Suggested Line of Questioning

John Bolton, he of the hilarious facial hair and questionable sex history, really is the worst of the worst -- vainglorious, full of shit about every-goddamned-thing, the stereotypical fake-tough armchair warrior. So he's perfect for this steaming choad of an administration.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the ultimate outcome of Bolton's selection, if only because Bolton has always been such a toxic presence, such an abysmal boss whose subordinates fucking loathe his very existence, that it will take him most of the spring and summer to "clean house" of people who might dare to disagree with his rush to sacrifice other people for his own bullshit principles. And all during that time Bolton's even more toxic boss will be doing and saying any number of stupid things, further alienating and demoralizing the margins of his own base, while further motivating the determination of opponents to push these motherless fucks into the outhouse of history, where they belong.

It seems like a roughly 99% certainty that Bolton was selected entirely because it would piss off the usual caricatured libtard snowflakes, as well as anyone with a triple-digit IQ. But as they are finding out the hard way, that's not really how you govern a country, because you can't get much of anything done. Good for everyone else, but good luck making a case that the only thing you've been successful at so far is monetizing all your Cabinet posts.

One thing that Fuckface Von Clownstick can lay claim to is a dogged repetition in his stump rhetoric. He says the same things over and over and over again, braying like a sunburnt mule about the same handful of imaginary grievances and positions. One issue he has been consistent about is his (false) claim about opposing the Iraq War, how it was a disaster, how his unique genius made him so prescient he just knew better than all those generals and smart-guy planners.

Well, as most of us know, one of those smart-guy planners was John Bolton, who still makes no bones about his feelings on the rightness and necessity of that war, the rest of the world be damned, the rest of that war's own architects be damned. Journalists can and should ask Bolton at the next opportunity about that, and ask him to elaborate. Bolton's a gaping asshole and a strategic moron, but he can think and speak extemporaneously.

Obviously there are any number of legitimate reasons to ask a new National Security Advisor to elaborate on his continued support for the unmitigated disaster of that war. So they need to do just that, and then they need to turn right around and ask Clownstick (if he's available), or one of his simpering dogsbodies about this vital inconsistency.

For once, take these jabbering idiots at their word -- if the emperor so fervently believes that the Iraq War was one of the biggest mistakes the US has ever made, then why for fuck's sake has he made one of that war's most ardent cheerleaders his national security adviser? It's a serious question that needs to be asked. This asshole wants war with Iran and North Korea, and is not above doing so pre-emptively. It's easy to learn nothing from the previous mistake, when you have no skin in the game.

Because our media entities are mostly crap, they will not bother with such important questions, besotted as they are with the more salacious details of the Stormy Daniels case (ignoring, of course, the most interesting detail by far -- that Clownstick's NDAs read like poorly transcribed Nolo templates, and he has his staff [illegally; they work for us, not him] sign NDAs as well, thus potentially opening the floodgates for tell-all books that will make Fire and Fury look like My Pet Goat). But someone needs to ask, and soon. Stop transcribing shameless lies, and start forcing these assholes to answer some real questions.

Social Justice Worriers

A thorough post-mortem analysis of the 2016 election will include the inevitable effects of reactionary sentiments, especially against putatively "progressive" causes that made the rounds in that year and the couple years preceding it. Some of this reactionarism certainly had its roots in racism, as the folks in the Black Lives Matter movement (insofar as it even qualifies as such) can attest.

Some of the working-class frustrations, whether real or cynically exploited by the Koch-Mercer-Murdoch axis of evil, had at least a strata of truth. Imagine someone out in the 'murka's vaunted heartland, town decimated by outsourcing, smart kids left and dumb ones stayed and impregnated each other, no prospects, no future, just the steady drip of generational dilapidation, punctuated by the occasional limp parade through town on the veterans' holidays, to remind of lost greatness and vigor. They've put up with this shit for some years, and are now watching those people riot, disrespect cops, and such like.

Now throw on immigrants collecting social services and squeezing out anchor babies, campus smart-asses jabbering about intersectional micro-grievances, and transvestites demanding restroom privileges, and Democratic politicians paying far more attention to such things than even mentioning (much less actually visiting and witnessing firsthand) the decaying Mayberries across the country. You can see where those folks might conclude that Something Had To Be Done, even if you completely disagree (as you should) that their chosen electoral action had any basis in operational reality.

In other words, people across the political spectrum can and should be able to see where people in many areas in the US might feel like their lives and communities are well and truly fucked, and their fat-cat pols are non-responsive. And yet they still should be able to see that electing a fake billionaire who apparently got a heart transplant from George Wallace might not be the solution to that set of problems.

It is perhaps the mark of a society that is collectively doing better than it thinks it is, when a sufficient number of people have the luxury to complain about micro-aggressions and triggering and the other inane jargon terms of the intersectional grievance claque. However, the corollary to that might be that you could say the same thing about a society that has the luxury of complaining about those complainers, especially when there are far worse challenges staring us all in the face.

There are the obvious big-picture transgressions:

• the piss-colored rosacea golem squatting in the people's house, profiteering illegally with impunity, sending his dipshit progeny to conduct sensitive high-level negotiations that hold countless lives in the balance;
• the steadily mounting evidence that a hostile foreign nation affected a US presidential election with the complicity of the victor and his campaign staff;
• a stolen SCOTUS seat;
• the Republican Party's rapid devolution into a proto-fascist enabling regime;
• the Democratic Party's typically dickless response -- these fuckers stole a Supreme Court seat and the election, and the only thing you assholes grandstand about is the so-called Dreamers?;
• the various cabinet ministers whose respective missions amount to killing off the agencies they have been appointed to oversee;
• the sizable minority that still supports such nonsense, directly counter to their own rational self-interest and that of the country they self-righteously claim to revere.

It is no exaggeration to say that it may take another full generation to come back from these things. Any and all of them are so much worse than whatever esoteric jabber some humanities major is concocting in their Wednesday empowerment group.

I've been rereading some of what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election, and one thing from then that certainly holds up is that the defiling of the Oval Office with the likes of Fuckface Von Clownstick really is the political equivalent of 9/11, in that it has literally changed how everyone, regardless of political persuasion, thinks and perceives pretty much everything in that arena.

The mainstream media have mostly relegated themselves to covering the daily follies and outrages, sputtering in impotent perplexity that he keeps getting away with it. But they still show up dutifully to be lied to by Baghdad Barb, who makes no effort to conceal her contempt for them. And rightly so -- they have forgotten what their real mission is, and so the majority show up like pathetic dogs, waiting to get their heads kicked in by their abusive owner. It's painful to watch. Everything changed, but they have not.

What does all this have to do with the SJW types? Not much, really, except to point out that most reasonable people can agree that the bumptious PC nonsense spewing forth from the campus crusaders is frustrating at best, but mostly eye-rolling and obnoxious. The paucity of critical thinking, the herd mentality of political correctness, the reflexive squelching of opposing views, all contribute to a stifled orthodoxy that, as most people outside academia can tell you, will be beaten out of them by the real world almost the instant they hit the street. Anybody working an honest job does not have time to parse the nuances of intersectionality.

No, the real world has much worse issues, many of which have been thrown in sharp relief by recent events. The Parkland school shooting in Florida is a prime example. It is a mundane, now routine observation that the US is the only nation on the planet where this sort of thing happens, much less happens on a frequent basis that we have all become accustomed to.

What compounds this gruesome calculus is that we are now also the only nation where the survivors of such events are routinely attacked, mocked, lied about, threatened. It was awful enough when that fat fuck Alex Jones disseminated the idea that the parents of the second-graders murdered in their classroom at Sandy Hook were "crisis actors," people brought forth to perpetuate a tragedy that never happened, in order to engage in the fruitless, endless quest for even modest gun control.

Now we are picking on teenagers who have had the temerity to stand up for themselves and speak their minds. About the mildest reproach I have seen toward these kids is the notion that since a handful of kids roughly the same age have gained some YouTube notoriety doing the "Tide Pod Challenge," that entire generation is therefore disqualified from even opining on the complexities of law-abidin' gun fetishists.

I would suggest that for the past several years, this whole goddamned nation has been participating in an ongoing Tide Pod Challenge, ever since the day that ridiculous asshole came down the escalator and tossed his piss-colored wig into the ring.

The Parkland survivors, most of them still (barely) too young to vote (but you can be assured that they will), provide some measure of hope beyond the gun control debate itself. They are proving first and foremost that we don't have to take shit from the right-wing nutjobs and their hired scum. They are demonstrating the hypocrisy of the bloodthirsty NRA and its shills, especially the loathsome Dana Loesch.

The NRA does not represent gun owners, it represents gun manufacturers, and Dana Loesch is a paid spokes-tool. This is something I have pointed out in one-on-one conversations with my gun-owning NRA friends -- they think they are customers, but they are the product. The NRA is basically a gigantic mailing list, a market for the NRA's true customers -- that is, the manufacturers -- since most guns are now purchased by people who already own guns. This is a very powerful statistic that underpins the entire problem, despite all the distracting rhetoric about "culture" and whatnot.

It should not be a terrible thing for a group of crime victims -- kids who watched their friends and classmates and teachers get murdered by a psychotic ex-classmate with an AR-15 -- to collectively observe that it should be at least somewhat challenging for such a person to have access to a military-grade weapon. In a country where schools are notoriously underfunded and teachers underpaid, it is retarded to insist that the best solution is to invest money into turning schools into fortified citadels, and teachers into trained killers.

But most of all, the hypocrisy of paid assholes such as Loesch excoriating victims as somehow insincere or financially goaded into the stance they've taken, well, that should be completely unacceptable. But in three short years, this orange animal and his dirtbag failsons and the paid cockroaches who enable and support him, they have turned this country on its collective head, practically eliminated our ability to process disgust and outrage at things that used to require very little time to arrive at that destination.

When and if the US climbs out of the abyss we have collectively thrust ourselves into, there will be a great many things that will need to be repaired. Almost certainly, the first thing that will need to be done is to formulate a highly specific set of protocols prohibiting the chief executive, and their family and staff, from personally enriching themselves through their elected office. A blind trust will be truly blind, not a wink and a nod to the aforementioned failsons minding daddy's grift machine while he pretends to be in charge. You can't just send your knockoff-handbag-peddling daughter to a geopolitical flashpoint to conduct highly sensitive strategic negotiations regarding a country with which we are still technically at war, because you're too fucking lazy to appoint a proper ambassador to the region.

But more intangibly, and hence more difficult to reclaim, will be our capacity for cynicism, and the ability to translate that into action. The sheer mendacity of every one of these fucking people is exhausting. This is beyond mere policy disagreements -- they are vile humans, every last one of them, and they have taken up actively against the interest of their own country. They are nothing short of traitors, and one hopes futilely that some sort of justice will eventually find some or most of them.

In the meantime, maybe we focus on that which is in front of us and actually threatens us all. Again, the campus crybabies will find out soon enough just how little use the real world has for their grievances of privilege. There are too many academic types on the opposing ideological side who have a vested interest in stoking those differences, otherwise they'd have nothing to write about, and then might be forced to ply an honest trade.

But we have kids dying, adults bullying the survivors, a claque of scummy oligarchs undermining the fundaments of the republic, and media monkeys who can't find their own assholes in a dark room with both hands an a flashlight. It is now more important than ever for us all to keep our eyes on the ball.

Year Zero

"If everyone always knows what they're doing and acts in a perfectly rational way, how did most of world history happen?" -- M.R. Carey, The Boy on the Bridge, p. 108

So at the one-year mark since the investiture of one F. Von Clownstick, perhaps a brief recap is in order.

Foreign Policy

• Cozied up to nearly every scumbag butcher this misbegotten planet has to offer.
• The main tyrants Clownstick hasn't snuggled with -- Kim Jong Un and the Iranian mullahs -- he seems to be trying to start wars with.
• Alienated most of our Western European allies, both with his obnoxious buffoonery and trying to shake them down for NATO dues, as if they were delinquent Maga Lardo members. This deficit of friends should quickly be filled by the nascent fascist regimes taking hold in Poland, Hungary, et al. They love him -- birds of a feather and all.
• Endless squawking about "fixing" NAFTA, without proposing any actual ideas, nor the realization that Canada and Mexico are two of our biggest trading partners, and are pursuing greener pastures in the broader world that Mister Man wisely decided to flip off.

The most dangerous feature of the current foreign policy as it stands is that it shows no capacity for even medium-range thinking, much less long-range. There is no ten or twenty years down the road for these people, no realization that this is going to be an Asian century, that the center of power is in the long process of shifting, and that their bumptious nonsense is accelerating that process. So much winning, so much maga.

Domestic Policy
Hell, do we really even need to bother enumerating the list? It all boils down to two major tactics:

• Appoint Cabinet secretaries who are expressly there to dismantle and/or monetize the department they've been put in charge of. Betsy DeVos is there to turn the entire education system into a profit center, while killing the teachers' union once and for all. Ryan Zinke is there to ensure that the extraction industry can work their magic in every nation park, from sea to oil-slicked sea. Ben Carson is there to pretend that no one gave him a hand when he was being brought up in public housing.
• Telling those people to go fuck themselves.

And remember, none of this would have been possible without the media and their fucking Cletus safaris, their need for clickbait and their slavish insistence on both-siding every goddamned thing, even when there really isn't another side. Bokay? Jeffrey Dahmer did not have a "side," at least not one that deserved to be aired as a mere "opinions differ" comparison.

The Russian word "grozny" has been famously mistranslated in referring to that country's most notorious historical tyrant. The word does not mean "terrible" in the sense of wreaking terror and violence; it is closer to "awesome" in the sense of inspiring awe (rather than greatness).

In that spirit, I have to say that this administration has really impressed me so far. For more than thirty years, Fuckface Von Clownstick was synonymous with "failed blowhard" in my mind, a ridiculous person saying ridiculous things, and our ridiculous mediots always there to give him a platform to spout his nonsense. But he truly is dumber than I had thought, even more of an asshole than I had supposed. And that's impressive, because again, I had felt that way about this clown for decades, well before he cast his piss-colored cotton candy weave into the political arena.

And it's impressive to see someone so willing to "lead" by appealing solely to his ~30% cult of personality (or lack of personality). If you thought Dick Cheney was a supreme asshole for his practice of taking a microscopic victory and assuming a 100% mandate, you can rightly chastise yourself for having a failure of imagination.

It can always get worse; all it takes is someone completely unencumbered by anything resembling a moral compass, and an entire political party to enable him, because they know they can control him. After all, they both have the same central teleological faith that the best thing is to make other people pay for your high-on-the-hog lifestyle, all while lecturing the peons about personal responsibility.

I never saw his stupid show, so all I knew about it was the stupid catch-phrase, which of course made it incredibly ironic that there were sentient beings out there who figured that their best chance for more and better jobs was a fake tycoon who never paid his bills, and was most famous for firing people. A sucker born every minute? Please. There are hundreds of suckers born every minute, and they all happily vote against their own interest every goddamned time.

But let's talk about that a bit, the fact that the major economic indicators are "good" in the usual, conventional assessment right now. The Dow is over 26,000 and unemployment is hovering at about 4.1%. GDP was just over 3% for Q2 and Q3 adjustments.

Obviously, for one, these are lagging indicators, especially GDP and unemployment. The Dow, however, is a poor rule of thumb to use for assessing or forecasting economic stability or future health. In fact, not only does the Dow reading not benefit the majority of people who have no stocks, but its volatility as of late is beginning to smell a lot like the Bitcoin bubble. It is entirely due to the billionaire class licking its collective chops at the prospect of massive tax cuts, which of course everyone else will pay for in a myriad of ways.

The Republican Party is the party of the "bust out" economic policy, the party of racking up debt and breaking programs, so that they can then claim that the programs are broken and defund them accordingly. Sell off the parts and pocket the proceeds. That's what made hectomillionaires out of animals like Clownstick and Willard "Mitt" Romney.

There is a shutdown because Mitch McConnell and John Kelly want a shutdown. Schumer was actually ready to compromise with the orange turd, even giving him money for that fucking wall that Mexico was supposedly going to pay for (and that, of course, we don't need in the first place). But the Republitard "leadership," sensing that the brewing "blue tsunami" might actually be real, understand that their best gambit to mitigate that damage is to try to fool enough people into thinking that a shutdown is due solely to Dummycrat intransigence.

Think about that for a second:  the Republicans want the shutdown. Clownstick just wants to "make a deal," and by now it should be apparent to even the die-hards that he makes deals like old people (such as himself) fuck. This doddering old fool couldn't sell one-cent water to people dying of thirst.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this clusterfuck of an administration so far is how well it's revealed people and institutions and things for what they really are. Now, it's easy to pick on the Cletus class and their economic anxieties, but the fact is that there are economic issues that they are and should be concerned with. Sure, there's an unmistakable vein of racism and sexism baked into their bullshit, but still they, like their idol Clownstick, are simply symptoms not the disease.

The disease is chronic and increasing wealth and income disparity, worldwide and here in the good ol' USA. One percent of the people in this country own forty percent of the assets. Eight individuals, six of them American, own as much as half of the entire human race. The six Walton heirs, all whom merely married or were born into their great luck, and did not lift a finger to build their own wealth, are worth $160 billion as of last count, and that will of course go up with the tax cuts.

Six people, one hundred and sixty billion dollars. None of them worked for a dime of it. Tell me more about this meritocracy of personal responsibility. Tell me what Barack Obama did to alleviate it, what Hillary Clinton would have done to help. The bottom 90% of the population carry 73% of the debt. Remember, no matter who you are, no matter what you do for a living, and no matter how you incurred your debt, your debt is always by definition someone else's equity. This is the key element to the whole problem.

The surest way to reduce this criminal disparity is to institute some sort of debt jubilee. People who are not stuck paying usury for their whole existence on this planet have more money to -- get this -- put into the actual economy, as opposed to the shadow economy of shylocks and paper collectors who produce nothing but desperation and compound debt.

Debt relief, even partial relief, for the peons would do untold good for hundreds of millions of people, without severely impacting the folks who already have more money than they could spend in a dozen lifetimes. It wouldn't even require higher taxes; you could even peg it to yet another tax cut if need be.

But they don't want that. All the distractions -- the bullying of immigrants, the constant shameless lying, the dopey nicknames, the paid-off porn stars, the countless boorish idiocies of these people and their figurehead -- they are merely there to distract from what this really is:  the endgame of a thirty-year war the top .01% have been waging on the rest of us. They won, by the way; anyone who hasn't figured that out yet is never going to. They own the means of disseminating information -- and more importantly, disinformation. They saw those rural suckers coming up the dirt road.

So yeah, the Cletuses suck balls, no doubt about it. And their propensity to be gulled into cutting their own throats over and over again is instrumental in the one-percenters' continued dominance. That's not politics, that's math -- the fortunate few cannot keep winning without the assistance of the proles and their imaginary grievances.

But these motherfuckers are the real problem, these pampered cyborgs with their bleach and botox and collagen and real fur. Anyone who would pay a hundred grand or two hundred grand a year to hang out at a tacky golf club with other tacky swells clearly did not work hard enough for that money, or they'd have more fucking respect for it.

I don't know what the fuck those assholes are smiling at; those are the faces of people who are condemned to accumulate and never be satisfied. They may have had all the fat sucked out of their asses and spare tires and put into their lips and cheeks, but their souls are morbidly obese. They already have more than enough for themselves, for their kids and grandkids, but their life's pursuit is more, more, more. And it comes out of everyone else's hides.

The saddest, sickest part about it is the rubes who, when they finally come to realize that they elected Charlie Sheen, minus the drugs, talent, and intelligence, they'll vote for him again, simply because he hates the same people they do. They'll go to their graves -- that much sooner thanks to their electoral choices -- not getting it, not even wanting it.

Hole Hearted

It would be somewhat hypocritical for yours truly to get too bent about the emperor referring to certain countries as shitholes. I've certainly pulled no punches about such an assessment, and have in fact used that word to refer to third world countries, or violent Islamic despotisms where basic human rights are scoffed at. That's not an evaluation of the individuals living in those countries, nor their suitability to emigrate to these here Yew-nighted States, merely an impolite observation of the condition of the government, the society, the economy, the levels of basic services, etc.

So yes, Haiti is a shithole, as is North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, and the Congo, and on and on. So are many parts of the US:  the opioid belt; large chunks of the NASCAR states; the swaths of washed-up towns festering out in the hinterland with delusions of revanchism and the lost glory of Granpappy's hallowed widget-stamping job that went to Malaysia during the Reagan years.

It is not necessarily a value judgment of the inhabitants, nor an assertion of moral superiority over them. Unlike the emperor, I don't hate the humans, I feel bad for their situation (except when they bring it on themselves). It is simply a blanket observation of an area that is arguably not only much worse off than other areas, but substantially worse off than it should be, if said area had its collective shit together. It is also a correlative observation that many or most of such areas have the common thread of overpopulation compounding the overall poverty rate. In other words, they could simply cut their birth rate in half and improve their lot within a generation, doing absolutely nothing else to move in the right direction.

Americans of white European heritage take things for granted (duh). They tend to forget that the countries their own ancestors left were not good places to be -- they were shitholes as well. That's why they left, y'know? Scotland was not a paradise when the emperor's mommy got out of there a hundred years ago. Many parts of Germany were ravaged by famine and wars of national confederation around the time the emperor's paternal grandfather left. The Pilgrims didn't come here because they were doing well back in England. I know my ancestors left Ireland and Wales and Poland because they needed to get the hell out of those places at the time. There are books about this sort of stuff. This is not rocket science.

So while the squirrel mediots fixate on the "vulgarity" of the word, they seem to be ignoring the much more important issue, the proverbial elephant in the room -- the man seems literally to not understand why people emigrate, why they would leave their homes, families, communities, the only places they've ever known in their harsh lives, to come to a country where they don't know anyone, don't understand the language. It doesn't even occur to him, the concept that someone from a poor, violent country would be more likely to want to leave home than someone from a prosperous, stable country.

People take those risks because the opportunities are worth it to them, because all they have is hope that things can get better. People who were doctors and lawyers in their homelands come here to drive taxis and taco trucks and run convenience stores, because they think of the USA as a place where someone can work hard and get ahead. Life is a series of offsets and tradeoffs, unless you're a spoiled dipshit who has always gotten everything you want.

Seriously. What kind of a moron does not get the basic concept that Norwegians no longer move to America because the average Norwegian has a better quality of life than the average American? Well, it turns out it's the kind of moron that's been given the keys to the country, and has chosen to drive it to the nearest cliff, gas pedal stomped to the floor. It's the kind of moron that talks derisively of other nations as shitholes, while doing his level best to turn this country into a shithole as well.

I felt that tonight's Netflix premiere of David Letterman's new interview show would be a nice break from the daily nonsense, as the featured guest of course was PRESIDENT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA (PBUH). I miss both Letterman and Obama tremendously, all the more so for the current collective maelstrom we find ourselves in, and it was rewarding to see these two chat in an intimate setting, their mutual affection obvious to all.

It was somewhat disappointing but not at all surprising that Obama and Letterman studiously avoided any direct mentions of the emperor or his abortion of an administration. The interview was punctuated with a couple of segments of Letterman walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis, and much discussion of the importance of the civil rights movement to Obama's development as a person and a politician.

It turned out to be better for not mentioning that bastard and his works, because what you focused on with Obama and Letterman is how both men function as normal human beings who speak with enormous affection for their families and children, who go out into the world and experience it, who actually do things for other humans without expecting money and adulation in return. Both men are funny and sharp and kind and self-deprecating. This accumulated steadily into a wondrous contrast with what we've been immersed in, a claque of scummy cultists utterly obsessed with lying and cruelty and greed.

By the end, my wife was in tears, just thinking about what we've lost in the longest year of most of our lives, and what more will come before we pull out of it (if we ever really do). This toxic man and his toxic cult followers have poisoned the water table of our collective consciousness, and we're all waiting on Robert Mueller because no one else has the stones or ability to do or say anything meaningful about it. And the longer we all wait, the more of an effect the fumes have on all of our brains.

Perhaps most potently and subtly, the Obama interview was a reminder of a time, in the dim and distant past, when the President of the United States did not act like a jabbering drunk on a fucking barstool every goddamned day of the week.

The Wart On Christmas

When Fuckface Von Clownstick proclaims that no president has done as much as he has in such a short time, he has a point:  in less than a year, Von Clownstick has managed to ruin football, the internet, and Christmas. As always, the liberal media gets credit for an assist:

“It offends me,” [some random dipshit] continued, “to see at the stores, where they just do ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Seasons Greetings.’ It should be ‘Merry Christmas.’ Put Christ back into Christmas. That’s what it’s supposed to be. . . . I just wish we would all get on the same page.”

Trump tapped into this sentiment on the campaign trail when he promised that if he was elected president, everyone would say “Merry Christmas” again — never mind that most Americans never stopped.

....

“We can’t say ‘Christmas,’ because there’s too many Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus, and it offends them,” said Naomi DePriest, a property manager in her mid-50s whose husband farms, over a lunch of fried catfish and ribs at Hens and Hogs. “I think they should keep Christ in Christmas, which is what they said originally, and to heck with anybody that don’t like it. Anybody that’s Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, let them do what they want to do, but don’t criticize those that want to keep Christ in Christmas.”

I've gone fifty circuits now on this overburdened blue-green pear, orbiting our yellow ball of fire, and I read way more (and specifically way more political jabber) than any sane person ought to, and I have never -- like not even once -- heard or read of a non-christian or even an atheist complaining about any distinction or preference between "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" or whatthefuckever people choose to say.

Yes, you occasionally have your ACLU types striving valiantly (and usually in futility) to remove nativity scenes from publicly owned sites, but that's about the extent of it. You want to talk about insufferable fucking snowflakes, these jagoffs are the worst. They are demented in their delusions of persecution. The only time anyone has ever been told what to say during the holiday season has been as a matter of a perhaps more inclusive, if ultimately misguided, corporate policy. Don't like it? Then boycott the company, quit your job, whatever it takes, snowflake. Anything less would make Fentanyl Baby Jebus cry.

It's at least somewhat heartening to know that in the age of modern medical miracles, we have finally achieved the ability to perform brain transplants. Unfortunately, these rubes have chosen to exchange their brains for root vegetables. Ruta-bay-ee-a-ga, ruta-bay-ee-a-ga!

But again, the real problem here is not the angry rubes per se, it's that a national newspaper feels the urge to trudge out to some abandoned shithole where no one lives in the first place, and dutifully stenograph the deep thoughts of these dopey losers. I don't give a fuck what they think about anything, especially not Christmas, and their imagined persecution complex. They can spend the rest of their lives festering bitterly in their broke-ass hick town, wondering why they're being forced at gunpoint to bake cakes for faggots and memorize Family Guy scripts.

I don't care what morons are worried about, and no matter how many times the media-industrial complex humps my naked leg, I will never care. They pollute the world with their idiot nonsense, and the last thing the world needs is more insufferable retards. Unless, of course, their so-called revolution can be monetized.

What a truly liberal media would do is remind them -- remind us all -- that Christmas is really a holiday celebrating an anchor baby whose homeless mama had a bullshit story about her sex life. And they might talk to an actual liberal once in a great while, instead of repeatedly going out of their way to statistically insignificant places, to pretend that the demented ravings of fist-shaking codgers have any truth or utility to them.

Litmus Test

Folks are always taking those dopey Which Dukes of Hazzard Character Are You? quizzes on the Facebook and such. I have here for you a much simpler, quicker, and infinitely more accurate psych battery for you:

1. If you are angry about NFL players taking a quiet knee during the national anthem before the game, than you were about nazis in Charlottesville waving the flags of extinguished enemy nations, you are:
   A. an idiot
   B. an asshole
   C. a charter member of Cult 45
   D. all of the above
2. If you insist that protesting during the anthem is the same as protesting against the anthem, and therefore "disrespectful,", but you were unconcerned about a presidential candidate taunting a tortured combat veteran and heckling a Gold Star family whose son was killed in combat, you are:
   A. a moron
   B. a liar
   C. unclear on what the First Amendment actually means
   D. all of the above

Pretty simple, right? If there's one thing that's depressingly consistent about the rube contingent that infests and propagates and keeps this nation down in perpetuity, it that these shameless assholes fetishize the symbols of democracy to a creepy extent, while simultaneously expressing utter hostility to the most important principle of democracy, that of free speech.

They seem unclear on what the First Amendment actually means, and what it entails. It is meaningless if it doesn't protect unpopular speech. It is useless if it does not allow nazis to march peacefully in a college town, or athletes to express their concerns in one of the few ways a black man in a culturally prominent role can get the attention of white people.

I don't want to hear anymore bullshit about "disrespect" from someone who talked shit about whether John McCain is a war hero or not. I've said it before, but let's do it once more:  I've taken more than my share of pot-shots at Poor Ol' Straight Talk, especially when he summoned the Arctic Harpy as his running mate in '08 (probably by saying her name aloud five times in front of a bathroom mirror). But it was always about things he said or did in a political context.

The Vietnam War, the farther we get away from it, looms more and more as a moral catastrophe in the US' history, which is saying something. There's not much debate these days from any political position that it was strategically and morally indefensible in retrospect. And one might say something about the morality of dropping death from far above, frequently on defenseless rural villages.

But here's the deal:  when McCain was shot down in his bomber, both arms and a leg were fractured. When the Vietnamese pulled McCain from his downed plane, they crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt and bayoneted him. He was tortured for months before the Vietnamese decided to make a propaganda effort to release him, since McCain's father was the supreme Navy commander for the Pacific region. McCain refused to be released before officers that had been held longer; the enraged Vietnamese immediately re-broke both his arms, knocked out all his teeth, and tortured him mercilessly for months after. (David Foster Wallace describes all this and more in his famous essay Up, Simba, or you can read the rundown here.)

McCain certainly has plenty of faults -- he was a cocky, swaggering asshole who routinely endangered other pilots and shipmates, and after his release from the Hanoi Hilton, he treated his first wife horribly. And again, the war itself is and was morally irredeemable. However, none of those things detracts from the simple fact that McCain endured horrendous treatment that would break most of us, and much of that came after he conducted himself honorably by refusing early release from a literal torture chamber.

All of that occurred while Bone Spurs McHairpiece was going through his own "personal Vietnam" by supposedly fucking everything that moved within reach of him. For all of his flaws, John McCain has more honor and courage in the sweat on his droopy old-man balls, than Fuckface von Clownstick ever had in his entire miserable body.

So anyone who's taking that "disrespect" tack about professional athletes expressing their opinion about something that affects many of them on a very personal level, they can shove it up their ass, take it up with their disgrace of a "leader," a crazy old man who's still butt-hurt that the NFL refused to let him buy the Buffalo Bills, because he's a greasy shyster who never pays his fucking bills and screws over everyone who's dumb enough to do business with.

Don't Stop Believing

The carnage continues --  not only is it possible that Emperor Snowflake may be responsible for the breakup of Journey (and hey, how surprising is it not only that he has a "spiritual advisor," but that said "advisor" is willing to admit to that?), but his earthy rubes are "embarrassed" by him.

To which I would say to those rubes:  hey, the rest of us are embarrassed by you numbskulls, and I am truly sorry that I have only two middle fingers to wave in your general direction. As long as he's too stupid and weird to get anything meaningful done, he can stay for all I care, and the more it reminds these idiots that their dying towns are still dying, the better. Choke on it, assholes.

Poisoning the Well

Once in a great while, it's fun and even illuminating to reread books. Depending on how long it's been, you can get a lot out of it. I first read Stephen King's Needful Things back in the early '90s, half a lifetime ago. It was billed more or less as a horror version of Our Town, and that was essentially how I recalled it, until actually sitting down and rereading it over the last week.

(We here in Northern Cali are in the midst of a protracted heat wave; the number of days below 100 degrees in the daytime is maybe five since Memorial Day, so more than enough time to read. I think I knocked out seven full-length books in July, somewhere around 3,500 pages. It's too fucking hot to do much else.)

As intrigued as I am by King's explanation in the link that Needful Things is in some respects a satire of '80s excess, I came away with more specific impressions this time around. If I were to condense this 700-page doorstop (not an insult; it's a richly rewarding and fun read, but it's a big-ass book) into a logline or elevator pitch for someone who for some reason hasn't gotten around to reading the book, it would go something like this:

The devil comes to a small New England town, and turns the townsfolk against each other.

That's a radical oversimplification, though it gets the broad points across. The devil (pun intended) is in the details, and contextualized against our current real-world backdrop, can be fleshed out more interestingly.

The main theme of the book is cupidity, the sort of slavering covetousness that spurs otherwise rational humans to abandon good sense in order to pursue an object that they connect perhaps too deeply with, for whatever reason. In NT, these objects are at once mundane and yet important on an intimate level -- a mint-condition Sandy Koufax card; Elvis Presley's sunglasses; a splinter of wood from Noah's Ark.

So maybe now the elevator pitch is a bit more expansive. The "devil" understands his target audience, their vacant desires and what they will do to attain them. He hooks them and sets them in motion against each other. Desire and surrender and our willingness to see what we want to see are central to the trickster demon's nefarious plans. And when the objects of desire turn out to be junk -- the ratty card of an unknown player; a busted pair of cheap sunglasses; a rotted hunk of lumber infested with bugs -- the marks (at least the ones that manage to eventually see the objects for what they actually are) are appalled at themselves, at what they did for an empty promise.

Any sort of deceptive person -- a used-car salesman, a cheating relationship, a grifter or con-man, a politician -- cannot do what they do effectively without the complicity of the mark. The old saw about a grifter being someone who gets you to empty your pockets, but a con-man being someone who gets you to empty you pockets and then go home or to the bank and get the rest of your money to hand over, holds true here.

A good liar understands the value of pride and the need for respect that we all have, the intrinsic need to not be thought a dummy or a rube. Pride becomes the hook for the con-man to reel in his fish -- the fish cannot admit that he was dumb enough to fall for a shiny rubber lure, even as the barb hangs out his cheek and he is being reeled toward the boat.

Leland Gaunt's goal in Needful Things is ostensibly to collect souls, but it is really just to make mischief, the sheer joy in turning neighbor violently against neighbor. The discord is the reward, you might say. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

In a consumerist society, we are used to our thoughts and desires being monetized. It is so routine at this point it barely merits notice. But what if those thoughts and desires are escalated, taken to the next logical level? Someone who figured out how to weaponize those things would wield unspeakable power. That is how cults are built, and whether that cult leader is Alex Jones or Kim Jong Un or Fuckface Von Clownstick is irrelevant -- the principles are the same, and they work on the same type of people.

Perhaps worst of all is that when it comes to deprogramming brainwashed cult victims, the consequences can be almost as bad as leaving them in the cult. It's not they're going to thank you and jump across to "your side." By definition they are in need of something, usually something that jibes with their preferences thus far -- so when that something gets removed, there's a good chance they'll find something worse.

The symptom gets treated, but the disease -- ignorance in the broader sense, but specifically things such as living in a bubble with their own facts, racism or racist assumptions, a daily addiction to outrage du jour stories (again, without bothering to check whether there's any factual basis to them or not) -- persists and mutates.

Obviously, the root causes go back generations, but the more recent origins do stem from persistent systemic inequality, that most Americans did not get to share in the "recovery" anywhere near to the extent that their betters (who, after all, caused the collapse in the first place) enjoyed. Until that gets adequately addressed, we are simply heading deeper into an extended cycle of viciousness, regardless of whether the con-man gets impeached and removed.

Twitler Youth

The Boy Scouts are one of those organizations, like the Catholic Church, that are utterly mystifying in how they manage to persist. Like the Church, the Scouts don't really teach anything you can't learn elsewhere -- in this case, from modestly attentive parenting, a few weekends camping every year, and maybe some team sports along the way. And like the Church, you would have thought that the Scouts would have been damaged more by the decades of pederasty that have been uncovered in recent years. Seriously, what the fuck is up with people? Maybe (again like the Catholics) it's the cosplay and the oaths and ranks and such.

Whatever the case, Princess Snowflake's latest in a practically daily litany of me-me-me grumbles ranks up with some of his better insult-comic routines. From lambasting a former president to nudging up against a sex-yacht anecdote to threatening to fire a cabinet member if he couldn't deliver the votes for a non-existent wealth-care bill -- did we mention this was a fucking Boy Scout Jamboree? -- the guy just never stops. It's exhausting just keeping up with all the toxic levels of incompetence.

And yet, as always, Snowflake proves once again to be merely a symptom. The Scouts profess an ethos of apolitical selflessness, and here they are, cheering on this nonsense, spouted by a man who has never done a goddamned thing for anyone else that didn't have a transaction involved, a man who literally paid his son's seven-dollar BSA admission fee out of the coffers of his money-laundering "charitable" foundation.

This has been the problem all along. Scumbags like Snowflake cannot succeed without fellow scumbags to root for their lies and bluster, to cheer for the nonsense and hate. Whether it's at another tedious rally in Youngstown, or some cholera-ridden Deliverance holler in Bumfuck, West Virginny, they are responsible for him, and by association, whatever else he does before the actual majority of this country decide to take our country back. Shame on every last one of them, and shame on the BSA organization for their mealy-mouthed non-apology for this nonsense.

Anhedonia

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Even Stephens

We've already gotten to know far too much about shadow preznit Steve Bannon. But did you know there's another Stephen in Clownstick's inner circle who's just as bad? It's true!

If anything, Stephen Miller might be even worse -- where Bannon has actually held jobs that require at least some skill and talent, Miller has been a lifelong conservatard Fuckface, writing passionate missives to the local newspaper as a high school student in Santa Monica, over such critical issues as whether the pledge of allegiance is being said often enough, or if Mexican holidays are getting too much attention.

Miller went straight from Duke University to work for Michele Bachmann and new Witchfinder General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuhd, before becoming Clownstick's main speechwriter last summer. Kind of funny how many of these douchebags who want only to tear down the gubmint have spent their entire professional lives working for that gubmint, innit?

So now Miller is spearheading the current LIE spewing from Clownstick's puckered liehole, that thousands of Massachusetts voters bused into New Hampshire to illegally vote there and throw the state to Hitlery. Despite the fact that, as described in the link, it is statistically and logistically just about impossible (and the down-ticket votes make no sense for that scenario), the idea that anyone could or would engage in this sort of easily traceable shenanigans for, you know, four electoral votes isn't just ridiculous, it's retarded.

So the media outlets seem to actually be pushing back on the current round of LIES being propagated by Miller and his thieving scumbag boss. It would be a mistake, though, to simply assume that this is more of Clownstick being his usual dumbass self. All of these lies and tactics -- the inauguration crowds, the travel ban, the intimidation of federal judges for doing their jobs, the placement of a Russian mole as National Security Advisor, the insistence on voter fraud with zero evidence -- are part of a systematic, concerted effort to push boundaries, to see what they can get away with.

This is not a matter of mere difference of political opinion. These people are scum, pure and simple. Miller is part of a breed that will literally do and say and fabricate anything and everything, just so the holy few who actually own this country, who already have more money than they could ever hope to spend, can get even more. Fuck them all.

Back at the Funny Farm

You've probably seen this little gem making the rounds already, and it's a definite winner for this week's edition of Clownstick Voters Get It Snapped Off In Their Asses:

MERCED, Calif. — Jeff Marchini and others in the Central Valley here bet their farms on the election of Donald J. Trump. His message of reducing regulations and taxes appealed to this Republican stronghold, one of Mr. Trump’s strongest bases of support in the state.

As for his promises about cracking down on illegal immigrants, many assumed Mr. Trump’s pledges were mostly just talk. But two weeks into his administration, Mr. Trump has signed executive orders that have upended the country’s immigration laws. Now farmers here are deeply alarmed about what the new policies could mean for their workers, most of whom are unauthorized, and the businesses that depend on them.

“Everything’s coming so quickly,” Mr. Marchini said. “We’re not loading people into buses or deporting them, that’s not happening yet.” As he looked out over a crew of workers bent over as they rifled through muddy leaves to find purple heads of radicchio, he said that as a businessman, Mr. Trump would know that farmers had invested millions of dollars into produce that is growing right now, and that not being able to pick and sell those crops would represent huge losses for the state economy. “I’m confident that he can grasp the magnitude and the anxiety of what’s happening now.”

Uh-huh. Because mere mortals couldn't possibly understand the logistical and financial requirements that farming to scale present to the farmer. What the fuck is with these people? It's bad enough that this dipshit seriously thinks that non-farmers or non-businesspeople have no concept of this, but it's even worse that he also seriously thinks that Clownstick does understand their dilemma to any significant level.

Immigration was by far Clownstick's most consistent issue. Forget that he had no real plan or solution; forget that he clearly had no fucking clue about anything, including that particular subject. He tried, in his own inimitable, incoherent way, to make it his key issue. But it came out as a rambling obsession, like all his other obsessions the rambunctions of a drunk on a barstool in every Moe's Tavern across this land of ours.

Only someone who knew nothing at all about large-scale agriculture, who had no clue about what cracking down on immigrants had done to other states in the recent past, would talk like that, would say the things He, Clownstick said over and over and over again.

The Investiture of Fuckface Von Clownstick

Was there anyone who seriously thought that Tweety would change from blustery campaign asshole to someone more presimadentiamable? Probably, but that's why they're called suckers.

Clownstick's inaugural benediction was indeed a piece of dark, Lovecraftian doggerel for the depths of R'lyeh, a tone poem for the Elder Gods, painting a lurid story of a flaming hellscape in the middle of a Thunderdome, and only Batman can save us from ourselves. Seriously, what kind of thumb-sucking dipshit believes this nonsense?

Of course, we've all heard exactly what kind of dipshit, the same kind that lives in these wiped-out shithole counties that have been busted out by opioids and heroin. We'll see how long it takes before these rubes come out of their comas and realize that Batman doesn't really give a fuck about them. Nor does he really exist, because life is not a fucking played-out comic-book movie franchise.

And really, what is Batman's deal, anyway? Consider:  Bruce Wayne is a single billionaire who is expertly trained in martial arts and wants to fight the bad guys in his crime-riddled city. So does he join the police force? Does he buy them some new equipment? Does he maybe create a fund for them to finance more staff on the force? No, he dresses up like a bat and goes vigilante. Probably hasn't paid his fucking taxes for twenty years either.

It is interesting and heartening so far to see some form of resistance to this idiot nutcase, but we'll see if it holds. The Democrats and the corporate media each seem to be finally getting the message that these people are not fucking around, that the animosity is real, it's not schtick, and they either fight back like they mean it or find new jobs.

Or learn to speak Russian.

Our Liberal Media

Good to know that the New York Times is now finding "stories" by reading asswipe RWNJ sites like Right Wing News and Newsmax.

Here's the key excerpt from the Times article that demonstrates how thoroughly the journamalists have forgotten what their actual job is:

The question has gained momentum in the weeks since Mrs. Clinton lost to Mr. Trump, a Republican. It began quietly at first, then grew louder among the conservative media outlets and pundits who hold her and Mr. de Blasio in disdain.

I'll never link to them, but I invite you to go to RWN and Newsmax and see for yourself what they are: poorly written, rarely bylined, loosely attributed, never corroborated.

Put more clearly: no reputable journalist should ever cite these websites for any sort of information, knowledge, or empirical fact. They are liars, calumniators, prevaricators and provocateurs. Their aim is not to inform, it is to disinform, to agitate, to stir up shit. They do not remotely care whether Hillary Clinton might actually be planning to run for mayor in NYC; all they care about is making the usual media monkeys go "Squirrel!" and chase the phantom distraction.

I have a polite (for now) request for Amy Chozick, J. David Goodman, and every other so-called reporter who deals in this sort of bullshit non-story:

Quit your jobs, because you're fucking terrible. What you do has already harmed this country, and continues to do so. Go make sandwiches, be plumbers, write shitty novels. Anything but what you're doing now. Because did I mention that you're fucking terrible at your jobs? When you cite internet agitprop outlets as "sources" of any type, all you do is legitimize them, give them credence, give the innuendo and lies that they manufacture the very thinnest veneer of credibility. Your job is not to repeat what random internet morons are spewing, your job is to point out the veracity of what they spew, to point out that they routinely lie, that they are never objective, that they have an overt agenda, that facts do not and have never played into their content format.

Starbucks needs you, much more than we do. Make yourselves useful and get me a fucking venti dirty chai, three shots.

Seriously, I've never been a letter-to-the-editor writer or a boycott monger, but maybe it's time to start. Because fuck these people. Shame on them and their editors for pushing this nonsense as a legit story. Some fucking clown at Right Wing News pulled something out of their asshole, and didn't even have the common courtesy to brush off the peanuts and corn? Well fuck, let's publish that motherfucker.

One thing is frighteningly clear -- ol' Tweety McTinyhands and his internet minions are going to have grand fun for the next few years, making these scrivening dipshits dutifully repeat every online snipe and fnord they can conjure. Why aren't the Democrats any good at this game?

Smug Alert

Anthony Bourdain has a decent point here:

"When people are afraid and feel that their government has failed them they do things that seem completely mad and unreasonable to those of who are perhaps under less pressure," Bourdain said.

Still, Bourdain said he was empathetic to the circumstances that led to outcomes in those countries. And he faulted those same forces for Trump's win in November.

"The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we're seeing now," Bourdain told Reason.

"I've spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America," he added. "There are a hell of a lot of nice people out there, who are doing what everyone else in this world is trying to do: the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love. When we deny them their basic humanity and legitimacy of their views, however different they may be than ours, when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good."

....but undermines it with his own recent stances on Clownstick, and therefore by association, his supporters:

Bourdain did not specify in the interview whether he might be interested in breaking bread with Trump, a notion he shot down in a September conversation with the Wrap. At the time, Bourdain was asked whether he might consider a private dining session with Trump if he should be elected president.

"Absolutely f--ing not," Bourdain told the Wrap. "We know him well here [in New York]. . . I would give the same answer that I would have given 10 years ago, when he was just as loathsome."

....

Bourdain has made no reservations about his disdain for Trump - or for those who choose to do business with him.

In a recent interview with Eater, Bourdain said he had "utter and complete contempt" for restaurateur Alessandro Borgognone, who announced in November he would open a sushi restaurant at Trump's hotel in Washington.

"I will never eat in his restaurant," Bourdain declared in that interview.

Someone needs to explain why it is that only "liberals" and "the left" can be "smug" and "contemptuous" and "in a bubble." There seems to be a lifetime supply of anger, vitriol, and certitude on both sides, each with their own respective media outlets. There is always some ratio of facts to emotions. Ultimately it comes down to which group tends to muster the strongest ratio, utilizing the most (and most factual) facts, as objectively as possible.

I fail to see how a reasonably objective observer can look back at the facts, and look back at what people in each group were quoted as saying and thinking and believing, again and again, and not see a huge difference, to put it mildly. These patterns and differences were quite consistent; the Clownstick supporters were incoherent in explaining their logic to a level that must be deliberate. They chose to believe lies about Hillary Clinton, just as they chose not to believe the truth about Fuckface Von Clownstick.

This is nothing new; this is how these people have always operated. They wore purple band-aids to mock a decorated veteran to show their support for two draft dodgers in 2004. This year they pushed lies and nonsense about Benghazi and emails and Obamacare. When facts and logic are literally meaningless, everything within reach is simply a vehicle for your anger. People keep acting like this is some new phenomenon, driven this time by "economic anxiety" or some such. They have always been like this. They are always going to be like this.

Does anyone out there on either side of the debate seriously believe that, had a hundred thousand rust belt morlocks voted for her and got her across the finish line, that there would be some "voice of reason" on that side of the aisle going, You know, maybe since we lost, we need to get over our self-righteous smugness and reach out to these folks and learn to talk with them? Fucking seriously? They got the fuck blown out of them in 2008, and by March 2009, six weeks after Obama's inauguration, had declared full-throated war. And they made good on that promise.

We all have to figure out how to live with each other, Bourdain is right on that count. But none of us who see this fucking clown for the clear and present danger that he is owe anyone anything. There was always the outside hope that Clownstick might possibly govern in a less antagonistic fashion than he campaigned, but the opposite is proving to be true. He's going to do to this country what Putin has done to Russia -- plunder the economy for himself and his cronies, punish his opponents in government and media, and use racists and nationalists as a sort of volunteer enforcement arm.

And Bourdain knows it. That's why he's so strident about being unwilling to "break bread" with Clownstick personally, why he pre-emptively refuses to visit the restaurant in Clownstick's hotel. It's all of a piece, you can't have it both ways. If you can't explain to these incoherent retards why you're boycotting their hero's bidness enterprises, then there is probably not a lot of common ground to be found.

Theirs is the logic of the rioter, and some of us are just boarding up our small businesses and homes, and just hoping to make it through the long dark night, knowing that there's nothing we can say to them. Seriously, I'd give money to hear exactly what Anthony Bourdain would say to someone who thinks Barack Obama shares some of the blame for 9/11, to find some mythical common ground.

Given all the deep-seated problems facing this nation and the world, and our collective refusal to do much about any of them (heaven forfend the one-percenters experience even a tiny blip in their fucking endless greed), the only sensible thing to say to your average Clownstick supporter is, ironically, the same thing to have said to Clinton supporters had she won: Be careful what you wish for.

True Lies

From the "Least Expected News of the Month But In a Weird Way It Kinda Makes Sense" file, it turns out that the Next Big Clownstick Revelation is in the hands of none other than Tom Arnold:

Last week, comedian Tom Arnold came forward with the information that he has in his possession outtakes from Celebrity Apprentice in which the show’s host, United States President-elect Donald Trump, can be seen and heard “saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children,” among other delights. Arnold has said he will not release the tapes, which he received from Apprentice producers who meant it as a joke years ago — before anyone thought the perpetrator of such comments would be the president of the United States — because he fears for his own safety and that of his family. And, according to Arnold, those same producers fear the repercussions of the tapes’ release professionally (presumably, there are strict contractual considerations).

Well today, according to The Hollywood Reporter, there are developments: In a series of tweets directed at actor Michael Rapaport (who essentially asked Arnold to step up and release the tapes), Arnold somewhat clarified his position, stating that the content of the tapes was “disgusting but not illegal.” Furthermore, he said, “smart Watergate level journalists are on top of this.” While Arnold does not clarify what that means, exactly, the implication is that a larger story, one with criminal implications, may be developing here.

[emphasis mine]
Really, what "Watergate level journalists" are there? Only a few names distinguished themselves throughout the campaign, off hand I can only think of four: David Fahrenthold, Kurt Eichenwald, Julia Ioffe, and maybe Katy Tur. In reverse order, Tur basically became a penned punching bag for Clownstick at his hate rallies, in with the rest of the media veal. She had a book planned to shine some light on her experiences tracking the Clownstick scampaign, though it's tough to see just how it could have been any worse. Ioffe got anti-Semitic death threats after writing an article gently criticizing a few things about Melania Clownstick. Eichenwald, who has epilepsy, had to suspend his Twitter account temporarily after some fine Christian folk put strobe GIFs on his feed, hoping to trigger a seizure, plus they started parody accounts of their own to troll him.

Fahrenthold keeps on trucking, but for what, to see more good work go completely ignored? The fix is in, has always been in, and for every solid reporter out there running down a real story, there are dozens of "analysts" and "commentators" and gatekeepers to ensure that either the story never sees the light of day, or gets diluted by disinformation and bullshit commentary.

So Tom Arnold has a recording of Apprentice outtakes that has El Caudillo saying the n-word, the c-word, the r-word, and more. I'm saying that said tape could be indisputable high-definition video and audio, verified by the ten most reliable sources you could dream of (or by Clownstick himself), of Clownstick using all those words in reference to, say, Oprah Winfrey or LeBron James or Barack Obama or whoever. And it won't make a goddamned bit of difference. It won't matter. He wasn't far off when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and they'd still support him. They would.

That's the real problem. That's what we're not getting. Facts, words, deeds, responsible governance, ignorance, lies -- none of it matters to these people. They don't care about their country, or the US' vital role in a dangerous world. The only thing they care about is rubbing your nose in shit, the stankier the better, for as long as possible.

Season's Beatings

This week in stoooooopid:

In Phoenix, two middle-aged women in the Trump-only focus group said they wouldn’t support him for re-election if he signed away funding for Planned Parenthood. “It’s a deal-breaker,” said an earthy 58-year-old in a plaid work shirt. “It will rob women of basic fundamental rights. I’m talking about female health care, which includes abortion. Which includes birth control. I think birth control is the greatest gift that they gave for womankind.” Added a 44-year-old, if Trump attacked Planned Parenthood, “I’d be pissed off as hell.”

This leads to an obvious question: If these women think defunding Planned Parenthood is a deal-breaker, why did they vote for a candidate who promised to do exactly that? After all, in a September letter addressed to “Pro-Life Leaders,” Trump pledged to strip Planned Parenthood’s federal funding unless it stops performing abortions. But many of the people in the focus groups didn’t know he’d made this assurance, and those who did didn’t take it seriously. It seemed as if Trump’s lasciviousness, which Clinton hoped would disqualify Trump with women, actually worked in his favor. The focus group participants couldn’t imagine that Trump would enact a religious right agenda. “He’s probably paid for a few abortions himself,” said the 58-year-old in Phoenix, eliciting a roomful of laughs.

Durrr....hyuk hyuk hyuk. That shore is funny, I tell ya what. Not as funny as watching these fucktards get exactly what they voted for, but high-larry-us nonetheless. They'll need that brilliant comedic wit to sustain them in the coming months and years, as they reap the whirlwind in so many different ways.

Over the Edge

Not sure what the hell's going on over at Robb's jernt these days, but the commentary's off-base, and half of the commenters seem to have truckled over from whatever shithead white-power joo-baiting  site serves their insane purposes these days. You have to read it to believe it; these are the sorts of rubes who spout racial slurs at the workplace, whether in anger or in "jokes," and then seriously wonder why no one will hire them after they're summarily fired.

Anyhoo, Robb's contention is that the nascent (and ill-fated, let's face it) Electoral College upset tomorrow would signify the transmogrification of our Jebus' Favrit Nayshun into a banana republic.

Parasite

David Fahrenthold still deserves the Pulitzer. Donald "Fuckface Von Clownstick" Drumpf is still a scummy, skinflint dirtbag who deserves to live on a fucking sidewalk and beg for change.

In the linked article, a line from one of Drumpf's "books" is excerpted:

“We’ve benefited from the American Dream and we feel the duty to give back to the community,” he wrote of his family in “The America We Deserve” in 2000. “Those who don’t are nothing more than parasites.”

Couldn't agree more, and as Fahrenthold has spent the better part of the past year painstakingly chronicling, Drumpf and his offspring have never done a goddamned thing for anyone else that didn't also -- or in many cases only -- benefit themselves and their interests.

Think about just one of many examples of this -- Drumpf literally used foundation money to pay the seven dollar fee for Fuckface Junior to join the fucking Boy Scouts. That's as bad in principle, if not in volume, as him using foundation money to buy life-size paintings of himself. Seriously, there's something wrong with a person that does this, or cashes a thirteen-cent check.

These people continue to be living, breathing, slithering proof that there really is no such thing as karma. They are liars and frauds and utterly soulless con artists, and they should be ridden into the throes of desperation and poverty at the soonest available moment.

Drumpf'd Too: Fuckface Boogaloo

WaPo's Chris Cillizza gets points, I suppose, for engaging with Norm Ornstein over the latter's critique of the media's handling of the Drumpf campaign overall, yet Cillizza remains willfully obtuse to what Ornstein is trying to tell him. Ornstein correctly cites the reporting of the Post's David Fahrenthold as exemplary, as well as this week's Newsweek article by Kurt Eichenwald about the Drumpf Org's massive conflicts of interest around the world, frequently with hostile governments and/or crucial geopolitical interests.

This is not a small point; it is the essence of the scampaign coverage. Consider the events of the last couple weeks, give or take, regarding the Drumpf scampaign:

1. Fahrenthold's reportage uncovered a direct link between the Drumpf Foundation's completely illegal "donation" to Florida AG Pam Bondi, just four days before Bondi's office graciously decided not to pursue fraud investigations against Drumpf University;
2. Fahrenthold's reportage also showed conclusively that the Drumpf Foundation itself is a racket. Not only does its namesake not contribute a thin dime to the foundation, but in one instance, accepted an award from the Palm Beach Police Association, based on a "gift" from the foundation that came entirely from another charitable organization. The event was held at Drumpf's dump in Florida, for which the PBPA was charged over a quarter-million dollars.;
3. Eichenwald's Newsweek article, which is thorough and exhaustive and therefore will get short shrift.

So think about these revelations for a moment, particularly those from Fahrenthold's articles. The guy's "foundation" is transparently a fraudulent slush fund, one that its founder contributes nothing to, merely funneling other people's checks and taking the credit. As if that wasn't bad enough, he uses it to bribe elected officials, buy paintings and souvenirs for himself, and even sticks it to the organizations giving him an award for being such a fucking humanitarian. But the media chase after the Clinton Foundation because Drumpf claims it is "pay-to-play," without at all pointing out the insane levels of hypocrisy and criminality on his side.

They could have covered all that and more. Instead they spent that entire time obsessing over HFC's health scare, dutifully reporting on Drumpf's visit to "Doctor" Oz's teevee show, and getting hilariously gulled into helping this cheap fucker promote his new hotel. Smooth move, guys. No wonder everyone despises you. You're hurting America, whether you realize it or not. Your mewling, pathetic excuses won't help you when this piece of shit wins. You are enabling horrible people, full stop.

It's understandable why Cillizza fails to see the dynamic at large, preferring instead to focus on the few bright spots, but still not asking why, for example, no other leading media entities have picked up on Fahrenthold's and Eichenwald's in-depth reporting. It's inexcusable, yet Cillizza insists on making excuses.

Well, like I said before, it's fuck-or-walk time, and they need to start reporting things as they are, and stop giving Drumpf an unearned curve and start reporting his LIES as such, every time, and see what effect that has on the electorate. Or they can keep doing what they're doing, get Drumpf elected with their even-handed ineptitude, and learn to bend the knee or get against the wall.

Your choice, folks.