anger.

That's on all of us, on our shithead corporate mediot gatekeepers and the people who keep them employed.

Even as it was, obviously one of the more frequent criticisms of Obama was that he was too cool or professorial, which translates from dipshit as high-handed -- or worse, smug. You can't win for losing with this fucking country. Obama visited all ninety-nine counties in Iowa, eating their corn dogs and kissing their pigs and all that horseshit that reveals nothing about a person's competence, only what they're willing to put up with. But he did it, and then as soon as he got in, an entire industry geared up to play to the rubes' generational strain of rabid anti-intellectualism coursing through their veins.

More to the point of the tweet that originally sparked the mini-thread, Obama certainly does seem much more self-reflective or even self-critical than most other presidents of recent years, excluding perhaps Carter and Nixon. Whatever flaws I might have found with what Obama said or did in certain areas, one thing I appreciated about him was that he clearly had what is actually the most vital characteristic that a chief executive must possess to be effective -- he knew his weaknesses, shored those areas up with people who knew more, and he listened to them. Seems simple, until again, you compare him with Bush and Trump, two spoiled brats who never heard the word no, and made the world pay for it.

So no, Obama wasn't really the once-in-a-generation world-class thinker his fans praise him as. Compared to the current turd, he's Einstein. But even if he had been this super-genius, he would have had to hide it. They went after him for wearing a tan suit, for putting Dijon mustard on a sandwich.

It's not exactly a secret that a significant part of the electorate -- certainly all of Trump's base -- boils down to you think yer better'n me? They want to spend the rest of their lives drinking shitty beer and watching hillbillies drive billboards in circles at 180 mph. They want to watch nobodies air their sex lives on teevee, because they don't have the guts to watch porn or Faces of Death. They want a life that demands as little of them as possible.

Obama's primary flaw, like that of all true idealists, was this teleological belief that all people are inherently "good" and want to do the "right" thing. But when they encounter people whose concepts of good and right don't jibe with their own, they have no answer. When confronted with moral monsters like Rupert Murdoch, who would literally rather watch the world melt and its people murder each other than pay one percent more in taxes, they don't know what to do. It doesn't occur to idealists that some people, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp once sagely observed, ain't no damn good, you can't trust 'em, can't love 'em, no good deed goes unpunished.

In the end, that'll be Obama's legacy -- having to watch a cloven-hoofed oaf tear apart everything he spent eight years building, for no other reason than to show that he could, while Obama watches coolly from the sidelines, staying out of the fray because we are the change we're looking for or whatever.

Well, no, we're not. Most people are overworked and underpaid and struggling in this magnificent gig economy the billionaires have bestowed on the peons. Nearly forty percent of American households can't handle an emergency expense over four hundred dollars. So when they vote for someone to get in there and handle the problem, they don't expect to then be asked to pitch in somehow and help out. No, that's why we voted you into office, pal.

But the deeper, darker truth is that too many people are leery and distrustful of someone who appears too smart. It's the root of every ill and every demagogue we ever have or will see.

Maine Event

Here's a thought for the folks contributing to and running the Go Fund Me account set up to challenge useless ectoplasm Susan Collins if she fails to vote correctly on prep-school rapist Brett Kavanaugh for his pre-ordained SCOTUS seat:  don't bother making the challenge to Collins conditional on just that one vote. Fucking go all in against her. Put that money into getting a senator that will actually represent the interests of average Mainers(?).

Collins is horrible, a weaselly hack whose cultivation of bullshit "moderate" and "independent" descriptors is as craven as Saint McCain's "maverick" appellation. The day Susan Collins shows any real independence from bog-standard swamp rats like Bitch McConnell or Huckleberry Closetcase is a day you should go out and buy a fucking lottery ticket.

So just lean into it and make it official, turn it into a PAC to fund whichever Democrat takes Collins on for 2020. Because she needs to go regardless. Maybe she can replace that shitbird Paul LePage as governor, but there's no shame in just raising as much dough as possible and getting opportunistic hacks like Collins and Murkowski and the rest of the faux-pendents the fuck out of there.

War Party

The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings have been every bit the monkey-fuck we all knew they would be. The nominee is a smarmy little putz who should be drummed out of public service post-haste, I don't give a shit how nice he is in the soccer-team carpool or whatever.

He's a typical little suburban asshole creep who is salivating at the chance to go after every conservatard's judicial wet dream -- no, not Roe v. Wade, but Griswold v. Connecticut, the ruling that not only tragically permitted American citizens to purchase birth control and have some say over their reproductive lives, but also put the phrase "penumbra of rights" into the judicial lexicon, as that pertains to the privacy of individuals. These creepy little Handmaid's Tale shits can't stand that they might not be able to fully control women's sex lives.

But what's worse is how cynically the Republicans have gone about this, not just bulling Kavanaugh's confirmation through before the midterms, not just releasing less than ten percent of the documents Kavanaugh has worked on, but withholding another 100,000 pages of potentially incriminating documents. Indeed, it appears that Kavanaugh has already perjured himself.

And yet the GOP will sign off on this rigged bullshit, because that is what they have been for a long time. It's just gotten progressively worse, and now here we are. It's going to cost them in the long run.

I'm fifty-one years old now. I was a pretty reliable ticket-splitter up till 2000, and even since then, I've voted for an occasional Republican at the local level. But never again, not even for dog catcher or tax collector. Fuck that corrupt husk of a party and everyone who remains within it. Kavanaugh is a fucking animal who was specifically brought in to get His Travesty's dick out the wringer with Mueller, and the process is rigged beyond belief, and even "moderate" Republicans like Collins and Murkowski are in on it. Fuck them, every last one of them. They are betraying this nation, pure and simple.

So figuring I probably have another twenty-five to thirty years of life, that works out to roughly fifteen electoral cycles I have left to vote in. And I don't give a shit if the alternative is a dirtbag of a human being, if they are running against the Republican, they get my vote. My wife, same thing. My daughter, who unfortunately is five months too young to vote this November, is looking forward to a long life of never voting Republican. Never. Not under any circumstances.

The fucking aliens could land or the Chinese invade, and we'll just have to figure out something. Because we'll never vote for those treasonous cocksuckers ever again, and I know a lot of other people who are feeling the same way. The entire party has abdicated any pretense to principle or morality, or even basic loyalty to country over party. They must be made to pay. The Republican party must be rendered moot, razed to the ground, the earth salted, and the ashes scattered to the four winds.

Which brings me to the Democrats, who to their credit have been steadfast in their angry opposition to this fucking travesty. But this has to be a permanent war stance now, because it is a war. There is no room for compromise on anything anymore. That is my expectation out of this, or I won't be voting Democratic either. I'm not having anymore of this "live to fight another day" bullshit anymore -- this is now that "another day," so it is time to fight, until you win or die.

Assuming that this dog-and-pony show goes through, and that smug little shit gets the SCOTUS seat, and the House goes Democratic in November, it needs to be a priority to impeach -- impeach Kavanaugh, that is. As noted above, he's perjured himself, possibly multiple times. He lied in the job interview. That's not even touching on the hundreds of thousands of dollars of credit card debt Kavanaugh incurred buying tickets to fucking baseball games -- and then paid that debt down very quickly, suspiciously so. This asshole is janky to high heaven, and he's a sex freak to boot.

It's been cool watching Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and Pat Leahy and others get all up on Kavanaugh, getting loud and angry and fighting. Chuck Grassley is a fucking doddering weasel who is leading this betrayal of the country, and Leahy or Feinstein or one of the older Dem lions needs to pull him aside in the back room, away from the cameras and microphones, and look Grassley in his beady, traitorous eyes, and calmly assure him that if he insists on bulling through this travesty, that they have Kavanaugh on video perjuring himself, and that that is grounds for impeachment, and that a Dem House will absolutely go through the impeachment process, even if there aren't enough senators to convict and remove this turd.

The Senate seats up for grabs in 2020 are basically the reverse of this year -- twice as many vulnerable Republican seats as Democratic ones. Again, the Dems need to put on their war face and make sure that the Republicans -- who are not their friends, not their colleagues, not their fucking drinking buddies; they are complicit in the ongoing destruction of this nation's institutions, and are openly rigging the processes and rules, and as such, are now the enemy -- understand that no compromise or cooperation or quarter will be asked or given.

I don't know about you, but I've had quite enough of gutless incrementalism. Look around you -- this is what that has gotten us. It's time to try something else. Mencken's aphorism about hoisting the black flag and slitting throats should be the rule of thumb going forward. This can no longer stand.

Don't Do Something, Just Stand There!

The good folks at LGM have been all over what would be a Big Story, if we had a remotely competent corporate media. But since they're too busy transcribing Judy Ghouliani's "truth isn't truth" lies and stroking their chins about the meaning of it all, it mostly goes unnoticed.

Two Republican Secretaries of State, Kris K. (for Kansas) Kobach of Kansas, and Brian C. (for Cheater) Kemp of Georgia, are running for governor of their respective states. Kobach is perhaps most notorious for chairing the rigger voter fraud commission that FAILED in its mission to manufacture evidence of widespread (or even narrowly spread) fraudulent voting. Kemp's profile is a bit lower, but he deserves credit for stealing the GA-06 seat for Karen Handel (who also has a history of voter suppression when she was Georgia's Secretary of State) last year.

It's not an unfair question to pose to these scumbags:  why bother holding elections at all? Seriously, if they're not even bothering to conceal their cheating and rigging of the electoral system, why even bother? Let's just go full fashy and y'all can tell the peons who they voted for.

But this takes agency away from said peons. Kansans need to step up and take responsibility for their decisions, and start atoning for voting for a clown like Sam Brownback over and over again. The state is absolutely gutted, and they're lining up to have a two-by-four snapped off in their asses by Kobach. At some point people have to start paying attention and showing up, and not getting gulled over and over again by the last flag-humping teevee commercial they see before they go to cast their lot.

Georgia's predicament is a bit more transparent -- a white power minority (only slightly different from a white-power minority) preserving power over a black majority with several methods -- closing most of the polling places, throwing voters off of registration rolls, etc. They know they can't win fair and square, so they cheat and cheat and cheat some more. And no one does a goddamned thing about it.

Maybe disenfranchised voters should organize via this "social media" thing we keep hearing about, and organize a collective strike for a day or several. Maybe they should identify all of Kemp's corporate campaign sponsors and organize a boycott.

And maybe some politicians from the so-called Democratic Party could step up and make some noise too. I don't just mean the Chuck and Nancy show. How about former Georgia governor and noted fan of electoral integrity Jimmy Carter? How about recent president Barack Obama, if he's not too busy parasailing at Richard Branson's private Bahamian island? Former attorney general Eric Holder, mighty crusader against guitar companies and potheads? All of those people could at least raise a ruckus about this situation. But they don't even try. They never do. They'll mumble some bullshit platitudes about not wanting to corrupt the process, never mind that Kemp and Kobach and their ilk couldn't give half a fuck about corrupting the process.

Think about it -- Kemp and Kobach are openly rigging their own elections for themselves, right out in the open, and no one with any power is doing or saying a goddamned thing about it. And they're gonna get away with it.

Citizens do need to step up and exercise their franchise, as it were. But regular folks only have so much time to do such things, after commuting and working and finding some precious time in what little is left of the day to live their lives, knowing every moment of their debt-slave existence is befouled by the banana republic bullshit being rubbed in their faces every fucking day.

The future is going to be a lot uglier; it is absolutely going to get worse before it gets better, if indeed it ever really does. And this is how it starts, with the "small" stuff, stealing an election here and there, working the refs, knowing that the media exists to stenograph lies and truth side-by-side, naively thinking an addled populace will magically be able to suss the truth.

But in a world where lies are truth and truth is irrelevant, all that matters is the art of the steal. It would be a lot less disgusting and demoralizing to watch if some of the folks who seem to have a bottomless pocket of empty bromides for every occasion helped out a bit and gave the good guys a fighting chance once in a while. Instead they'll show up a week after the election somewhere on the rubber chicken circuit for $50k, to offer some cheap observations about our better angels or some such nonsense.

Allow me to be the first to pre-emptively say to them fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Disengage

I'll give David Frum some small benefit of the doubt -- he's certainly traveled far from his "Axis of Evil" bafflegab a decade ago, providing the rhetorical buttress for the fanciful arguments of a feckless doofus. Frum has been front-and-center in his dismay at all things Drumpfski, probably because, like fellow columnist Bobo Brooks, his vanilla sensibilities are rankled by Cheetolini's voluble rampages. It is the form, more than the content, that chafes Frum's suburbanite mores.

So it makes sense that someone with Frum's aesthetic would adopt the rhetorical trope of "let's find out what makes these folks tick, so's we can talk to them in a language they can understand," which is condescending to begin with, but let's set that aside for the moment.

But as always, the weakness of that trope ignores our prime maxim at this here jernt:  It is impossible to deal rationally with irrational people. We may not like to hear that, but like gravity and death, it is true and inevitable. It is, as they say, what it is.

Cleveland Steamer, Day 3: The Derpening

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None Dare Call It Reason

As long as we're making up crimes and punishments, I call for this worthless cocksucker to be strung up in a filthy back alley, and his bug-eyed corpse to be dumped in the nearest outhouse. I mean, it's West Virginia, so you know there's a fuckin' outhouse within earshot.

Look, I'm as skeptical of HFC as the next cat, but this is ridonkulous. These crazy assholes need to beaten down, hard. No mercy. Twenty points is not enough of a spread; 99-1 would be more suitable. These knuckle-draggers must be repudiated wherever they crawl out of the woodwork. If they cannot mount a campaign of principled disagreement and proportionate response, then the gloves must come off.

I don't know if Michael Folk has noticed, but there is a climate of violence brewing across the nation right now. Cops are abusing and killing citizens, madmen are murdering cops that had nothing to do with any abuse issues, terror attacks are occurring hither and yon, and people are kind of on edge. We do not need this sort of incendiary rhetoric.

Additionally, Folk may want to review the tape of Jim Comey declining to prosecute HFC for her email issues. I can take it or leave it, but Comey is not a Dem partisan hack, by any means. If he says he saw smoke, but not fire, we're all just going to have to leave it at that and move on, especially considering that General Petraeus' issues with classified emails was much more egregious and criminal, and he walked away from it.

Not only that, but even if Comey had decided to prosecute HFC over the emails, it's not a hangin' offense. Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people? One expects this sort of dipshit booga-booga from random YouTube or Twitter assholes, places that treat their comments section like the bathroom wall at the filthiest rest stop on I-80. But Michael Folk is a state legislator. Is it too much to ask that he behave as such? Apparently it is.

(Just a reminder:  Jim Comey was Patrick Fitzgerald's assistant prosecutor in the Scooter Libby trial. You may recall that one, where a CIA field agent was outed, endangering her life, as well as those of her field contacts. That was not a hanging offense either.)

I don't know about you, but I've had enough of these people, and their tedious bullshit. I do not seek rapport or common ground with them, when they talk like that. Fuck them, fuck their voters, fuck their families, their communities, their social clubs. Everything they touch is tainted, and must be razed to the fucking ground. I want HFC and the Democratic Party to go scorched earth on them, burn them to the ground, salt their ashes and the earth beneath them, take a healthy dump, and plow it all under.

They won't of course; the Democrats are as feckless and gutless as the Republicans are stupid and spiteful. It will be enough of a challenge to get the Dems out of their natural circular-firing-squad posture. But there's always hope.

We'll Create a Cure; We Made the Disease

A couple posts back I linked to the new George Saunders exegesis of the Drumpfsters in the upcoming New Yorker, but it deserves its own reference. It makes sense to be charitable and assume that Saunders' effort was at least in part to humanize them more, make them look less like hateful morons.

And yet, afaic, it fails utterly in that regard. This is about more than the mere clash between two opposing sides with "non-intersecting data sets and myths," this is about cult behavior in the political arena, people motivated by nothing more than foolishness and lies, hatred and spite. It's not even wanting to burn the village in order to save it, but merely the pyromaniac's impulse to simply burn the motherfucker down, without worrying about who might still be in the edifice.

Billion Dollar Baby

I'm not familiar with PoliticusUSA, so cannot vouch for the veracity, but for one, it seems far more professionally written and laid out than rightie sites, such as your Bartbrite or Right Wing News or Western Journalism, and for another, it's about Donald Drumpf Fuckface Von Clownstick John Miller, so frankly, I don't give two fucks if it's even accurate or true or not anymore.

But it sure as hell sounds one hundred percent accurate:

When Donald Trump told Republicans that his campaign had money, it was a lie. In meeting with Senate Republicans, Trump’s campaign privately admitted that they have no money and will not be able to run television ads until after the GOP convention in July.

So, let's recap, shall we:  One of Miller's biggest positives, according to the double-digit IQ mouth-breather cultists who support him, is that he's "self-funded" and therefore beholden to no one. But just in the last couple weeks, Sheldon Adelson (you know, the other casino-owning scumbag), has already pledged $100m to the cause, since his last 100m pledge -- to Newt Gingrich in 2012 -- flamed out hilariously. And now it turns out that Miller doesn't want to pull a Meg Whitman and dump his own money into this after all.

The Aristocrats

Watching whatever stage of grief the Republicans are in right now is entertaining, to say the least. Some have a false sense of triumphalism and unity, as if their boy's excursions into Nineties nonsense is going to help their, um, cause. Yes, Deadbeat Donald, please do keep telling us about Whitewater and Vince Foster. While you're at it, go transcribe some Mudhoney lyrics, ya fuckin' hump.

Now, "principled" Republicans and/or conservatives, to the extent that there are any left, find themselves scrambling for purchase, wondering how they can in good conscience support the bloviating, comically-coiffed ass-clown representing their supposedly grand old par-tay.

Get It Together

Okay, so hopefully by now it should be clear that you're never ever going to tune in here and see me engage in cheap Nader-baiting, or smugly lecturing STOOPID LEFTIES how they "owe" their vote to this or that candidate. But this sort of behavior has to stop. This is nuts.

Nobody has any illusions about how this election is going down. This is going to be a soul-sucking, mind-numbing, interminable blatherfest between a cynical corporate Republican hack, and Donald DrumpfJohn Miller.

But it's also a showdown between people who have stayed active and informed and concerned about their country, and the gaggle of ignorant maroons mindlessly supporting Drumpf-Miller. Many of Drumpf-Miller's flock have proudly attested that they had never or rarely voted in the past. And as much as one might ideally wish that everyone would show up to exercise their sacred right, we're finding out the hard way that there are in fact some folks who, if they're not going to bother to inform themselves or think logically and rationally about serious issues, we're all better off if they stay home on election day.

American Horror Story: Convention

If I ever get worried that I might occasionally get too over-the-top in my insults and pointed jeremiads against various assholes, all I have to do is keep in mind that there are true freaks out there. What do you even say to someone who emails a delegate that they're praying for said delegate to get prostate cancer because they might support Cruz instead of Drumpf at the convention? What the hell is wrong with these idiots?

Bonus points to Bobo Brooks, of all people, from a March column:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

This week, the Politico reporters Daniel Lippman, Darren Samuelsohn and Isaac Arnsdorf fact-checked 4.6 hours of Trump speeches and press conferences. They found more than five dozen untrue statements, or one every five minutes.

This is why, while I actually agree with Drumpf's assertions about his flock being dispossessed and left behind, and sympathize with the lost dreams of said flock, it's possible to feel only so much empathy for them. They voted for the politicians that did this to them, over and over again, for decades, generations. They were fine with selling out someone else's future somewhere else, so long as they got to keep their McJobs stamping overpriced widgets.

The Party's Over, Part 3: Controlled Demolition

Once the smoke clears, it might be a good idea for the little people across the political spectrum to consider just what their expectations are out of their party machinery, and if maybe there's another way. Technology has evolved so rapidly and massively, faster than our ability to keep pace with all its capacities, that it's likely that it can facilitate a political paradigm that does not require the current system of institutionalized bribery.

The grievances from Sanders supporters and Drumpf supporters are nearly identical in many respects, and mostly concern the lack of responsiveness from their elected officials. Part of this is obviously the usual chicanery and deal-making that has left a lot of people out, sending away their jobs without adequate replacement or retraining, decimating their towns and communities. But part of it, as we've seen consistently, especially with Drumpf voters but along the political spectrum, is that the people don't know what they want, or they think they do, but have no idea how it should be made to happen.

It makes sense that the largest swath of these discontented folks would gravitate toward the "none of the above" candidate, filter through his generic, anodyne nonsense to hear the self-affirming bits they needed to hear, and perceive any skepticism with outright hostility. Again, the defining characteristic of the Drumpf voter is to see opponents not as individuals with a differing viewpoint that may or may not have some validity, but as a threat, an enemy. This is a natural consequence of following a candidate who communicates mostly in authoritarian rhetoric and boastful, self-serving lies.

The Party's Over, Part 2: Chaos and Discord

As violent incidents have increased at the Drumpf putsches, I have several times invoked the memory of Altamont, the infamous rock festival where security was provided by the Hell's Angels, with predictably disastrous results. So of course Drumpf now has a cadre of bikers promising to shut down protesters. What could possibly go wrong?

Between that development and what's already taken place, as well as the brewing confrontation at the party convention in July, the likelihood of the chaos that Loki-Littlefinger (heh) has sown thus far to bear fruit is increasing. It's looking more and more like Cruz will pull enough delegates to keep Drumpf from getting too close to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, and may even end up with a spread of 100-200 delegates, meaning a brokered convention.  You've seen the rallies -- do the Drumpfster divers seem like they're going to take that well?

But that is the ultimate intent of the trickster god:  to weasel his way into the process with empty promises and laughable rhetoric; to expose his opponents as frauds; to solidify his support into a hive-mind impermeable to reason; to throw the process into a state of unpredictability; to capitalize on the hostility.
 

The Party's Over: Creative Destruction

Media critics who are well attuned to the entertainment aspects of the never-ending political anointing process have rightly compared Drumpf to the Norse trickster god Loki. This comparison proves to be more and more apt as the season wends on. (A more contemporary metaphor might be that of Heath Ledger's Joker; as Michael Caine points out, some men just want to watch the world burn.)

This year's political Loki has thrived on sowing chaos in his chosen group. The only common cause Drumpf has with the Republican Party is the desire to keep every cent he's made, and to pretend he strived just as hard for it as every hotel-room cleaner or construction worker who's ever worked for him. In the process, Loki/Drumpf has thrown open the rank hypocrisy baked into every bit of the party, from the privileged dopes who run the machine, to the platform they continue to espouse, a platform that is responsive only to the donor class and "fambly valyews" morons.

So when Anderson Cooper exposes Loki's lack of knowledge or principle -- or even basic consistency -- on the subject of abortion, what also is exposed is the ridiculousness of that policy itself. Drumpf is correct in his initial proposal that, in the event of Roe being repealed, women should be punished, as well as in his subsequent demurral that it is the medical practitioner, rather than the woman, who should be punished.

This is a prime opportunity to scrutinize the absurdity of the pro-life proposal, of the practical ramifications, of this bizarre obsession that these people have with this procedure, which has steadily declined in frequency over the last twenty years, and is at any rate being curtailed state by state through other means. The bottom line is that their mission is not only to curtail access to certain options for reproductive health and family planning, but ultimately to exact punitive measures on the people who utilize and/or perform those measures. They tend to avoid talking about it in such terms, preferring instead to harp on the inane "sanctity of life" argument.

By fumbling around with his inept, ignorant unprincipled pose on the subject, Drumpf has inadvertently exposed that entire movement for the farce it truly is. They want to imprison doctors or women or both, they need to specify for how long and on what charge. And calling for "states' rights" doesn't fly; the citizens of Indiana have the same fundamental rights as the citizens of California.

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.

Poll Smokers: 2016 Edition

If there's one thing you can count on with the Iowa Caucus, it's for it to be utterly useless in predicting a nominee, or even a real trend. Tuesday's shit-show proved more than ever that there's just not much reason to let these corn-dog-engorged mouth-breathers have precedence in selecting candidates. What the fuck is this coin-toss-on-a-gym-floor bullshit? Game shows are more rigorous in their vetting methodology. This is just shameful.

I've stated before that between Sanders and Clinton, I far prefer Sanders (but will vote Clinton if need be). But the Democratic Party has done a lousy fucking job building a competitive bench of players. Their top two contenders are a former First Lady/Senator/Sec State with negatives as high as her positives, and a 74-year-old man who identifies as a socialist and only caucuses with the Democrats. The also-rans were the guy David Simon based Tommy Carcetti (unfavorably) on in The Wire, and two former Republicans who couldn't get re-elected in their own states. Clinton will save face (and her neck) upon winning the nomination by pulling in Julian Castro as her running mate, but still -- there's a veritable power vacuum in the GOP, and the Democrats seem to avoid taking advantage of the opportunity to set themselves up for the next decade or so, including down-ticket after the next census.

As for the Goopers, you can pick your analysis as you see fit. Trump's a loser because he's spent seven months telling us how yuge his cock was, and he barely held off Marco Rubio to keep his second-place finish. On the other hand, Trump has never run for or held any political office whatsoever, has spent far less money than any other candidate, and still finished in the top three, between two sitting senators. And each of those top three received more votes than any previous candidate in the history of the caucus. Again, take your pick, as neither conclusion helps pick New Hampshire, where Trump still leads comfortably by double digits.

I do have to appreciate Fuckface von Clownstick's meltdown the next morning, if only because it proves what I (and pretty much anyone who's paying attention) said all along -- there's something off about this fucking guy, Trump. I don't think I've ever seen someone in the public eye who's so consistently thin-skinned, so petty and vindictive. Is Cruz a weasel? Sure. Did he do anything out of the ordinary for political campaigns? No, not really. Has von Clownstick been anything but a mouthy dickhead from day one, talking shit about anyone and everyone, making things up as he sees fit? Does he have a right to complain about the shenanigans of others? Is karma actually a thing once in a rare while?

It's just hard to picture someone of Trump's temperament having to work -- having to compromise -- with other people. That's not just an important part of the job, it's the job, full stop. Trump would have some advantage in working with a Republican dominated Congress, particularly a House comprised of rabid, deeply stupid reactionaries. But it wouldn't be a given, especially if he doesn't have a supermajority in the Senate. None of his proposals have any real-world viability. And every other major world leader, excepting perhaps Vladimir Putin, sees him for the obnoxious jerkoff that he is.

With regard to Ted Cruz' dirty tricks in Iowa, the "Voting Violation" flyer is at once obnoxiously stupid and counterintuitive -- conventional wisdom holds Republicans benefitting from low voter turnout (or in this case, low-forehead voter turnout). Either way, someone stupid enough to fall for the flyer is exactly the sort of moron to vote for Cruz or Trump (or really, any of them) in the first place. And Cruz' imputations of Ben Carson dropping out really just boils down to a fairly obvious conclusion -- Carson is an idiot, but he's smart enough to know that he has no chance to win, or even to get a position in someone else's administration.

I don't think he's angling for that anyway, unlike most of the other undercard fools. One thing about professionally religious people in this country is that the more religious they are, the deeper their understanding of the grift. Carson can shuffle his way through New Hampshire and South Carolina, declare that he fought the good fight, and then head home to Florida to rest up, crank out another ghost-written book, and schedule as many "inspirational" speaking engagements as his stomach and wallet can handle. And his supporters will gravitate to Rubio, since Trump long ago barked many nasty things about Carson's admittedly weird Scarface-to-Urkel backstory, and Cruz' little gambit will be fresh in their pea skulls.

So while no one knows for sure how NH shakes out, the narrative seems to be taking hold already -- the establishment GOP wants Rubio, because they hate Cruz, Trump's an asshole, and Rubio is a willing sock puppet. Rubio's biggest gap, in their eyes, is his lack of experience and gravitas, just like Fredo Arbusto. And like with Fredo, the bosses will pair him up with an old hand who can lend the kid a veneer of seriousness. That's where John Kasich comes in.

Really, the one who fell the furthest in Iowa was Jeb Bush. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

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.

The Enema Within

The circus comes to town, and more hijinks ensue. Violence against protesters has already occurred at several Trump rallies, mostly in the south, which more and more is looking like an area we should have either let go in the first place, or completely eradicated every trace of traitor-slaver existence. It's only a matter of time before someone gets seriously injured or worse.

These yahoos mean business, and by "mean business" I mean that these Horst Wessel rallies provide emotionally retarded morons an opportunity to be their true selves. And that means that if someone browner than themselves is at the rally, they're up to no good, and must be stopped by any means necessary. You know, pointing out that every word out of Trump's asshole-shaped mouth is a lie, including "and" and "the", makes the baby Jebus cry blood.

Not that they care if anything their hero says is true or accurate, or is even grounded in reality. It affirms their bullshit, it validates what they knew all along. There is no perceivable benefit to pointing out that Trump is a liar and a fool, that Ben Carson is even more so. These people don't care about facts or reality. They want what they want. They think Trump is the guy to give it to them, good and hard.

Corn Pwned

There are many tedious rituals in 'murka's interminable campaign process, but one of the worst is this weird insistence that some inbred shithead small state possesses some sort of intrinsic wisdom that us city slickers (I say this from a town in California that has fewer than 8,000 inhabitants, in a county with fewer than 30,000 people, and not even a movie theater) jest cain't reckon.

People who classify themselves as "traditionalists" tend to hew to the idea that just because something has been done in a certain way for a certain amount of time, it should continue to be that way. Slavery was one such tradition; subjugating women was another. I wouldn't say that having states like Iowa and New Hampshire have first call at anointing national politicians is as ethically abhorrent as those things, but it is certainly at least as counter-productive.

This is a no-win situation for those states, quite frankly. There are only two lines of defense -- Iowa's miserable track record at picking eventual nominees either makes the process a harmless, anodyne event, or it renders its considered collective opinion completely useless. So why not just set up a rotating schedule throughout all states, large and small?

While most of us may not have traveled around the world, visiting every country and culture, I would guess that most of us have traveled at least some. I wouldn't say I'm well-traveled by any means, but I've been through half of the U.S., half of Europe, and parts of Canada and Mexico -- enough to know, like most people who have traveled far more also know, that once you get past the cultural bullshit, people are basically people. They mostly want the same things:  a decent living for themselves, a future for their families, a community that provides opportunities for prosperity, freedom to live their lives more or less how they please.

There is nothing special about a small rural state, nor a large urban city. Again, the individuals in both of those locales want essentially the same things out of life, even if they self-actualize those desires differently. The only real, measurable socioeconomic differences mostly have to do with the levels of education, which in turn center around people with degrees leaving for the cities, where the money is.

Many people in rural communities are simply stuck there in lives of inertia and clutter, but there are also some very intelligent people in those areas. Unfortunately, most of those smart folks are retirees who moved out to the sticks to save a buck and get away from the crime and assholes. So they can help and skew the IQ curve, but not much and not for long.

The point is that, despite our cultural reverse pretensions, there is nothing particularly special about these areas at all. It is merely a fiction perpetrated by the corporate media, as part of their endless PR arm to simultaneously guilt-trip white urban liberals, and falsely empower aggrieved rural conservatives, who apparently are unable to count, or they would have noticed by now that no one with any real brains or ambition wants to live in Cooter's fucking Gulch anymore.

It doesn't matter that Iowa Republitards are jacking off to Ben Carson this week, when they were spanking it to Trump a month ago, and Michelle Bachmann a few years ago. They should know by now, just by the empirically verifiable and consistent results, that no one gives a red-hot monkey-fuck what they think. But for some reason we persist with this odd fiction that Iowans "should" continue to have first opportunity to kick the tires on potential leaders.