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.

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.

I'd Rather Be an American Than a Republican

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A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Some light reading:

Rebecca Solnit, The Coup Has Already Happened

Associated Press, The Princes, the President, and the Fortune Seekers

Daniel Larison, [Clownstick] Doesn't Have North Korea 'Cornered'

I suspect that most of us non-cultists veer between good days and bad days, or perhaps between bad days and worse ones. For the most part, I manage to persist in two assumptions that keep the balance mostly on the positive side:

1. That the inept crime syndicate currently running ruining this country are a special combination of arrogant and stupid. They are too arrogant to realize how stupid they really are, and they are too stupid to realize how their arrogance will undo them. This mitigates a lot of the damage they could be doing if they were even marginally competent.
2. That Mueller knows far more actionable information than we do, and is building his case with care and prudence, in order to keep it unassailable when the time comes.

It doesn't take much scrutiny to render these assertions as teleological more than anything; I am counting on these things to be essentially true, more than actually knowing or being able to prove them. They are at best semi-educated guesses, gleaned from years now of spelunking in the self-reinforcing mines of endless data, most of it contextualized as best as possible.

This Land Is Your Land

Is there really anything to say about school shootings anymore? Since everyone on both sides understands full well that nothing at all will ever be done about any of it, the whole thing has turned into a sad, repetitive kabuki.

Gun-control advocates will cite the usual litany of statistics and call for more background checks and mental health screenings, all well and good but completely useless in preventing a sick kid from taking daddy's legally-obtained gun. You want to make a dent in this thing, start figuring out a way to require liability insurance on firearms. We all have to have insurance to drive our automobiles (the other quintessentially 'murkin item, in that we are conditioned for life to self-actualize through our driving choices).

So it doesn't seem too onerous to propose that, say, if your son is caught outside the fucking White House with a bunch of weapons that are confiscated and handed back to you -- with an admonition not to give them back to your mentally-ill son -- and you give the weapons back to your son anyway, and he shoots up a Waffle House, well, not only are you a flaming dipshit, but you deserve to spend the rest of your miserable life making restitution to the families of those your son slaughtered. Any decent society would shun such an individual. He is morally responsible for the deaths of those people, even if, through some shameful quirks of the gun laws of his state, he isn't legally responsible.

I promise you, if we hold people financially responsible for the damage caused by their weapons, they'll be a lot more goddamned careful about locking them up and lending them out. But no one seems to be talking about that, not at the level you hear the other stuff anyway.

The gun-humpers, of course, are infinitely worse. Christ, are these people fucking tedious. You know what they're going to say before they say it. It's now just a perverse wager, the over-under on how many hours will elapse before:

• Someone will accuse the survivors of being "crisis actors" paid by George Soros, who apparently writes checks to strangers like most people draw breath.
• Someone will attempt to draw a tenuous political motivation (within minutes of the shooter being identified, someone literally started a Facebook page in his name, complete with photo-shopped pics of him wearing a Hillary cap and Antifa gear.
• Someone will show up at the school where kids were just murdered, the bodies not even cold yet, armed and stupid and ready to scribble some incoherent manifesto.

That last person is especially execrable, a piece of fucking shit. I am not exaggerating when I say that I hope he goes home, thinks about his choices and actions, maybe has one last cheeseburger and jerks a final wad into his favorite gym sock, and takes his sidearm and parks one in the bag of fevered worms that passes for his brain. Fuck that guy right in the medulla oblongata. He's a goddamned waste of oxygen, and there are already plenty of those in this world.

We've got some real decisions to make here, folks. Either you're tired of this shit, tired enough to vote for any sort of change at all to this country's bizarre mania for guns, or you're not. We can talk about NRA money or Koch money or whatever money goes to which candidate, but either people are sentient enough to pay attention and not be bought off by some stupid political ads, or they aren't.

And if they aren't aware enough to watch the ads and still understand what their rational self-interest really is, then we're done anyway. The body just hasn't fallen to the ground yet.

Endless Cycle

For as long as I can recall, the cycle plays out and repeats:  A Democratic president is elected. He is smart, earnest, wants to (at least appears to want to) help the little guy. He cleans up the mess left by his Republican predecessor, balances the budget, embraces the future, works collaboratively with the rest of the world.

Then a sufficient number of paint-chip-eating goobers augment their diet with daily inhalations of rubber cement, and vote for the most preposterous, transparent Republican dipshit they can find. Someone who exaggerates their worst impulses, who vocalizes their limbic tribal fears.

Frankly, I've spent the last few months learning to enjoy the ongoing clusterfuck. I want to see the goobers get everything they voted for, good and hard, even as I sincerely wish that the people who didn't vote for this bullshit had other options. But if the tax cut goes through, then everyone has a choice whether to observe the effects of it honestly, and a choice of whether to learn from it.

And as always, by "learn from it" I mean taking specific actions to counter those efforts and results. Protests and marches and phone calls are nice, but they only get you so far. Everyone is Washington is owned by some rich asshole or corporation, and if you hit them where it hurts, they'll listen. Protests don't cost 'em a dime, but boycotts hit them where they live.

Bob Corker just voted for a tax break for himself, after his usual tiresome mime show about what a "deficit hawk" he is. Let's call him for what he is:  a goddamned liar, and a particularly shameless one at that. But it's important to note where he will make that money, on his real estate investments. So, what are those real estate holdings, and can they be protested or boycotted? Hit that weaselly motherfucker square in his thieving gut. You might as well; you're paying for it regardless.

And the actual vote itself, the action you take at the ballot box. Show up. Take five minutes on election day and be there -- or better yet, take fifteen minutes and register to vote by mail, and bypass the lines and ID checks altogether. Trust me, it'll be the best move you ever made.

Just an example:  we heard for weeks non-stop about the apocalyptic consequences of the Alabama special election last week, yet at the end of the day, about 40% of eligible voters actually showed up. Turnout was down last year as well, when the choices could not have been any more stark. You know why angry old racist crackers keep winning and putting their retard candidates in office? Because they fucking well show up.

There's no shortcut or off switch on this thing, folks. Elections are not Super Bowls, where everyone takes some time off to relax after the time expires on the game. The game never ends, because the wealthy and the powerful never stop looking for ways to steal more money from poor people. Does that sound like work? Good, because it is work.

But it's also work to live a financial life of being permanently forced to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place, especially when it turns out, over and over again, that it's all so a bunch of spoiled white assholes can push a law (which none of them bothered to read) through that will give them all tax breaks, as well as allow hard-working aristobrats like Paris Hilton and the Walton heirs to keep more of the money they never lifted a finger to earn.

Never kid yourself about the cold, hard truth -- these pelf-grubbing assholes don't care about you, whether you live or die, succeed or fail, thrive or wither away. Your life, your family, your community are nothing to them. You are another species, you're livestock. It would be easy to say they hate you, but the fact is that hate would take some effort, and they don't want to expend any effort on the peons, beyond the absolute bare minimum.

What's always amazing is just how many members of the livestock class are more than happy -- eager -- to vote for the slaughterhouse and the butcher, every goddamned time. It's really something to watch. They even buy into the idea that a massive tax giveaway will actually result in lots of good jobs, as opposed to what tax giveaways always result in -- corporate bonuses and shareholder profits. We always joke about how Democrats are like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football, but the Dems got nothing on these fucking rubes, seeing everything through their fentanyl 'n' jebus goggles.

Whether that's the kind of country we want or not, it's the one we have now, and the symptoms and excesses continue to accelerate and accumulate. The falcon stopped listening to the falconer a long time ago. The flood is coming. Get a boat, grab onto something, learn to swim, or be swept away.

Yet Another Cletus Safari, Alabama Dingbats Edition

These people just never fucking learn:  the day before a hugely contentious Senate election, perhaps simply to prove that it's not just old angry white wimmins who love them some Roah (I say, Roah) Moah, Cosmo decides to give us all some "insight" into what the future iterations (one of them, I shit you not, is a Moah campaign intern) are cogimatatin'. Well, there's five minutes we'll never get back.

I honestly have no idea what purpose these stupid pieces are intended to serve, but let's note for the record that there does not appear to be any Cosmo article presenting an opposing point of view -- say, even one (1) person of any gender explificatin' to those of us dumb enough to waste time on these things, why they cannot vote for Roah Moah, and are in fact voting for Doug Jones.

Seriously, is there anyone out there who actually cares what these dipshits are thinking, why they do what they do, their excuses for the way they vote? It doesn't matter what they say -- their Christianity is the angel topping a Christmas tree, and their self-professed morals and values are merely the tinsel and lights to get you to look. It's a costume, a pose. It is meaningless.

They will say whatever they think is necessary to rationalize what they know inside to be a wretched choice. And their state will pay for it, as aerospace and tech companies will be the first to start divesting. Good.

We need a better media, one that doesn't keep legitimizing these jabbering retards by taking their pulses every few weeks. Listen close, assholes:  the majority of this country voted against Fuckface Von Clownstick, and his works, and people like Roah Moah. Maybe you should consider talking to a few of them once in a great while, if only to provide the veneer of "balance."

Tweet Hole Alabama

The weather forecast for Tuesday's Senate election looks favorable for Roy Moore -- it's supposed to dip into the teens. -- joke on the internets

Despite the supposed plaints from random Alabamans whining about "outsiders" tellin' 'em how ta vote, the hard fact is that this is all up to them -- every last bit of it. Electing a piece of shit like Roy Moore will have consequences, and not just because he's the sort of creep that got banned from a mall because he was cruising high-schoolers.

Moore was an incompetent jurist who was removed from his bench twice, for being a Christian Sharia whackjob. He's a fanatical anti-Muslim bigot and homophobe, and recently told a black questioner at a rally that slavery warn't all bad, 'cause there was more fambly valyews then.

(Except for, you know, the slave families that were broken up all the time -- parents watching their children be sold away and vice versa, husbands and wives sold separately, etc.)

So let's be honest about exactly what you're supporting here, Alabama. You can couch it in terms of wanting to support the agenda of another incompetent serial sexual harasser, or getting another SCOTUS justice, or "preserving" "tradition" and "values" -- though, look at the means you're pursuing to justify those ends.

Look, it's pretty simple. If you're tired of blue-state elitists perceiving you as cousin-fucking hillbillies, which choice makes more sense:  defiantly voting for a caricature of a cracker bigot and affirming those perceptions, or sensibly voting for a moderate, pro-gun prosecutor who put child-murdering Klansmen in prison?

Grow the fuck up. Do the right thing. Stop voting by temper tantrum, and start reading and thinking for yourselves, instead of what your orange grifter king and his flying Fixed Noise monkeys bullshit you with.

Because frankly, it wouldn't take a whole lot to make it hurt. Enough letters to Mercedes-Benz and they move their plant to a state that wants to live in this century; enough threats of a boycott to CBS and they stop broadcasting Crimson Tide games. You want to return to the 1950s and tell the rest of the nation to go fuck ourselves, we can certainly return that favor. And as much as you may resent the supposed smug elitism of your detractors, electing a crank like Moore will only confirm those assertions.

I would like to be proven wrong. I would love nothing more than to wake up Wednesday morning, and see that Doug Jones has squeaked into the US Senate. It would be worth it to apologize for making unkind assumptions. But again, the choice is up to you, Alabama, not the rest of us. Vote for something besides he hates the same people I hate, for once in your miserable lives.

Or don't. Keep riding the Chump Train and see what that gets you -- higher taxes and no health care, so that your cult leader and his billionaire butt-buddies can keep living high on the hog at your expense. Because the fact is that, despite that stupid county map the dotard keeps waving about (probably sleeps with it, and has a small hole cut into it so he can fuck it once in a while), the most productive parts of this country by far voted for her.

So you can grow up and join the 21st century, or you can flip off us elitist book-readers and stick with the fentanyl 'n' jebus strategy that's been working out so well. Either way, good luck.

куклы

Hopefully the beginning of the end is nigh, but hope is neither a plan nor a shovel. It's more like the beginning of the beginning, and which way this goes is going to depend on a lot of factors. The Republicans -- including the newly anointed "mavericks" Corker and Flake -- are willing to go down with the SS Clownstick, so long as they push one more tax cut for the rich fucks who count their money by weight.

If you believe that the conduct of this maladministration is treasonous (and Seth Abramson has painstakingly constructed such a case for months with countless Twitter mega-threads), and you believe (reasonably) that most or all US Senators know even more of the details than we peons, then it's simple math to figure that the Goopers that still support these treacherous fucks are at best opportunistic bastards, but really just willing accomplices.

(The Uranium One story sounds like the usual distractive bullshit, but let's just state for the record that if Mueller wants to investigate that as well, that's fine, and regardless, if any criminal conduct is found in that, then those involved should face appropriate criminal prosecution and justice. Period.)

So the majority party in this country has already made it abundantly clear that rules, norms, and laws mean little. They stole a Supreme Court seat in broad daylight, for fuck's sake. Overlooking a little bidness treason is just something friends do for each other, when there's tax cuts on the line and they're scared shitless of the rube base.

All of which makes it very difficult to be optimistic about the Mueller investigations and impending indictments. Clownstick will pardon the people indicted, including himself, the Republicunts will let him, and what the fuck are you gonna do about it? Vote? If they let you, if they decide to count it. Ask Jon Ossoff about all that.

Or maybe #TheResistance will take to the streets. Okay, good luck with that. Remember that glorious weekend of Pussy Power, record demonstrations across the country, biggest protest ever? What did it change? Not a goddamned thing. They can wait you out, the way they waited out Occupy Wall Street and the pussy-hat protesters and all the rest. They are pure muscle and gall. They don't give a shit what you think.

Everyone points out correctly that Emperor Snowflake is not the disease but a symptom. That's true but incomplete:  America is beset by multiple diseases, not the least of which is that a significant portion of its inhabitants have the intellects of farm animals, and vote in the dumbest motherfuckers they can find, at all levels.

Nearly all of what ails this country can be alleviated by a very modest amount of economic redistribution from the assholes that have more than they can spend in a dozen lifetimes, many of whom didn't even work for it in the first place. But their ever-increasing hoarding has driven the country into a deep hole.

Snowflake wants to drop the top tax rate to 20%. Fine, eliminate all the loopholes, and you got yourself a deal. And I mean all the loopholes. Straight twenty, no exceptions or discounts, no bullshit write-offs, no offshoring profits indefinitely. Call their bluff, because there's no goddamned way any of them, corporations or inherited Walmart layabouts, will go for it. Their goal is zero tax, and the proles pay for privatized services that work for shit.

And the worst part of that particular disease is that it's shamefully simple to get the rubes to go for it. Steinbeck may not have known how perfectly on-the-nose his observation was about poor Americans seeing themselves as temporarily displaced millionaires. The most People of Walmart dipshit is convinced that they're just one lucky lottery ticket from the good life.

That is not an exaggeration, and once you understand that, it suddenly becomes clear how people keep voting against their own rational self-interest every time. They seriously believe that if they give the Koch Brothers another fucking tax break, that will somehow translate into an extra buck an hour at their soul-deadening widget-stamping job.

So there's a very good chance that Mueller will unroll a metric fuckton of irrefutable facts, and it won't matter. And there won't be anything you can do about it. You wanna talk about hope, well, I hope I'm wrong. But there are no surprises anymore. We're the frogs in the water, and it's been warming the whole time. This is right out of the "how empires fall" playbook.

Thank You for Your Service

Nearly two weeks ago, four Green Berets were ambushed and killed in action on a mission in the Saharan country of Niger. During that period of time, HRH Emperor Snowflake has visited his golf resort five times, and took Rand Paul out for a "make sure you let him win and tell the media what a great golfer he is" round (last week it was Huckleberry Closetcase's turn with Dear Leader). But he has neither called nor written the families of the fallen soldiers, nor publicly addressed their sacrifice. (Don't know or care if he tweeted about it; that doesn't count as formal communication from the office of the country's chief executive.)

So when he was called on it at today's hostage video with Mitch the Bitch, Snowflake started dancing like a kid with a late book report, first saying that he'd written letters over the weekend and that they'd be going out today, then falling back on the tried-and-untrue tactic of Making Shit Up About The Blah Guy. "Someone told him" that Obama didn't call or write, or maybe they didn't. It so hard to be sure when you're making it up as you go along, just pulling it out of your ass and not even bothering to brush the peanuts and corn off.

This is at least the third time this fucking guy has said something completely disrespectful to military personnel specifically. The first time was when he mocked John McCain, the second time when he trash-talked the family of fallen combat veteran Humayun Khan. There are no doubt other incidents, of varying degree of seriousness, that I'm forgetting for the moment. (Honorable mention:  "I know more than the generals about ISIS," when he clearly knows jack shit about anything, and it's disrespectful to their position, as well as the work they've put in to fighting that enemy.)

But of course as far as Snowflake and his retard fan-base are concerned, the real disrespect for the troops and the country comes from professional athletes silently taking a knee in principled dissent during the national anthem. That should tell you everything you need to know about him and them -- that their flag-humping and troop-pimping is as cynical as you can imagine. The military is nothing more than a prop to him, and like good little cult monkeys, his base lives and breathes in rhythm with him. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

On the one hand, this lying criminal monster is exactly the chief executive that a fat, illiterate empire deserves when it's fallen and can't get up. On the other hand, we need more voices like Gregg Popovich to speak up and tell him to fuck off already. Few things are more shameful than cynically hiding behind and lying about military personnel, particularly when they've given their lives for this country, for a senile moron who's never done a goddamned thing in his life for anyone else.

The Devil In Miss Jones

If our ongoing cold civil war ever goes hot, be sure to send Alex Jones a thank you card. Not that it will matter, since he'll have gotten his fondest wish.

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?

Well, You Could Knock Me Over With a Fucking Feather

It's like you already knew, it's like I've been saying for so many years, more so the last couple years -- they define themselves by their opposition to the caricature in their brains. Cleek's Law is as real as the First Amendment. Don't doubt it for a second. At least they're becoming more honest and upfront.

That's because they -- to use what they would consider librul jargon -- feel empowered, emboldened, encouraged. His belated demurrals make the indecent feel embraced, as if he's speaking to them in a code only they can understand, while the rest of us are left bemused, bewildered.

This is what they count on, what they subsist on. They're not even bothering to hide behind some book or Austrian economist or some such. This is pure fuck you, whaddaya gonna do about it?

And you know what? They have a point, however demented it may be. How's that "when they go low, we go high" shit been working out for everyone? Look at your state house, your congressional reps, your executive and judicial branches. They drank our milkshake while the Democrats were haggling over bathroom rights. Awesome.

Most of all, this is proof positive that Fuckface Von Clownstick is merely a symptom; the Republican Party is the end-stage (as Charlie Pierce puts it) prion disease that comes from eating the monkey brains. Clownstick is the culmination of decades of work, and as such, even if we find a way to get rid of his incontinent, doddering ass, they'll just find a smoother, sleeker version to pimp the same asshole message.

But the main point is this:  they are able to simultaneously buy the premise that the country is a flaming hellscape needing serious expertise to repair it all, and hand the job over to a moron who is months away from smearing his old-man, KFC-smelling poop all over the Oval Office walls. There is truth to the idea that a sophisticated mind can hold two contrary ideas at the same time; this becomes inoperative when both ideas are completely awful and stupid.

This is where, once again, we may collectively want to look past the current threat of Clownstick's ape-like mendacity, and realize that he's simply the current avatar of what that entire party is thinking, and we'd better get with the program fucking quick-like, or they're going to finish that steamroll job they've been doing. Fuck these assholes; fight or die.

It Was At That Moment That He Truly Became Dear Leader

"And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it anymore, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing." -- Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, p. 293

Let's explore a small but important footnote from Tuesday's Two Hours of Hate in Satan's Asshole, better known as Phoenix. At the usual "fake media" attack point in Snowflake's babbling greatest-shits nonsense, he observed that there were several news cameras filming and recording the lies for the bafflement of posterity. He then asserted that because he was talking shit about them, some of them were stopping the filming, that camera lights were going out.

It doesn't need to be stated for the record that that wasn't at all true, right? And yet, despite him telling them to look, and presumably them doing so, and seeing that the cameras were not in fact being turned off, many people in the (admittedly small, perhaps even smaller than Snowflake's tiny wittle doll hands) audience, grumbled in agreement with their dark lord.

In other words, despite being able to see for themselves a very simple empirically verifiable fact -- the lights are either on or off -- these folks looked, and listened, and decided that whatever Snowflake said must be the "truth," simply because he said it. These people have lost their fucking minds. They are more than happy to drive off the cliff with him.

Beatdown

This made my day. Watch the video. Good stuff. Fuck that cow and whatever's incubating inside her.

Drumpferdämmerung; Or, Appetite for Distraction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promises Made, Promises Kept

I don't know if Charlottesville will turn out to be the Fort Sumter of the current "cold civil war," as all the kids are calling it, but things seem to be heating up, slowly, surely, inexorably. The joke has been that maybe Clownstick ran over an old gypsy woman, and she cursed him to live out all his peanut-gallery tweets at Obama. The truth is that Yeats was a prophet, and we are all living out his warning. Clownstick may be Orangemandias, faded glory that never was in the first place, but the Pepe-the-Frog Jew-baiting douchebags are the falcon to his falconer.

These racist assholes and their racist bullshit are being normalized right in front of us. They are not bothering to conceal it at all, you have to give them that. David Duke is a loathsome tool, but when he's right, he's right:

“This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back,” Duke said. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”

Yes indeedy. They got their panties all up in a wad every time the Black Lives Matter folks blocked traffic, but in the meantime, these small racist rallies have been going on all over the south, and you know what you have not heard of? Some random BLM activist pulling a Mr. Mercedes and running these losers down.

Plz Moar Tardz

Well, it's about that time again, time for the lamestream media's periodic ass-spelunking tour into dipshit country, to reinforce Emperor Snowflake's rapidly dwindling coterie of ball-lickers that somewhere out there, there's a derpelganger jes' lahk thaym:

Out on Colorado’s eastern plains, an agricultural region where voters went overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, the response to the president’s remarks was one of support, with little fear of repercussions.

“He needs to step all over that little twerp,” said John Stout, 71, who sat with three retired friends over coffee at the Sinclair gas station in Wiggins, Colo., on Thursday. The other men nodded in agreement. “If it had been me up there,” Mr. Stout continued, “I’d have done it a lot quicker.”

Sure you would've, old man. Everyone's a fucking tough guy when they have no skin in the game. Why, I recall the last time I played a Civilization 4 campaign, I finally got bored and decided to finish off the last AI opponent -- Korea -- by nuking....wait for it....Pyongyang. Then I smoked a cigarette. [cough cough hack] So satisfying.

Mr. Stout said he did not fear for his safety, and hoped that [Fuckface Von Clownstick] would take action to “take out” the North Korean leader’s nuclear abilities.

“Hell yes,” he said. “And they can pinpoint it to where they are not killing a lot of innocent people. That will be the big goal there.”

The worst thing this country ever did -- and continues to do, through its estimable coven of city-mouse scriveners -- is ascribe some sort of earthy wisdom to random jabber, simply because it comes from the piehole of a fist-shaking codger in a dumpy shithole town.

Rock the Vote

Looks like Jester's got the answer:

It might get in the way of Supergeeeenyus Snowflake Von Clownstick's tireless efforts to write off the three million more people who legitimately voted for his opponent, but them's the breaks.

Consider:  since the founding of the republic, between stuffing and/or tossing ballot boxes, voter intimidation, literacy tests, poll taxes, crooked or "broken" machines, deliberately shorting busy districts in order to create three-hour lines to frustrate voters, and on and on, this nation has almost certainly never had a one-hundred-percent free and fair election in every part of the country. Some ward heeler or local factotum always has their thumb on the scale in some location(s).

That's a different matter than saying that the will of the people has always been thwarted, but obviously it would be very difficult to forensically go back and re-litigate all those past exercises in civic futility. All of which is to say that it would simply be interesting, to say the least, to get a truly untainted picture of What The People Really Want, to the extent that they actually know.

Choose Life

This. So much this.