Boycott Them All

In its own shitty way, CNN is just as useless and destructive to the desiccated corpse of American politics as the Fixed Noise Entertainment Option is (click photo to enlarge).

These "news" orgs need to get right with Jebus and either clean house, or fold up shop. Not that that'll ever happen, since they're definitely fulfilling their true purpose -- to give each other panel discussion points and sell cheeseburgers and pharmaceuticals to the rubes.

It does no good to remind of the right thing to do. The only thing they understand is taking a shot to the wallet. This is hackery at its worst. I don't give a fuck how "principled" Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper are supposed to be, they're taking the checks, they're part of the problem.

Sometimes the "fake news" epithet is well-deserved. Fuck 'em all, put every goddamned one of them out of business. They're how we got in this jam in the first place. It's time these assholes had to go earn an honest living.

Death of a Salesman

Touching back briefly on the week-long Saint John McCain media production:  I happened to catch a few choice minutes of the coverage this morning, reverential play-by-play from the dutiful CBS This Morning crew, segueing into the eulogies. I caught a taste of Addison McConnell's song-and-dance, before Poly Rayon stepped up to the mic.

I don't even recall what either of them said, and obviously it matters not at all. Ultimately, this week was about the media and their narrative regarding Poor Ol' Straight Talk, and his mavericky maverickness. He gave them that narrative, and they were happy to take it and use it.

Since McCain famously disinvited our petulant toddler-king, and good on him for that, the week's narrative was peppered by countless jeremiads about how McCain was too good for Clownstick. And that part is true enough -- McCain was a thousand times the man Fuckface Von Clownstick could ever aspire to be. Balls, charm, and a real sense of humor, all things that Clownstick thinks he has, but is in fact entirely bereft of.

Fair Game

Folks, if you're on the hunt for intellectual dishonesty and shameless hackery, look no further than this sanctimonious asshole. Here's a choice excerpt:

In the meantime, the view of the mainstream media seems to be that there needs to be more harsh coverage aimed at the family members of Trump administration officials.

For instance, there’s Darla Shine, a self-declared “happy housewife” living on New York’s Long Island. Just two weeks ago, Mrs. Shine—it seems okay to refer to her as “Mrs.,” given her declared celebration of married domesticity—was minding her own business, blogging about such topics as “canning at home,” “lasagna gardening,” and “tips for grilling,” and penning paeans to children, family, God, and country.

Then, on July 6, Mrs. Shine’s privacy evaporated. Mediaite did a big writeup on her, quoting her conservative and/or politically incorrect views on topics ranging from Barack Obama to autism.

That second paragraph does a lot of heavy lifting, but let's do a quick rundown. First is the none-too-subtle implication that until the big bad libtard media decided to doxx her, poor ol' Darla Shine was jes' a simple country gal, gardening and making lasagna and pleasuring her husband -- in a very Christian way, of course, which means no swallowing unless it's his birthday.

You would never guess that she had been a producer at Fixed Noise, until she banged her way into the exec suite and cashed in her chips to go raise rugrats on Lawn Guyland. You would never guess that she's spent a good chunk of that time trying various methods of monetizing her mommy bliss, spreading the word to day-drinking housewives who need a little motivation between polishing off the Chablis and fingering themselves to Dr. Oz reruns. You'd never guess she's had a years-long lady-boner for the standard ofay-cracka "musings," mostly variations on the classic theme of how come they can use that word, but we can't?

She's led a public existence for quite some time, doing years of social-media gardening -- carefully watering and fertilizing the ambulatory rutabagas who spend countless hours listening to closet cases like Melonhead Hannity and Fuckface Carlson regale them with lurid booga-booga tales of ISIS and MS-13 super-predator hybrids, menacing the elderly at the Piggly Wiggly in Bumfuck, Arkansas. You can't now suddenly immunize her from scrutiny.

Not that it matters -- let's face it, bigotry and vaxxism are job qualifications with their crowd. The only thing missing is a JPG on her hard drive of Obama photo-shopped as a loincloth-wearing spearchucker.

This asshole even glosses over Bill Shine's tenure as an unapologetic hatchet-man to a workplace rapist who not only got away with his crimes but was paid a fat $40M in the process from his agitprop nutwork. A decent society would have tarred and feathered a turd like Bill Shine years ago; instead, he's "rewarded" with a high-profile position in this ongoing shitshow, the treasonous embarrassment in DC.

Even without their dismal track records, anyone wanting to step onboard this sewage raft needs their fucking brain checked. But the idea that the Shines are just nice people done wrong is not just a flat-out lie, it should be completely intolerable for anyone to try float that shit past a competent editor.

Whatever puling standards "conservatives" once professed to have are clearly gone, like the brain cells of their sundowning clown-lord.

What, and Give Up Show Business?

It has to be hard fucking work to be as obtuse as Chris Cillizza manages to be, day in and day out. At the very least, he deserves some grudging respect for a rather alarming track record of consistency.

I mean, get this -- Cillizza's premise here is that Baghdad Barb should quit, because her boss keeps sending her out to defend him with lies and half-truths and incomplete bits of disinformation. Apparently Cillizza thinks that this makes Baghdad Barb's boss a bad boss, and undermines poor Barb's ability to do her job. Sad!

Nowhere in this nonsense is the notion that maybe the same principle applies to Jim Acosta, to the other stenographers in the press room, to Cillizza himself. Acosta spends his time trying to bait Baghdad Barb into admitting that she's a flunky, a sap, a shill for a mendacious orange cocksucker in a hilarious combover. He knows she's never going to do that, and even if she did, who gives a shit? Nothing matters anymore. And yet, Jim Acosta presumably earns something resembling a respectable living faithfully executing this sham on a daily basis, just as Chris Cillizza gets his ducats wearily meta-commenting on the dismal proceedings.

At no point are useful facts or inculpatory evidence limned, just endless iterations of this shopworn above-the-fray schtick that informs no one and improves nothing. This is not news; this is filler. It is the pixelated equivalent of single-ply finger-blaster bumwipe, the kind you find in a portajohn.

Cillizza's plaintive querying as to why Baghdad Barb doesn't quit her job doesn't even top the low bar of "rhetorical." It's almost too sad to contemplate that he might actually be asking from a place of seriousness and sincerity, rather than the expected studied cynicism, but there ya go.

And there's an answer for such a question being asked sincerely:  Because she enjoys it. Because like her scumbag boss, she hates the gutless media monkeys, and she hates anyone who questions the emperor, and she loves rubbing their fucking noses in it. She gets moist, as close as she'll ever get to a true sexual frisson, when she vomits a clear and obvious lie into the faces in the crowd, and they sit and wallow in it, lamely trying to volley back with some limpdick question that she can snort and sneer at.

Everyone in the room knows it's all lies, and everyone knows there's not a goddamned thing anyone can or will do about any of it -- including refusing to continue this nonsense. That's power, knowing that she can rub their collective faces in the obvious lies, and they'll still be back the next day, waiting for the next shit sandwich. You wanna know why people despise the media, there's a huge reason.

Fuck you, Jim Acosta. Fuck you, April Ryan. Everything Baghdad Barb says at every one of these stupid, useless exercises in muscle and gall has that as a subtext. She could say to them, Have a great weekend!, and the subtext would still be, Sure hope you don't get plowed by a garbage truck, motherfuckers!

So I would pose Cillizza's question back to him, and to Jim Acosta, and April Ryan, and all the battered wives that keep showing up, day after day:  Is this what you went to j-school for, really? To dutifully appear like an ankle-biting mutt, and valiantly pretend that anyone cares that you know you're being lied to? If a job or career is supposed to have purpose and meaning, what kind of purpose and/or meaning do these exercises serve for you and your career aspirations? You think if you suck enough shit, you'll have a shot at the brass ring, the anchor chair, the panel slot, some fucking bullshit like that. Is that what you tell your kids when they ask what you do, is that what you tell your spouses when they give you that look?

Is that what you noble scriveners will tell yourselves in those quiet moments, when it's just you and a cold drink by the fireplace, no teevee white noise to drown out the contempt you feel for yourself, for what you thought you could and should have been, before you became just another showpiece for these evil fuckers? You ask why doesn't Sarah Sanders quit her job. Why don't you quit yours? Seriously. What purpose is served by these choreographed lies?

I'll tell ya some good journalists right now:  Natasha Bertrand. David Fahrenthold. Alexandra Petri's commentary has been scathing. Catherine Rampell has stepped up her game over the past year considerably. There are others, and what distinguishes them is that they're not squatting in a squalid pit with the Possum Queen, transcribing lies and bullshit, scribbling out remnants of their souls in pained missives that they all know are useless before they're even published. Nobody gives a fuck if Jim Acosta gently pushed back on Baghdad Barb that one time. She says, fuck you, that's why, and he meekly sits back down, and the world keeps on turning. Bokay?

Credibility? She's arguably the most powerful woman in the country right now. That doddering fucktard listens to her, confides in her, trusts her implicitly. Only a simp like Chris Cillizza would seriously think that Baghdad Barb gives a fuck about losing "credibility" in his eyes. She's got fifty million knuckle-dragging morons out there that hang on her every word -- and the more she sticks it to chumps like Jim Acosta, the more they love her.

Part of the kabuki is that these idiots periodically have to grumble about shoveling elephant shit, but let's not kid ourselves -- there's no place they'd rather be. And that's fine, if that's their [rolls eyes] minimum standard of competence. But they can at least spare us the endless posturing that they're somehow above the muck. They are the fucking muck, and the sad part is that they really don't have to be. It's their choice. Everyone in this administration is so vile and corrupt, there's bound to be stories under every rock you flip over. So why sit there and take it, when everyone knows it's bullshit?

It's their decision whether they'd rather die on their feet or live on their knees, but again, stop crying about the uncomfortable kneepads.

Access Washington

Just finished reading David Cay Johnston's The Making of [Fuckface Von Clownstick], and it's a very good (not great, but very good and quick) compilation of the countless small crimes of character His Orangeness rode into his current unearned position of power. As a career investigative reporter, Johnston for the most part wisely avoids editorializing and "analysis" and lets the ugly facts do all the talking.

There were a few specific items in the book I hadn't been aware of, but no real surprises. But there are three (actually more, but let's focus on three) major factors in Clownstick's rise to infamy that Johnston's book ably captures. Here they are in (imho) ascending order of importance:

1. During the Atlantic City casino years, the level of corruption and incompetence in New Jersey's gaming regulation boards was nothing short of criminal. Clownstick should never have been let anywhere near a casino, much less allowed to own one. Every job and investor stake lost in his failures is on the head of every corrupt gaming regulator who chose to look the other way instead of doing their fucking job.
2. In chapter after chapter, Johnston lists one failed scam after another, where Clownstick misrepresented himself and his family and his companies and his interests and stakes in any given project, from Chump "University" to Punta Bandera. In all of these, once the fish get wise and sue his ass, Clownstick ends up settling, contrary to his frequent boasts and LIES. And in all of these cases, the courts sealed the details of the settlements. Gee, it might have been nice for the public to know about these repeated incidents of fraud before the motherfucker ran for fucking political office.
3. The media sucks. Let it be shouted from the rooftops till all our eardrums bleed:  OUR MEDIA FUCKING SUCKS. More than any other entity, more than the in-the-pocket Jersey gaming commissions or the institutionally impotent court system, feckless media careerism is what propelled Clownstick into his current seat. Since the early 1980s, he has lied, bullied, cajoled, stroked, and bamboozled them collectively into giving him a platform to spout his LIES and nonsense, and then left them to lamely scramble after him and maybe (usually not) try to clean up the mess, too little too late.

To cite just one string of examples, how many times during the 2016 campaign was that asshole allowed to phone in from his gold-plated shitter to the Sunday morning follies, on all the networks, one after the other? How the fuck do you interview a presidential candidate over the phone, again and again, especially one with such a tenuous relationship with empirical reality? Yet they let him get away with it, over and over.

 

At no point did any of them say, Fuck it. We're not interviewing him unless he shows up, and then we're hammering him on at least some of the lies. Nope, they just let him call in, say what he wanted to, half-heartedly challenge him on his more egregious lies, but at no point did they stand up to him, or god forbid just refuse to have him on because of the incessant lying.

 

Have I mentioned that that cocksucker does nothing but LIE, about every goddamned thing?

And if today's collective marathon of pearl-clutching in defense of Baghdad Barb doesn't make all this clear, I don't know what will. These people are fucking terrible at their jobs. Or maybe I've just been misinformed all these years as to what their jobs actually are. Maybe they're supposed to suck up to powerful people who despise them. That certainly would explain things much better.

Look, we all get the rapidly changing institutional factors impacting their long-standing revenue model. Even the phrase "twenty-four-hour news cycle" means something completely different than it did from, say 1983 to 2015. Seriously. It used to mean that the cable news channels had so much airtime to fill, practically anything became a news story, or more likely, real news stories got beaten into the ground with incessant coverage and overly obsessive detail.

But the meaning of the phrase has changed since He Who Shall Not Be Named threw his hairpiece into the ring. Now with things happening constantly, there's not enough time to keep up with a given story and cover it with due diligence.

Here's another example:  Sean Hannity, Fox's flagship common-tater, was outed less than two weeks ago as one of three clients of Michael "Smithers" Cohen, the obsequious bratva-linked Clownstick toady, who clearly wants to spend the rest of his life polishing his idol's little cheeto. Now, it's bad enough that Cohen isn't really even a lawyer, he's a "businessman" (big finger quotes there, folks) who happens to have a law degree. He's a wannabe Ray Donovan-type "fixer" who uses said law degree to help his main client take care of things, like paying off his inconvenient hoors.

Now, Hannity has been extremely vocal in his defense of Smithers Cohen and Fuckface Von Clownstick, never once disclosing that he, Hannity, was another client of Cohen. When it finally did come out -- thanks to actual investigative reporting by The Guardian, a British media outlet -- Hannity lamely averred that he was an opinion and entertainment guy, not a serious journalist. NBC fired Brian Williams for far less (although Williams is back in a late-might slot at MSNBC these days, but still), but Fox took it all in stride and said they were fine with Hannity's excuse. Within twenty-four hours of the disclosure, Hannity was joking about it on-air with Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.

Since then -- again, bearing in mind that the initial revelation about Hannity was less than two weeks ago -- we have also found out that Hannity is a slumlord, using his ill-gotten pelf to buy up distressed properties with HUD-backed loans, and promptly jacking up the rent, because he's a fucking scumbag. Oh, and no one is surprised that Hannity has free-spending HUD director Ben Carson on with some regularity. It's all just a big coincidence. This sort of thing, this blatant collusion between a key anchorperson and the people he reports on and talks with, would have been unacceptable, even at Fox, just a few years ago.

Not to mention Clownstick's bizarre call-in rant to Fox & Fiends last Thursday, which now (please please) might be a monthly standing appointment. Fox is now officially a propaganda organ for these fuckers, and they aren't bothering to conceal it one bit.

Do gutless media twats like Chris Cillizza pontificate on those sorts of inconvenient truths? Why no, they prefer to grumble about the incivility of comedians calling out lazy media tools for their feckless, dickless careerism. Fucking lazy hypocrites, all of them. They are in the wrong line of work. They really are hurting America.

There are no consequences or accountability for bad behavior anymore. And that's what Johnston's book is really about, in the end -- this steaming orange turd is in charge because at every step of the way, when the courts, the media, the fucking gaming commissions had a chance to hold this fucking piece of shit accountable for the things he'd done, they pushed it off. They let it go; they let him go.

Fuckface Von Clownstick's entire existence -- indeed, his sole actual skill -- has been an extended exercise in getting other people to pay for his high-on-the-hog lifestyle. And he's been enabled the entire time by access journalism, from Page Six to the Today show, these careerist hacks who are more concerned with getting eyeballs and filling airtime than in calling an asshole what he is.

In a rational world, we'd drop him and his vile minions off on a remote island with all the Beltway hacks, let them deal with each other, and never hear from any of them again. They made him, they should be the ones to have to live with him.

Dinner for Schmucks

As it does every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner serves as a reminder that while individual journalists might be fine people, collectively they pretty much all fucking suck, are terrible at their jobs, and should be replaced at the earliest possible moment. Michelle Wolf did the two things a comedian is supposed to do, which is be funny and tell the truth, and if the truth is ugly, whose fucking fault is that?

Consider:  at the same exact moment Wolf smacked up the crowd with a few "[Clownstick] is so broke" yo momma jokes, and threw the lightest of shade at Baghdad Barb's overdone mascara, the so-called leader of the free world was at an indoor soccer field in Bumfuck, Michigan reciting his usual list of lies and calumniations, calling everyone who disagrees with him -- including journamalists -- traitors and enemies of the state. (That the pearl-clutching took some attention away from the magat rally is one small bright point.) So of course Wolf is the problem.

We have a real situation here, folks. If anyone can be characterized categorically as "enemies of the state," it is indeed the corporate media, from CNN to MSNBC to Fox to the NY Times and WaPo. Certainly the degrees of severity vary, and outlets such as the Post have made the effort to include some diamonds among the dross.

But consider Maga Haberman's whinging tweet about how poor Baghdad Barb was forced at gunpoint to sit there and "absorb intense criticism" about things that are objectively true. The only thing Wolf said about Barb's physical appearance was a throwaway line about "smoky eye," and as far as the critique on Barb's job performance, Wolf barely grazed her.

Haberman, of course, thinks she's being "objective" when she sticks up for Baghdad Barb. I honestly don't know why she doesn't just jump over to Fox News and have done with it.

Wolf could have gone much meaner and deeper. Obviously any WH press secretary for any administration is going to be something of a hack and a shill, dutifully sweeping various shenanigans under the nearest thing resembling a rug. But let's stop fucking around here -- Sarah Sanders has taken the job to a new low, aggressively lying and obfuscating for an administration that has richly earned (in barely a year) its multiple investigations and reputation for incompetence and corruption.

Sanders is an active, willing accomplice to their daily efforts to undermine this nation and pit its citizens against each other, while the clown-in-thief and his cronies nose each other along the public trough. She's the closest thing this country has to an out-and-out traitor; she's done far more damage than the likes of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning could ever conceive. Calling Sanders "Baghdad Barb" in this here blog is about as polite as I can get when talking about her, a chuckling wink that only barely alludes to the depth of my contempt for her.

Sean Spicer was and is an asshole, but his main problem during his stint as Depress Suckaterry was that he too frequently, through his body language and facial tics, gave away what he really thought of the whole shitshow. Sanders, on the other hand, is all in on this thing, as they say. She's not acting in order to meet basic job requirements. She'd do this for free; the fact that she's well-compensated for it is just gravy. She enjoys rubbing the noses of the librul mediots and their librul snowflake readers in as much shit as possible. She's about as much of a good christian as Saddam Hussein. Any god that would be okay with her constant lying, and her shameless defenses of the indefensible, is not a deity worth taking seriously.

There's no need to make cheap remarks about her physical appearance -- her soul is as deformed and fugly as they come. Twitter Nixon had her number right from the start, when he said something to the effect that she looks like she's spent plenty of time over the years defending her brother.

Things have gotten progressively worse since that doddering monster waddled down the fucking escalator three interminable years ago, yet the mediots insist on doing things the way they've always done them. Their revenue model is dying, and they don't know what to do, so they don't do anything differently. We all know what that's a recipe for, and it's coming true, as expected.

They like to pride themselves on being neutral objective observers, but they're not, and the WHCD is annual proof of that. Their currency is access, the uncool kids doing whatever it takes to get invited to the kewl kids' party, even though once they get in, everybody hates them all the same. And I don't blame the people in power one bit for hating the media monkeys. I despise them as well.

It's a free country and all, but no one respects someone who eats shit and sucks hobo dicks, like some desperate Fear Factor moron, just to get in the room with a bunch of unqualified thieves and grifters, just so they can swill appletinis with them and transcribe the lies. As nasty as Wolf might been to Sanders and that fucking scumbag she carries water for, she saved her sharpest arrows for the mediot sellouts picking at their monkfish at their corporate-sponsored "see and be seen" tables.

And she still went easy on them. There's no two ways about this -- the media, with their horse-race bullshit and their stupid Cletus safaris and their fucked-up senses of objectivity and priorities, are collectively responsible for the mess we're all in now. This has been building for a long time, and all it took was a career con-man with a long and formidable track record of gulling credulous journamalists every fucking time into taking his calls and stenographing his lies and conspiracy theories and moronic barstool-drunk jabber. He's been playing them like a cheap accordion for decades, and they don't even seem to mind. Whatever gets them clicks and eyeballs, that's really all they care about.

Certainly their customer base bears plenty of responsibility as well. We're not off the hook by any means. The mediots do what they do because there's enough of us who seek it out, or are at least placated by it.

But it's a symbiotic relationship at best; if the media became more responsible and improved their coverage and reportage, the idiots would head for the usual fast-food options of epistemic affirmation, but the people who want quality and have given up on that hope would be back to support such an effort.

And it all starts with these assholes stopping the pretense that they can hang out and party with the people they need to cover rigorously and objectively. We talk about politicians needing to put country over party. The media need to put country over parties. They don't have to be assholes to the people that they cover, but they can't be their friends, either. There has to be separation. This shouldn't even have to be said, but sadly it does. The idea of "collegiality" has to stop -- they are not colleagues. They're not your fucking friends. Stop pretending that they are.

We're past the point of having some good-natured ribbing between friendly rivals, you dumb motherfuckers. They stole a fucking SCOTUS seat, and their golem spends half his time calling us traitors, and the other half forcing us to pay him to play golf. And that doesn't even scratch the surface. If the mediots had any real integrity, they'd stop attending this dismal, debased ritual.

There's a Fox Among the Chickens, and a Killer in the Hounds

Of course, no one can possibly surprised that that fucking melon-headed mick Hannity is so far up his master's ass he might as well be a tapeworm. Just imagine for a second if (just spitballing a random example) Rachel Maddow had been shilling aggressively for Preznit Hillary, that it was public knowledge that they regularly had dinners together, that Clinton called Maddow regularly after her show and sought her advice, and that, oh by the way, they have the same fucking lawyer, the same lawyer that Maddow went batshit over when said lawyer's office was raided by the SDNY and FBI.

Hannity is literally functioning as a surrogate for Fuckface Von Clownstick, while pretending to provide something remotely resembling fact-based analysis of current events. He is perhaps the most compromised, in-the-tank hack ever to squat his fat ass in front of a camera, and considering the piece-of-shit network he's a part of, that's saying something.

Neither their audience nor their detractors are under any illusions about whether Fox News is anything more than a cheap, transparent agitprop shop. That's all they've ever been, it's their sole purpose, and all the Shep Smith or Juan Williams useful-idiot types don't change that a bit. A vile Australian who simply refuses to do the right thing and die already, who is literally the model for The Simpsons' C. Montgomery Burns, uses his entertainment network to bankroll his propaganda network, a place with an institutionalized culture of coercing its female employees into sex. Fuck every single person who sets foot into that cursed building.

Fox has to go. Every bit of it. Fox News, Fox Entertainment, Fox Fucking Football. It's all part of the same evil, lying, self-dealing org. Boycott all of it, whether it's Tucker Carlson or Family Guy. Sign every petition you can find, send a note to as many of their advertisers as you have stomach for. Put them all out of work, make them earn an honest living at long last. Burn it all to the ground, salt the earth, piss on the ashes. This can't go on. We have to stop normalizing and accepting this behavior with a shrug. There needs to be accountability for poisoning the well.

[Update 4/17/18 8:30 PM PDT:  Chuck Toad is another useless sack of shit who needs to go find honest work as well. Fire all of them and start over.]

Girth of a Nation

I wanted to like the Roseanne reboot, I suppose; at the very least, I resolved not to let it be a political decision, which appears to be something of a feat for many folks these days. But let's not kid ourselves -- the show's namesake has gone out of her way the last few years to be (or at least make effort to appear to be) a repellent troll.

As her bumptious political opinions have pinballed around the dial throughout her tumultuous public life, one thing has remained consistent for Roseanne the person:  she seems to place an inordinate value in being tough to pigeonhole or defend. This would be worthy of note if only she'd ever had an opinion on any subject that was worth repeating or endorsing. But her main goal has always been simply to be a pain in the ass. Like her ricockulous orange golem idol, she can't stand to be ignored. Unlike Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, she doesn't care if you like her or not.

But again, I don't want to be one of those Zhdanovite douchebags, stress-testing every note of every song and every line of every show for absolute alignment with my own view of the world and its sorry inhabitants. Ultimately, either the show is funny, or it isn't.

And the show is funny....until it isn't. There are a lot of nice little moments, and some decent laughs. John Goodman fits right back into the Dan Conner (easily the best character on the show, then and now) role like a comfortable shoe. The original kids are all back, as is Laurie Metcalf. They all fall right back into familiar rhythms.

But the first two episodes, which aired back-to-back last week, submerge the viewer in tone and smarm and reverse PC winks. It's likely that the writers were going for an Archie vs. Meathead dynamic between Roseanne and Jackie, but Michael Stivic was actually allowed to make a point once in a while. Jackie is simply a hopped-up caricature of every conservatard twitbag's laundry list of imaginary grievances:  shrill, smug, self-righteous, pedantic. It gets old quickly.

Roseanne, on the other hand, is never ever wrong about anything, just ask her. She defends her choice of a moronic grifter with a vague grumble about "jobs" and brooks no further disagreement. We'll see how that all goes with the jobs and the health care booming along as they are in that part of the country. The bottom line is that it becomes difficult to separate a show from its politics when the show is so blatantly political at every turn.

One of the plots in the second episode encapsulates the dilemma of the show pretty well:  younger daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert, who is producing the reboot) has moved back home with her teen daughter and tween son, the latter of whom is, as the kids say in the 'hood, "gender fluid." Ultimately the grandparents' initial discomfort with a ten-year-old boy wearing unisex clothes and nail polish gives way to the predictable trope of fierce family protection.

All well and good, except this is precisely the same demographic that, in real life, could not stop braying about the looming danger of transgender bathrooms and such like. The lack of empathy in the real people the Conners are meant to represent is palpable, and the feeling that they (Roseanne and Dan) would have jeered at the same kid if he were in a news item at a school is inescapable. That's how they are -- they didn't give a fuck about heroin addicts, until it hit their trailer park. And they didn't give a fuck about jobs until theirs went to China and India and Mexico.

The preening arrogance of these people -- the real white working class and their teevee avatars -- is just exhausting. They seem to think that their diet of deep-fried twinkies and Bachelor offshoots confers some sort of "realness" upon them, that they are somehow more genuinely American than someone who (hurr!) reads hard-cover books and pays attention to actual news. That's really the worst out of all of it, you know, that they really seem to believe such bullshit.

Mostly though, the show is just old Thunderbird in a new-ish box. Underpinning the entire operation is this endless, constant, overweening grievance. It's the conservative reactionary version of that dreaded word, entitlement. To listen to these jabbering maroons, you'd never guess that their guy won, that they have a majority in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, that every thing their dotard has been criticized for has been well-earned. Seriously, these are the sorest fucking winners ever.

It is not the pussy-hat crowd's fault that the doddering grifter keeps shooting himself in the clown shoes every week, nor is it their fault that it turns out that -- surprise! -- all of his promises were predictably empty, that the widget-stamping jobs aren't coming back to BFE, and in fact his tiny-dick-waving stunts with the Chinese are threatening a trade war that will specifically target these salt-of-the-earth rubes.

For several years running, we've been entreatied to "listen" to a cohort of hostile, incoherent jokers who can't muster any facts, and blame everyone else for their manifest failures in life. There is never any countervailing voice, never anyone in the supposedly liberal media, and certainly nobody on the "conservative" side, who ever bothers to even suggest, Hey, more people voted for the other person, wonder if we might listen to them just once? I've gotta listen to them, over and over and fucking over again, but god forbid they'd ever come around to listen to me. Well, fuck that shit, as my great-grandmother used to tell her Sunday school class.

I don't know why that is, and I give up asking. All I know is that I've seen and heard enough plaints from these fools in real life, and I don't need a thinly fictionalized version of their nonsense to drive the point home. They'll never be happy, because they'll never get an even break, and they're never going to be honest with themselves about why that is. So why bother?

There was a time when Roseanne was ground-breaking in many respects, and downright hilarious much of the time. Now it just comes off as preachy and predictable, every bit as smug and spiteful and ill-informed as the loony lefties it lampoons.

But at least that should serve as an object lesson for any would-be liberals. Roseanne does deserve credit for telling her story her way -- loud, brash, aggressive, fuck you if you don't like it. If there are any real liberals (in entertainment or government or news) left, maybe they should consider doing the same thing for once, instead of meekly waiting around for Cadet Bonespurs to send us into a recession and nuke Tehran as a distraction. Waiting for Mueller and/or November is not a strategy.

In the meantime, instead of bothering with the nattering narcissism of the Oracle of the White Workin' Class (when she's not farming macadamia nuts in Hawaii), do yourself a favor and check out The President Show's special. Kathy Griffin's portrayal of soulless homunculus Kellyanne Con-way steals what was a pretty solid show all the way around.

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.

Show Business

"Pastor" Mark Burns is a thief, a liar, a sellout, a snake-oil spiritualist. So why have him on your "news" program for anything in the first place, except to stoke some bullshit political kayfabe? You don't need a genius or a psychic to know that, since it takes a liar to defend a liar, that whoever they get on to "defend" Clownstick's "side" in any given issue is going to -- wait for it -- LIE.

So what (and I'm asking this rhetorically of the journo class) is the point of it? Why have Mark Burns or Kellyanne Conway or any of those idiots on for anything in the first place? Seriously, why bother? Most of the viewers of these shows know what such people will say before they even say it. Obviously, it's all just an exercise for the "interviewer" to indulge in some variation of choreographed sanctimony. It would have been marginally more entertaining if Reid had smacked Burns in the back of his fool head with a folding chair.

This "shithole" thing in particular is dumb and uninteresting anyway, precisely because these mediots refuse to focus on the one part about it that is interesting:  it is clear by his words and phrasing that Emperor Snowflake literally has no idea why people emigrate to other countries. None. Which is especially strange since his own mother was an immigrant. It is a function of his fundamental personality flaw -- he cannot conceive of a human being who is not driven by the twin demons of endless accumulation and self-aggrandizement. To him, those traits are the very point of existence, the essence of life. How could anyone not want to be a well-known grifter who uses other people's money to prop up an illusion of genuine wealth?

The mediots have spent countless collective hours and column inches constructing elaborate arguments detailing the emperor's ongoing cognitive decline, as tracked by his increasing bouts of naughty words and intemperate behavior. And it's partly true -- he does appear to be in the process of (to be polite about it) a severe attenuation of mental acuity.

But the pieces were in place long ago. He was an idiot and a bigot to begin with. He has never not been an emotional retard, devoid of basic human empathy. He does not care about anyone but himself, and will say anything to get what he wants. He sees and processes and responds to every issue through that lens.

It is a pathology, and for three decades now, every media outlet from Oprah to Howard Stern has given this dipshit windbag a soapbox to bloviate from. And now that he's bamboozled the rubes into putting him in charge, the same (or same type of) mediots get his surrogates on their interchangeable shows to spin their wheels and shuck the same jive.

The one thing Joy Reid, Mark Burns, and Fuckface Von Clownstick all have in common is that they each have a vested interest in keeping the "conversation" about Clownstick going ad infinitum. And for all that, they never seem to get around to what's been staring everyone in the face the entire time -- senile or not, he was a corroded soul to begin with, long before he entered the political arena.

News Cycle Filler

Flipping through the wasteland for something to watch on a Sunday morning before the football starts, I did catch a split-second of dead-eyed homunculus Stephen "Stop calling me Maurice!" Miller on CNN, and jumped away as fast as the remote would allow. The mistake Jake Tapper made was having Miller on in the first place, because creating base-stoking fodder was not just an opportunistic tactic for Miller, it was the whole reason for him to go on CNN in the first place.

I like Tapper, and he seems to be genuinely trying to do a good job and be an effective journamalist, but like all of them, he's operating in a hole. The endless, insatiable need to create and churn content 24-7-365 puts newsrooms in the position of being content providers, rather than reporters. From the perspective of Tapper and CNN, the best possible outcome of having a toad like Miller come on to lie and propagandize is to elicit an inappropriate response of some sort. It's not like Miller is going to say, Oh yeah, Michael Wolff was right on the money -- everyone in the White House is enabling a fucking retard!

There is some truth to the meme of "gotcha" journalism; clearly many of them who give air time to lying shitheads like Miller, or sit there in the "briefing" room to be hectored and lied to by Baghdad Barb, are trying to capture some incendiary quote or statement that they can then point to and say See? See?!

Does it really need to be pointed out that that sort of thing has no effect any more? There's been something like that every fucking day for the past couple years, and it hasn't brought these people down. Our last best hope (and it seems to be a valid one) is that Mueller has all these bastards by the short hairs.

But considering where we're at, it's just as possible that Mueller does have a ton of key evidence and indictments, and it still might not make a difference. These people have no trouble telling two-thirds of the nation to go fuck themselves, and they'll do whatever it takes to suppress the vote.

Frankly, considering CNN honcho Jeff Zucker is the dipshit who gave Fuckface Von Clownstick a public platform for his fake-tycoon bubble in the first place (when Zucker ran NBC), they're lucky we all haven't boycotted them already. Voting is still necessary, but the fact is that your most potent power is in your wallet, because all any of these people really care about is money.

The Dude Is Happy

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The Witch Hunt Claims Another Scalp

Well, this is fun -- it's rare that I find myself in agreement with Rod Dreher, but when he's right, he's right. That the New Yorker dumps one if their better reporters, Ryan Lizza, over allegations from a single, unnamed accuser, is a bad sign. We are heading into some nasty waters with this me-too trend, where every man will get an opportunity be Harvey Weinstein for at least a few minutes, just long enough to lose his livelihood.

Oh, who are we kidding? Only liberal and Democrat males have anything to worry about; the Republican party and its propaganda arm are more than happy to employ the most thuggish of sexual harassers and gropers. Hell, what Roger Ailes did to the women at Fox was essentially rape, but with financial and professional coercion rather than physical force. He got a $40 million golden parachute.

But again, only one side will police themselves; as always, the first resort of the true liberal is to unilaterally disarm, no evidence required and the accuser can remain anonymous. The reason is because they are as concerned with virtue signaling as they are with doing anything constructive.

I don't give half a shit about overcooked hacks like Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, or Mark Halperin. They have been part of a movement of careerist hacks that has corroded what remains of actual journalism in this country. They are starfuckers. The profession is better off without them.

But Lizza is a real reporter, who investigates and writes real stories about real issues that affect real people. If people should know about why Lizza got fired, then they should know the specifics. There is a spectrum of offenses when we say "sexual misconduct," and there is a difference between Harvey Weinstein and Al Franken. And I'm betting there's a difference between Lauer and Lizza.

Regardless, it won't be much longer before it won't matter whether charges can be substantiated or not -- it will simply be part of damage control to fire people first and investigate later. And if it turns out that it was bullshit, well, them's the breaks.

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."

Head Count

I've mentioned this several times before, but of course no one listens to me:  every time the pustulent fucktard steps out to do one of his dipshit rallies, the very first thing our intrepid librul media need to do is publish the capacity of the venue and the actual attendance. I don't know why this is so fucking difficult. Every major venue has a fire marshal overseeing the events taking place there, and they get a head count.

It's not rocket science, but apparently it is. None of the national write-ups caught it; at best they do their lame "thousands" estimates, because they have no idea. "Thousands" tells us nothing; that could mean two thousand or twenty thousand or fifty thousand.

In this case, only the Pensacola local media sort of had a reasonable (though still insufficient) estimate:

Thousands of people filled the 12,000-seat Pensacola Bay Center on Friday night for [Fuckhead]'s "Make America Great Again" rally as hundreds were left waiting in line to get in as the doors were closed.

There's that word again, but at least you know the full capacity of the venue. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Pensacola Bay Center's capacity:

The Bay Center has a capacity of 8,150 for hockey games, and as much as 10,000 for non-hockey events.

Why is this stuff important? Because it drives him nuts, and he can't stand feeling, um, short-changed. It's especially important when a journo steps on his dick retweeting a photo from before the rally, showing empty seats.

Also -- and pay attention here, journos and wannabes, because this is the crux of the biscuit -- that number is a salient fact. When you are talking about someone who bullshits and exaggerates everything, literally everything, it is a solid fact that you can muster in this eternal, pointless quest to point out when lying liars are lying. At the very least, it shows that you're trying.

You would think that it would be of particular importance that a Snopes article clarifying that particular instance would (again) mention the name of the venue and the capacity, and the relative ratio of capacity to actual attendance, rather than an idiotic parsing of what "packed to the rafters" means.

And Dave Weigel? Don't apologize to that turd. Ever. Especially over the veracity of a tweet. Throw it back in his face with full pot-calling-kettle-black force. For fuck's sake, grow a pair already.

[Update 12/9/17 11:27PM PDT:  Dave Weigel is certainly sharp enough to know that no good deed goes unpunished, but sure as shit, even though Weigel deleted his erroneous tweet within twenty minutes, the emperor is still calling for Weigel to be fired. If Weigel has any spine, he'll retweet the scores of the emperor's own tweets that are pure, unadulterated bullshit (or, in the polite parlance of the journo, "factually erroneous") and throw it right back in his face.

Not to mention how routinely his favorite "news" organs, Breitbart and Fox, don't even bother with "facts" and just shit out whatever makes their trained-seal audience bark the loudest. For fuck's sake, the asshole got in the ring with several years' worth of birther nonsense.

I'm telling you right now, either these media monkeys start standing up for themselves, like the day before yesterday, and punch back, or they're going to be out of jobs anyway. Simple choice, folks -- die on your feet or live on your knees, or get forced out by bullshit and you'll have a new career asking folks if they'd like fries with that.]

Captive Audience

Back in the Eighties [Hail Reagan!], when I was in high school, a bizarre and shocking local story gained national attention. A married couple a half-hour away had kept a woman as a sex slave for seven years. The husband had kidnapped the woman (named Colleen Stan) in 1977 when she was hitchhiking, and had brainwashed her early on during her captivity into believing that he worked for some secret "Company" that would murder the woman and her family. The husband had already been treating his wife as a sex slave, and she, battered and broken, acquiesced to his perversions (probably a bit relieved to not be focus of his perversions for a while).

Imagine -- this woman was kept in a locked wooden box under their water bed, twenty-three hours a day most days, brought out only to be raped and fed. That went on for several years.

Perhaps most inexplicably, Colleen Stan was "allowed" to go visit her family in 1981, after four years of captivity. Stan was so brainwashed by her captor's empty threats that she returned to him after the family visit.

The old cliché is that we humans only use ten to fifteen percent of our brains' capacity. Obviously they are very powerful, our brains. But that power is a double-edged weapon, in that it can be turned against its owner by someone craftier, wilier, crueler. Other elements such as passivity, inertia, fear, careerism, or just lack of will, can also factor into an individual being persuaded not to use their wonderful brains, to not see what is right there in front of them.

Things keep happening in and around the White House, the administration, its minions and dogsbodies and agents of misfortune, and I find them baffling.

If you are a World War 2 veteran being "honored" at the White House with some meaningless jabber and a borderline slur right in front of a portrait of a literal force for Native American genocide, you can leave. You do not have to stay; no one can force or intimidate you. You have agency.

Similarly, and more ongoing, is the ugly dynamic of the utterly useless and completely demeaning pro forma ritual of the White House press conference. It is rare that anything genuinely informative has ever transpired at one of these things, no matter who's in charge, but under the current crew of sadists and morons, it is merely a tedious routine in cheap propaganda. Its perpetrators no longer even bother to pretend to try or care. Eat shit and go fuck yourselves is the prevailing tone, day after soul-crushing day.

So why do the career journamalists persist in this meaningless exercise? They know before they head into the room that nothing useful or informational will be uttered, that every word will be a lie, including and and the, that Huckabee Junior comports herself as a crude blend of Annie Wilkes and Nurse Ratched, a joyless sort who gets an endorphin rush every time she washes her kid's mouth out with soap for saying darn or gosh. What a job that must be, to stenograph lies and hope futilely that someone out there will give enough of a shit to do anything about it.

It's only a mater of time before Huckabee Junior makes it a standing rule that they have to wear dog collars and zippered gimp masks, and preface each question with Thank you sir, may I have another?

In the meantime, these Serious Journos really need to ask themselves:  Is this what I mean when I tell my parents that my job is interesting and important, that my role is vital to a free and open society?

One thing about these soulless fuckers running this shitshow is that they have given writers countless more things to write about than any previous administration. And the real fun isn't even starting yet. So why on earth would anyone want to sit there and be lied to and treated like shit by a truly nasty piece of work, to stenograph the lies she spews without batting a fake eyelash? That's not work, that's merely a routine.

You do not have to sit there and take shit from these horrible people. There is no value in being in the same room as they are; the atrocities can be recorded and analyzed from many other angles, any of them by definition more true and accurate than the one being spoon-fed to the crowd in the press room. They're afraid of losing access, but what value is access to these fucking reprobates? You would not want to be caught in the same room with Fuckface Von Clownstick or Huckabee Junior in a social engagement, and they are never going to share any useful -- or even true -- info with you. So what, again, is the point in playing their reindeer games?

Noted fake news org CNN has the right idea with declining the invite to the WH Christmas party. So far, the rest of the major news outlets are too cowed by their need to maintain "decorum" to grow a pair, but they should understand something by now -- the line has already been drawn. It is up to them which side of that line they prefer to be on.

They are not being forced to do their job under their self-imposed constraints. They are not being kept in locked boxes under waterbeds; their families are not being threatened. There is no outside coercion, physical or mental. Their limitations in this ugly instance are entirely of their own choosing. They have opted for the false hope of maintaining a sense of normalcy.

But none of this is normal, not at all, and journalists more than other occupations do a disservice to themselves and to their customers by continuing the pretense that any of it is normal. No one is making them sit there for their useless ritual of lies and abuse. No one is making them go on their stupid Cletus safaris -- again, an already useless pro forma exercise in reiterating ad nauseam the magical thinking and ignorant self-defeatism of your average slot jockey or meth addict. No one needs or wants a useless write-up of how "normal" and "average" the neo-nazi dipshit down the street turns out to be. Guess what guys:  he eats his cereal with a spoon, just like everyone else! Yeah, thanks for the heads-up there, Ed Murrow, I feel more informed by the nanosecond.

Meanwhile, there are millions of Hillary voters who would be more than happy to remind these wretched scriveners that every day is a reminder that we were right, that we are constantly vindicated in our blanket assumptions about this serial grifter, this borderline-retarded reality-teevee clown. Where's my article, where's my focus group, you bozo motherfuckers?

How many identical profiles of the stupid and the stubborn do we need to see in one lifetime? We get it -- there's no talking these assholes out of their trees. I lost count of these moronic articles months ago, but have yet to see even a single one profiling a few folks who voted against stupidity, against the evil clown.

This is when it's helpful to remember that despite their pious plaints, journos work for media conglomerates, and those companies are in the business of selling us giant pick-'em-up trucks and cheeseburgers and tampons and pills we don't really need. And the pitch they use to get us into the tent and keep us there is conflict. It's a surefire gimmick -- a ridiculous spray-painted man with ridiculous hair who says ridiculous things, defying people to correct or oppose him. Panel shows and common-taters have infinite job security in clucking daily at the malfeasance, while the ridiculous man knows that none of them have the balls to take him on.

The secret weapon of the bully is not the threat of force, or even the use of force. Bullies know instinctively that most people are passive, and wish to avoid confrontation. Normal people want things to go back to how they were, or at least to go easy. Things will eventually blow over, that sort of thing.

And that's what the bully counts on, that the victim would rather curl up and wish for someone to make it stop, than to stand up and fight back, or at least walk away. Now, most of us are never going to be in the same room as this pustulent pile of bile, and for that we should be grateful.

But the ones who are in proximity, they need to be reminded -- you don't have to accept it, you don't have to put up with it. Stop convincing yourself with nonsense about "respecting the office" -- he has no respect for the office or the country or for you, and unless enough people make it clear that they are not taking his shit anymore, it is his aim to change and twist the nature of the office to his liking.

When they talk about norms and rules and precedents and customs of the office and how the executive is supposed to do things, they are talking merely about expectations. None of the norms are legally binding, you see, so agreeing to abide by them is purely voluntary. This is bad enough when you have a ricockulous buffoon like Emperor Snowflake contorting those norms, but when you allow those precedents to be trampled without consequence, you allow the way to be paved for someone, smoother, slicker, smarter.

The healthiest thing for this country right now would be for its major media organizations, while they still can, to seize the remaining vestiges of their collective self-respect, and stop participating in these rituals and exercises that ad no value and only perpetuate the abuse and this overweening sense of unearned privilege this clown and his insane posse have cultivated for themselves. Nothing is stopping you from standing up and walking out, and investigating and reporting instead of merely transcribing.

Do it, for yourselves, for your readers and viewers, for the country you claim you love. Stand up. Walk out. Find the truth and write it and shout it, and do it again and again. Reclaim the self-respect you probably had before you set foot in that vile room with those vile fucking people. A "career" that consists of ritualized daily self-abasement is not much of a career, and is certainly not honest work.

Tyrannosaurus Sex

The tale of notorious douchebag Harvey Weinstein is a sordid but all-too-familiar one. Weinstein has been infamous for decades for his volatile temper, screaming at and physically threatening anyone who dares to publish anything he's not happy with. It's sort of ironic that what brings him down is his disgusting behavior with women.

I mean, seriously. You're one of the most successful movie producers in Hollywood -- you should have women throwing themselves at you, successful women and starlet wannabes. There should never be an instance where you have to coerce or use leverage to get sex, and frankly, a few of Weinstein's deeds sound like flat-out rape.

Maybe if Weinstein had played his cards right, he could have been elected to high office. I keed, I keed. But really, what is the qualitative difference between Weinstein and Clownstick, or Bill O'Reilly, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes? The last two would be the worst of that particular group, but the salient fact is that none of them will ever face any real repercussions for their behavior. The careers of Weinstein and Cosby are over now, and Weinstein is now facing what will likely be an expensive divorce, but that's about it.

But you can bet the story gives the Clownstick administration a serious orange old-man chub. For one, it serves as a distraction from the daily failures. Puerto Rico seems to have dropped off the mediot radar. Much easier for the chat shows to just sit and talk to each other about how awful Weinstein is (which, don't get me wrong, is 100% true, but it's been true for a very long time) than to send reporters to PR and get a look for themselves, talk to some residents, write an actual news story.

This lets one side, who elected a dirty old man who has bragged multiple times about accosting women and barging into dressing rooms, play some weird "hypocrisy" card, as if it wasn't the failing New York Times that broke the Weinstein story. And it lets the other side virtue-signal that they're willing to excoriate one of "their own" for such behavior, as if the example would resonate one millimeter beyond their own ideological borders.

Conservatives only care about sexual misbehavior when it's Harvey Weinstein or Anthony Weiner. When it's one of their own, they vacillate between didn't happen and fuck you. Liberals are consistent about punishing their own transgressors, but then seem surprised to find that it doesn't really change anything. This isn't about sex, it's about power, more specifically about powerful people using and abusing powerless people, which is a constant of the human condition.

Pretty sure it was in a Playboy 20 Questions interview in the early '90s, where Joe Pesci said, "Show business turns men into fags and women into whores." However that phrasing may put some people off, he's not wrong. One of the sicknesses of our culture is how badly some people allow themselves to be conditioned to seeking fame for its own sake. The promise of fame -- or even just being in close proximity to it -- gets some people to do things they ordinarily wouldn't.

Even a heaving fat sweaty tub of shit like Harvey Weinstein could get laid. This wasn't about getting laid. This was about a tubby schlemiel who never got a decent piece of ass until he was a wealthy Hollywood weasel trying to seduce Ashley Judd or Asia Argento or someone people had actually heard of. I produced her goddamned movie and got her an Oscar, the least Gwyneth Paltrow can do is give me a fucking handjob! That sort of thing.

And like Pesci, Weinstein wouldn't be entirely wrong in that assumption. It's one of the oldest what would you do for.... questions around. If giving a fat guy a handjob would make you a rich movie star and get you an Academy Award, would you do it? Probably most average people would say no, but a much higher percentage of people in the entertainment industry would say break out that dick. And that's the world guys like Weinstein and the rest of them live in.

Don't get me wrong; I find Gwyneth Paltrow to be insufferable, but I do not think she gave Harvey Weinstein a handjob, although I really don't care if she did. It's just an example to illustrate where the brains of people who function at Weinstein's level can easily be, if they have that kind of personality and temperament.

Despite the usual "casting couch" clichés that abound, I suspect that is the exception these days, rather than the rule it probably was back in the day. These are corporations with HR departments and risk-management protocols, and that sort of shit is bad for business. But if you put a dysfunctional person in that sort of position, of course he's going to exploit the opportunity and go after all the ass he can get. Dysfunction+Power=Bad Shit Happening. Who knew?

But again, the fact that a good chunk of the 'murkin media have gone off after this particular squirrel, while 3 million Americans continue to suffer without food or electricity or gasoline, and the turd stinking up the Oval Office continues to rage-tweet the voices in his head, speaks volumes.

Twilight of Hot Take Nation

I don't have any pithy thoughts on What Happened In Las Vegas. It's tragic, but not unexpected; as mentioned here countless times, we have become inured to the mayhem, accustomed to thinking of these events as the cost of doing business. So this is the cost, an annual blood sacrifice of several dozen innocent lives, so that the oppressive state doesn't impose too harshly on the rights of lawful gun users.

It would be no surprise at all to find that Stephen Paddock had no political agenda whatsoever, that he was neither a Clownstick hater nor supporter, just a lone nut with lots of legally obtained firearms. This is the inadvertently nasty trick the founding fathers played on later generations, the blank insistence that any citizen has an absolute right to any sort of weapon they desire, no test for qualification or competence.

There are, I believe some exculpatory perspectives on the absolutism of the Second Amendment. The main one is that, in societies with real gun control, there is an overt emphasis on the "monopoly of force" that is to be the prerogative of the state. Technically, if the state apparatus is popularly elected and supported, then said force should represent a willful and lawful majority of the citizens, versus the accumulated stockpiles of regional warlords and assorted cranks. Still, the view is at odds with the actual history and culture of the United States.

Second to that is the hoary but still true analogy that we don't take everyone's cars away when some dipshit careens through a farmers' market and takes out a dozen pedestrians. (Of course, we do test for driver competence, but go out on any given road for, say, fifteen minutes, and try to keep count of how many morons you encounter.)

People can and do go back and forth on all the facets of this issue, with the usual results. Whatever else you may hear over the coming week, however cynical or political or naively idealistic, the bottom line is this:  the cost of not changing is not yet greater than the cost of changing. This is the operative axiom for any major (or even moderate) societal change, period. It is as universal a law as gravity.

Tragically, in a geographically secure nation of 320 million people, you probably never reach that point of equilibrium where gun control laws would be implemented across the nation. There is too much invested in the rhetoric of "states' rights" and "tradition" and that sort of thing. Even standardizing basic background checks and waiting periods would be impossible.

If the Sandy Hook massacre -- a crazy asshole using his mommy's Bushmaster rifle to murder a classroom full of first-graders -- didn't change anything, you unfortunately have to start considering the moral calculus at work here. It's a ghoulish exercise in reverse engineering:  what would it take to get meaningful gun control laws across the country, 100, 200, 500 people? What is the benchmark, the casualty count at which enough people say, "Okay. Fuck this."? Seriously, try to conjure up a suitable number and setting for yourself.

The really strange thing about all this is that Americans are notoriously willing -- eager, in fact -- to embrace any manner of intrusions for the illusion of security. We'll stand in line for hours on end to be randomly searched and probed by TSA schmucks so's we can fly to Hawaii; we've passively accepted the mass surveillance of our emails and online communiques; we routinely let overzealous Barney Fife types push us around at traffic stops. Considering the statistical facts that fewer individuals own more guns, it's weird that the majority of 'murkins seem to be fine with this absolutism when it comes to gun rights.

So this is all old, well-trod ground. We've been hashing this bullshit out for as long as I care to remember, while the NRA continued -- and still does -- to build political influence on the bodies of the slain, fear-mongering to the fearful and paranoid.

What's more interesting (to me, anyway) is the meta aspect of it all -- the collective commentary on the event, then the secondary commentary on the initial commentary, etc. Something like this:  The Gateway Pundit retard posts a bullshit item about the shooting, it gets carried on Facebook because Zuckerberg gives less than a quarter of a fuck about anything besides raking in dough, and lowly bloggerses futilely attempt to clear up the facts as they are known. And nothing results from any of it, ever.

This dynamic has become at best a collective catharsis, a tacit acknowledgement that we are well and truly screwed, and can't do jack shit about it but complain and hope that the benevolent aliens hear us. And then we're all right back at square one for the next one, like it'll turn out any different. This is a classic death spiral; if you had a cousin like this, you'd get together with family and hold an intervention, if only to register your concerns before it was "too late."

I think it's too late, in many respects. When it comes to the daily concern of how to manage the mad emperor, I have a reasonable level of competence that Bob Mueller has unearthed at least enough evidence to shame and disempower him, if not remove him from power outright.

But that does fuck-all about the disease of which Snowflake is but a nasty symptom -- it brings no jobs back, it doesn't lessen the causes or effects of ongoing climate change, it doesn't get opposing cadres of 'murkins out of each others' collective asses, stoked by the ministrations of the orange insect overlord.

The commentariat --- and hell, I'll even throw myself in as a barnacle on the hull of internets discussion -- is as bad as the "conventional" mediots at this point. We can all poke fun at the media monkeys dancing to the corporate tune, penned in at a rally, having to contend with barely ambulatory morons screaming at them and flipping them off, and dutifully transcribing the proceedings like a bunch of assholes. But we bloggerses are much the same, meta-commenting and snarking and such like, but not really affecting anything meaningful. Yes, so-and-so is a certifiable, provable asshole, but the proof means nothing when said asshole just got elected, because enough of your fellow countrymen are toxic douchebags.

Maybe this is what a dying post-industrial empire looks like:  everyone endlessly commenting on everyone else and nobody listening, just shoveling shit into an entropic void.

The Evil of Banality, Part 3: Exceptional, My Ass

[I had the basic skeleton of this third part worked up back on the 5th or 6th, then went on a reading bender, and things went pear-shaped with Uday's epic fuckuppery last week. I swear, you practically have to keep up with these morons on an hourly basis. Which is ultimately the point of this one.]

Reading Nancy Isenberg's White Trash is at once reassuring and dismaying, basically for the same reason -- we are not in unique times. Things have always been thus, or at least mostly. We were granted a relatively brief respite of about sixty years or so, roughly from our entrance into WW2 to 9/11, give or take.

Isenberg patiently and effectively busts the tired "godly puritans escaping oppression" myths we were all fed in school, and paints a more real, more lurid picture. London had a surplus population centuries before Dickens coined the phrase, and many of the early colonists were vagrants and vagabonds and other such undesirables, pressed into servitude and shipped across the ocean.

That these folks came from "mean (mostly as in 'average,' but also to some extent as in 'cruel') stock" was less of a factor in their generational fates than was the concerted effort by colonial masters -- merchants, politicians, builders, tradesmen -- to keep them down so as to ensure a steady supply of cheap, generally compliant laborers.

What shines through is how consistently the low-born cracker class, as a generalized demographic, are kept in their place with fairly modest efforts, mostly empty appeals to pride, religion, jingoism, racism, whatever. But those efforts worked, and continue to do so quite well.

So the ugliness of the campaign, the "winning" candidate, the sentiments that were appealed to, the tenor of the electorate, none of those are unprecedented.  American history is littered with such examples of worse behavior than what we saw last year. That is strangely reassuring, to know that the nation as a whole has been able to get past such things in the past.

But it took a lot of blood and pain and time, and despite all that, the dipshit mentality still persists, and seems to be on the rise. The stupid is like mercury, it cannot be beaten or bred out of anyone, it spreads when you hit it, and it poisons what it touches. And it is getting on pretty much everything and everyone these days.

We already know that Clownstick and his crew are gaslighting America, but I'd take it the extra logical step and say that the media are gaslighting us as well, and in pretty much the same fashion. Clownstick demagogued the rubes with a lurid picture of bullshit, a flaming hellscape that only he could fix. Similarly, the media keep the twenty-four hour news cycle going by pushing the most sensationalized stories they can find. You would never know that the violent crime rate has been steadily declining for years, and is relatively low. And as mentioned above, as toxic as the 2016 campaign was, it was presented as an unprecedented, do-or-die cataclysm.

Most of us probably (hopefully!) never imagined a day where someone got into high office with the express assistance and collusion of a hostile foreign power -- and all the politicians and voters from that party were just fine with it. Such a thing seemed to be unthinkable a short time ago, but perhaps it had been lurking just below the surface the whole time, watching, waiting for the right moment to seize the opportunity.

Well, it's been seized, and too many people seem just fine with all that. Even though the truth of the matter is that, if those 80,000 rust-belt rubes not shown up and Butter Emails had squeaked in instead, those same folks would be swinging from the rafters over every jot and tittle. They would be seeing collusion in every crack in the pavement.

When enough people stop believing or caring about empirical facts and informed analysis, when enough of them seriously think that pulling some foolishness out of one's ass is just as valid as paying attention and strategizing accordingly, you are in deep trouble as a nation. The US has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, and it can slide back just as far just as quickly.

And we may very well be on that path after all. The sheer amount of toxic dumbfuckery in play right now, at the political, electoral, and cultural levels, cannot be offset or countered quickly. We have been focused on the foam at the crest of the wave, rather than the overall current and the tide direction.

The tide takes time to turn, but so far it has not shown any signs of abating or turning. Too many things seem to be a wink or a nod to the white-power crowd, people who we had hoped had essentially disenfranchised themselves by this point. But they found their champion in the sort of toxic narcissist who will jabber about "fake news" as a euphemism for "stuff I don't like," again bearing in mind too many of our fellow rubes no longer count "facts" or "information" as anything of any value at all.

Such a person, who does not want to do the hard work of leading but merely wants to be feted like an Egyptian god-king, is the ideal useful idiot to blithely toss dog-whistle rhetoric to the punters, perhaps even unknowingly. After all, they're just words on a teleprompter, which proved how stupid Obama and Hillary were, but apparently is acceptable now. Alrighty-then.

Honestly, it's a small wonder that he doesn't have a team of minions carry him around on a litter on these trips abroad. Maybe some chickens could be sacrificed to secure His favor. Whatever it takes to distract from the actual work of overseeing the (for now) world's largest economy and military.

But this current trip begs the classic question:  How many Polacks does it take to wave a confederate flag? This will get bypassed in the torrent of news and nonsense, but it is an important symbol of something much greater than what we normally think of it as. Focusing on the traitor-slaver rag's history of pain and racism is necessary, but again focuses on the foam (the, erm, whitecaps) while ignoring the actual current.

Again, we are now a country where the average citizen knows more about some "real housewives" characters than they do about who represents them, and how well. Again, maybe we were always that country, and we're just now realizing it. Technology has amplified the voices of outraged ignoramuses, along with all the other wondrous things that are provided. Those morons are emboldened by that amplification, and we are seeing the consequences.

Starting to see the consequences. Hope you're in it for the long haul, because it is about to get weirder. I stand by my earlier prognostications that the stupidity and arrogance of the current administration will prevent them from doing as much damage as they'd like. But they will do some damage, and more importantly, containing the symptom doesn't necessarily affect the disease.

When facts are what you want them to be, and reality is what you tell yourself it is, new and interesting possibilities open up for you. Flags and symbols that have been universally recognized for generations now mean just what you say they mean, neither more nor less. You can tweet a doctored photo of your hero throwing a kill-switch on his political opponent in a gas chamber, and have your kindred chastise the majority for not getting what was clearly a high-larry-us joke.

You no longer have to familiarize yourself with the source documentation of your own country, because you stopped reading a long time ago, and besides, reading books is for fags. So it makes sense that you might interpret the Declaration of Independence as a call to insurrection, and get all indignant when someone mentions it, even when they've been mentioning it every year at this time since the late '80s.

The beauty of being this type of complete fucking retard is that everything means exactly what you want it to mean, what you need it to mean -- words, deeds, people, flags, symbols, documents.

Obviously, it's a very short putter on your mobility scooter to arrive at the conclusion that if you studiously avoid knowing or learning anything of value, you can simply declare unilaterally that everything means exactly what you want it to mean, neither more nor less.

Fuckface Von Clownstick's supporters made that decision many moons ago, well before FVC decided to run. It just happens that he is the perfect empty vessel for their nonsense -- or any nonsense, really, as long as the check clears, he'll say whatever you want him to say on any given day.

But the potentially dangerous conclusion that we all need to understand is that these rubes, through their refusal to learn or experience anything new, or question their idiot dogma, believe that the country is what they say it is. That's how you get an anonymous Polack waving the traitor-slaver flag at a rally in Warsaw in 2017. The contents of the speech given at that rally hammer that whole idea home -- the country is what we say it is, and we're not letting you libtards take it away.

And this is how we end up with utter mediocrities and total fuckups in extremely important positions. I am not kidding, and this is not snark -- as I have mentioned before, Clownstick is the sort of person you would never work for or with, nor would you hire him for anything more complicated than moving rocks from one end of the property to the other. And even then you'd have to keep an eye on him.

His children are no better. One is a dyed-in-the-wool brander like Himself, pushing her knock-off handbags and glad-rags. One rides the charity grift racket, throwing epic fundraisers at dad's golf courses, then acting all surprised when dad charges roughly what the fundraiser took in. And Uday "runs the business" more or less like dad always did -- seat of the pants, skin of the teeth, fart of the squeal, whatever. Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ. Seriously, is there one (1) serious person out there who would really work for this fucking guy?

Well, the same goes for most of the people he's selected to "run" the gubmint. They're all hacks and dipshits and money-grubbing assholes. It should be unthinkable that a spoiled princess like Betsy DeVos, who has spent her adult life trying to buy and marry her way into influence, should be picked to run the American public educational system into the ground by making it into another goddamned profit center.

I'm out of solutions on this one. It's hard to force someone (or millions of someones) to not be a moron or an asshole. But we have collectively engendered this type of stupidity, simply by not squashing it.

That should be the real takeaway here:  beyond the insult-comic jabber, the alt-right fascist trolls, the skeevy grifter con-man mentality of these people, what really shines through is how mediocre they really are. All of them -- Himself, the kids, the thieves and poltroons in the cabinet -- these are people who are literally unemployable in the real world, and they literally know nothing besides how to fill their pockets. This needs to be pointed out at every possible opportunity, every bit as much as the Russia stuff.