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.

Strange Magic

As everyone predicted, oversized machine hack Luther Strange lost his primary in 'murka's Taint to Christofascist Roy, I say, Roy Moore. What's funny -- but like everything else, not at all surprising -- is that HRH Emperor Snowflake has backtracked through his tweet-machine to drop his inconvenient truths down the digital poop-chute.

Make no mistake:  Roy Moore is as whackjob as they come, a true embarrassment to the notion of an impartial judicial bench beholden to the law of the land, as opposed to his interpretations of the verses of his book. He's a Christian Sharia judge, pure and simple.

Over the next year, we'll be hearing any number of things about money raised and spent, various modes of voter suppression, etc. It will be presented in the context of fatalistic inevitability, as if it is merely a matter of sheer determinism that people will always vote for the best-funded candidate, or that they are powerless to take steps to ensure that they are not unduly franchised.

So that's what needs to be pummeled into the brain stems of Alabamans who might find themselves repulsed at the idea of this peacocking little shithead representing their state in the US Senate -- you don't have to vote for the guy with the most commercials, or the last commercial you hear before the election. You are still allowed to go to the public liberry; you are still allowed to turn away from this week's Two Minutes of Hate for uppity black athaletes, and read a book or an article about anything, anything at all.

Also, too:  you have more than thirteen months before the election. That's a lot of time to double-check with your county elections office and make sure you are correctly registered to vote. It might take a fifteen-minute phone call to do that. It might take slightly longer to register to vote by mail, which I promise you will be the best move you ever made. If your state requires voter ID, you have time to acquire that ID. Maybe it costs twenty bucks. That's not fair, but even poor people are usually able to look around them and find twenty bucks worth of things they can get by without for a couple weeks -- smokes, snacks, cable, etc.

We can debate the fairness of things like voter IDs, but the point really is that all of these simple steps described in the above paragraph, for someone who might be uncertain about their ability to exercise their right as a citizen of this country, can be done well before next year's election. Hell, it can be done before this Christmas, probably before Halloween.

So how badly do you want it, how urgent is it to you to stand against the fuckery of the world right now, and the agents of that fuckery, such as Roy Moore? Either it's important enough to step up and take care of your business -- here, now, while the election's still a mile off -- or it isn't. Either you have skin in this game, and something to lose -- your health care, your right to get married or adopt, your basic right to walk down the street and live your life and mind your fucking business without being treated like a subhuman -- or you don't.

Personally, I don't have any skin in any of these games. Being a straight, married, middle-aged, gainfully employed white guy with insurance, I'm in the fucking wheelhouse. But I still care about what kind of country this is going to be, and we all have to understand that it takes constant effort. It does not end with the election, it begins with the election -- if your candidate wins, then you work to support their efforts and platform; if a Roy Moore type wins, you do what you can to dump him the next time around. That's it. That's all there is to this.

I don't live anywhere near Alabama, I don't know anyone there, and I doubt I'll ever set foot within a thousand miles of there. (A southern man don't need me around anyhow.) So there's nothing I can do about whether Alabama sends Roy Moore to the Senate next year or not. That's up to the residents of that state. No one wants to hear about how someone's diaper is full -- either you can vote or you can't, and either you pay attention and take care of business or you don't.

Bum's Rush

When I speak intemperately of the toxic orange slug festering in the people's house -- and frankly, that is the only proper way to mention Emperor Snowflake -- there are myriad reasons for that tone, every single one of them provided by Himself.

This is fucking unacceptable, every bit of it, and it's been a pleasure and a joy this fine weekend to watch athletes of all races and multiple sports unite against it. There's a reason Colin Kaepernick's jersey was the biggest seller last year, after he began taking his weekly stand (so to speak). It's the same reason NFL players are linking arms today, why the Pittsburgh Steelers refused as a team (except for offensive lineman Alejandro Villanueva, who is an Army veteran) to even step foot on the field for the anthem.

Obviously, sports occupy a very peculiar place in the national psyche, and of course it's even more absurdly pronounced in many other nations, where soccer riots and such are not uncommon. The movement of a ball can do some hinky shit to the brains of otherwise fairly normal people. So of course there are those who are deeply butt-hurt over all this mishegoss. They are very wound up about the "disrespect shown to our military," but you can bet your next paycheck they have fuck-all to say about someone who taunted a tortured military veteran, who talked shit about a Gold Star family who lost their son in combat, who propagated a FUCKING BIRTHER LIE for FIVE FUCKING YEARS.

Respect, it seems, is only important to these folks when it involves people and things they care about. I know, I know, try to contain your shock at this amazing revelation.

The bigger picture is that the walls are closing in, and Old Man Clownstick is rage-tweeting while he's filling his old-man diapers, because Mueller's got his fucking number, because now it turns out that his own team has been using private email accounts (LOCK THEM UP! LOCK THEM UP!), because his approval rating scraped forty percent last week after he managed not to completely fuck up the hurricane responses in Texas and Florida. (Puerto Rico, on the other hand....), because the jig is about to be up, and he desperately needs a distraction.

Jesus H. Christ, this doddering dotard was so discombobulated the other night with his half-witted endorsement of oversized tool Luther Strange, he actually acknowledged that he might have made a mistake in endorsing Strange, and that maybe he should endorse ultra-whackjob Roy Moore. (By the way:  fuck you, Alabama, for foisting that piece of shit on the rest of the country.)

Most of all, even the cultiest of supporters have to acknowledge, if only to themselves, that if the world is a flaming hellscape -- if we are under mortal threat from North Korea and Iran, if ISIS is still imping along, if we are stuck in a failed war in Afghanistan and a despicable genocide in Yemen, then how does this fucking asshole have the time to worry about professional athletes exercising their First Amendment rights?

There needs to be a reckoning:  for the piece of shit defiling the nation's highest office on a daily basis; for the idiots and cranks who put him there; for the party that continues to enable this monster because they value billionaire tax cuts over everything; for the transnational merchant princes who bought enough politicians from both parties to create the conditions that made it possible for the P.O.S. to slither into office in the first place.

More and more people are recognizing these increasingly authoritarian conditions for what they are, and for what King Asshole wants them to be. Athletes using their positions to express resistance to this is a great thing, and hopefully the start of something greater. Let there be no confusion -- this is a warped, demented old man, a divisive, hateful, incompetent scumbag who needs to be stopped. Now.

The Rehabilitation of Baghdad Bob

If the denizens of Tinseltown haven't torn any ligaments stroking each other and patting their own backs, they might want to take a moment to reflect on how sometimes the view of them as supercilious dilettantes is justified. Is there a particular need to resurrect Sean Spicer's career right now, that the peons were unaware of, and do our dancing entertainment monkeys need to lead that effort at the very same awards show where they repeatedly (and rightly) lambaste Spicer's former(?) boss.

It shouldn't need to be said that if you want people to take your stated political convictions seriously, as in I may or may not agree with everything you say, but it sounds like you've thought your positions through and are making an effort to be intellectually honest and consistent, then you don't pull cheap stunts like that. Spicer is not allowed to be in on the joke, because he is the joke; worse yet, he was the willing homunculus for a lying, corrupt, demented old man and his crime family.

In making Spicey the Sammy the Bull of the west coast political smart set, Stephen Colbert and whoever else masterminded this nonsense exposed themselves once again that, like their media weasel counterparts, clickbait and eyeballs rank over everything, including political principles. This little asshole actively worked to undermine this nation's confidence in their institutions. He willingly enabled the most corrosive political figure in our lifetimes to seek rhetorical cover behind lies and transparent bullshit. No one forced him, and I'm sure the checks cleared.

Spicer is a henchman, a dogsbody. He should not be stunt-cast on the Emmys, or invited to Harvard as a guest lecturer, He should be completely bereft of further career options, and go back to his rightful place in the food chain -- as the White House Easter Bunny.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the "Leader" of the Free World

Some places refer to HRH Emperor Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick by his given name and official title. "Respect for the office" or some such bullshit, as if he has ever shown any respect for the fucking office.

Here's reason #1,359,277 why I will never refer to him as such, ever. He retweeted that the other day, but he cries like the LITTLE BITCH that he is every time someone does something similar about him. Fuck him, and fuck his dipshit supporters that, no matter their meaningless demurrals, support this kind of nonsense as well.

There are no two ways about this -- Snowflake/Clownstick is an embarrassment to this country. He's a miserable whiny cunt, and a horrible excuse for a human being. It's going to take a generation just to get rid of the shame of having this piece of shit in charge of anything more complicated than an ice cream truck.

So. What's it gonna be, 'murka? Tired of having a disgrace run the place? Are we motivated enough to get off our lazy asses and actually show up to the voting booth next time, and every time?

I don't just blame the dipshit deplorables for putting this fucking fool in a position of power -- I blame every putative "liberal" and "progressive" who just couldn't stomach voting for her, who both-sided the choice until they lost all rational perspective, or just took it all for granted because the retard pollsters insisted she had this in the bag.

You know why they insisted that she had it in the bag? Because no rational person could conceive of a situation in which enough people were stupid enough to vote for a lifelong three-card monte huckster. It's that simple. The majority assumed that the moron minority was smaller than it actually was. No one wanted to believe there are so many dumbasses in one place, that they can't see the craven misogyny, projection, and outright incompetence that fills every pore of Snowflake's fat diaper-clad body.

I said this shortly after the election, and it still stands:  liberals who were paying attention were forced to decide whether the nation was in the process of becoming something we no longer recognized, or whether it simply reinforced what it has always been in so many respects.

Either you side with college-turd tiki-torch suburbo-nazis, or you don't. Either you side with fat militia cosplay wannabes toting assault weapons, or you don't. Either you side with a fat, dementia-addled old man who rage-tweets his dumps and routinely retweets sentiments from "white genocide" types and wishes physical harm on those who oppose him, or you don't. I don't like the window-breaking antifa types, nor do I care for the trigger-warning campus speech police. But I'll take a hundred of them every day of the week over a single one of these endlessly projecting crybaby hypocrites.

And I sincerely hope that every one of them gets what's coming to them, which is a continuation -- an acceleration, in fact -- of all the circumstances that drove them into the arms of a con man.

Into the Void

Something non-political for a change, and infinitely more momentous:  after twenty years of faithful service, the Saturn spacecraft Cassini reached the end of its life-span, and plunged into the planet's surface. It took some unbelievable photos over the years. That's an amazing thing, one that transcends the smallness and venality of our earthly concerns, the amateur Kremlinology and dopey reality-teevee politicking.

Cassini serves as a wondrous reminder of what the human mind can achieve in its quest for real knowledge and our place in the universe.

Days of Whine and Poses, Slight Return

I don't begrudge Hillary Clinton the right to tell her side of the story and make a juicy buck off it, but it becomes tiring that every move she makes ends up becoming some sort of tactic or gambit in this weird, ongoing low-level dummycrat civil war between the Clintonistas and the Bernie Brats. This seems to be a recurring theme with her supporters over the years, and it's become tiresome and counterproductive.

Sanders has his flaws, but near as I can tell, he's at least trying to move a progressive piece of health-care legislation forward. (Funny how he managed to get something together to introduce in just a few months, while doing stump speeches around the country, while the Goopers thumbed their dicks for seven years and came up with jack shit.) Perhaps it occurs to some of the Bernie bashers that he is useful as a stalking horse for whatever actual liberals exist among Democratic senators; if the bill gets slammed, they can disavow it, if people love it, they can support him.

Or we can keep re-litigating last year's ultimate dog-fuck of an electoral loss until we're all sick of life itself. Blame Comey, the media, the Russians, whatever. You think the media just started fucking up their coverage last year? Tell it to Howard Dean, tell it to John Kerry or Mike Dukakis. The real problem is that too much of the electorate is now either completely disengaged or borderline retarded, and it's hard to come up with a sales pitch beyond the confines of Ooga-booga big! Ooga-booga strong!

But them's the perils of democracy, or the trappings of it. Here's a thought -- maybe if the rich paid their fair share, both in wages and taxes, we might be able to have schools that do more than warehouse the future meatbags.

I'm tired of hearing how their diaper is always full. They can't seem to talk enough people into voting for their own rational self-interest, and it's always someone else's fault. They sound like a bunch of alcoholics and junkies half the time, never accepting any blame for anything, no matter how obvious. They had the election gift-wrapped to them, thanks to the most obnoxious, polarizing candidate in our lifetimes, and they still found a way to fuck it up. Own it, learn from it, and move the fuck on already. All three of those things are necessary, and they haven't even done one 'em yet.

The Democratic Party could have made any number of modest efforts to preserve even a margin in those stupid rust belt states well before 2016, and they fucking didn't. They didn't do a goddamned thing to help the rubes, but they went to the mattresses for bathroom rights, and that's why that fucking clown won, and it's why that other dipshit clown Kid Rock has a pretty solid chance of taking Debbie Stabenow's Senate seat next year.

These people couldn't fuck their way out of a wet paper bag after a fistful of Viagra. They spent good money on shit pollsters who scammed them as badly as a Clownstick University doctorate program. And they're going to do it all over again, because it's more important to them to keep reliving their epic fail, and to attack the one guy who's actually trying to do something their party used to actually stand for, when it stood for something.

Days of Whine and Poses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Continuing Adventures of Florida Man

Good luck to everyone in Florida with one hurricane barreling through and another on its way, although there's a good chance that Irma and Jose will take plenty of morons with them.

The Freewheelin' Fuckface Von Clownstick

I don't know if the PTB at the FTFNY doesn't realize how many people are utterly repelled by bullshit like this, or they just don't care anymore. If they want to keep putting the "anal" in "analysis" and pulling nonsense like that out of their poopchutes, about all anyone can do is just avoid them like the plague. And of course WaPo isn't far behind. These people just can't help themselves.

Well, You Could Knock Me Over With a Fucking Feather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Was At That Moment That He Truly Became Dear Leader

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

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

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

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

Beatdown

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

Flaw and Ordure

A frequent gag on The Simpsons consists of showing what's going on in Homer's brain in a given moment. Generally it's what you would expect - monkeys picking bugs off each others' asses, Homer eating a sandwich, that sort of thing.

It's not unreasonable to assume much the same thing going on between Emperor Snowflake's dried-apricot ears. In disgraced Arizona "sheriff" Joe Arpaio, Snowflake has made a point of pardoning what he clearly sees as a kindred spirit, a fellow birther-conspiracy dirtbag. No surprise there; Snowflake pretty much telegraphed his intentions at his half-attended stemwinder in Phoenix last Tuesday.

The moral cretinism underpinning this move, coming as it did while everyone was focused on Hurricane Harvey getting ready to slam into Galveston, cannot be overstated. Since Arpaio may be one of the few people in American public life who is even more of a vicious asshole than Snowflake, it makes a warped sort of sense.

But strategically, it makes no sense at all. Yes, like everything else he's done, it's a big middle finger to libtards, sure to whip up the proverbial base. But that base is starting to wear out a bit, and is only going to continue to do so as this moron continues stomping his way through everything. Even these drooling meatbags have to start seeing that he's a one-trick pony, and it's really not much of a trick, especially when some of us are making a point of laughing at him -- and them -- rather than recoiling in horror.

Additionally, it draws a wedge between Snowflake and his own party, who are rapidly getting tired of dealing with his erratic, impulsive incompetence. If Fatboy wants to throw his cameltoe behind Chemtrail Kelli Ward in the GOP primary against Jeff Flake, let him. It will be an excellent test of exactly where his level of support really is. But the bottom line is, there is almost no way that pardoning Arpaio just to be a dick turns out to be anything but counterproductive for his own agenda. It's like he did it just because people advised him not to. Fuck you, you can't tell me what to do!

Let's not put too fine a point on it -- Arpaio is not just a racist, he's a sadist. He delights in inflicting pain and torture on his inmates, many of whom, let's recall, are still awaiting trial, and are hence technically not guilty of anything yet. He frequently referred to his tent-city sweat box as a "concentration camp," took perverse pride in cheap punitive stunts such as banning newspapers, eliminating salt and pepper.

Hundreds of people have died in his concentration camp, from heat exhaustion, beatings from guards (surveillance cameras caught an inmate tied to a restraining chair and beaten to death by fourteen guards, because the prison screw's spirit animal is the cowardly but vicious hyena), hanging. Hundreds of sex assault cases, including dozens of children, went uninvestigated because Arpaio waned his deputies focused on harassing beaners. He's cruel just for the sheer joy of inflicting cruelty on those he deems deserving.

He's a bastard through and through; the reason Arpaio's mother died giving birth to him is that she wanted to get away from what she knew from the start would be a shameful legacy. When he does finally kick off, he should be dragged into the desert and left for the vultures.

The good news hidden in this is that the acceptance of a pardon is by definition an admission of guilt for purposes of civil suits. That means that this 85-year-old shitbird may very well spend the rest of his rotten life having damages incurred against his personal assets. Maricopa County has paid out somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million over the years from his abuses and excesses, which provides a number of precedents for future civil suits on Arpaio personally. I hope they nail his greasy ass to the wall. It's a goddamned shame he won't do any time in his own jail. Let him sit in a 135-degree tent in pink underwear. It won't happen, but watching him die broke and harassed would be some consolation.

The more troublesome aspect of this, of course, is that the pardon is not just a middle finger to libtards, it's a middle finger to the rule of law. It's a clear, deliberate expression of the emperor's contempt for any law or rule or norm that runs counter to what this doddering psychopath wants at a given moment. These are classic moves out of the dictator's playbook -- threatening the media, encouraging fascists by equating them with their opponents (really, people who hate nazis are as bad as nazis?), doing absolutely nothing to reach out to the majority of the population who did not vote for him, consolidating and rallying his base support.

The reason he got this far is because no one in any position of power or responsibility took his insurgency seriously enough to smack it down before it could gather momentum. That has changed; people from the Capitol to the street are slowly but surely starting to mobilize. There are people who want their country back. We'll see if there are enough of them. In the meantime, maybe we all need to mass-mail as many congress-critters as possible that they need to step up and resist this asshole as well.

Thirteenth Step

[Post title because I'm currently listening to the Perfect Circle album of that title, but it's also relevant to the topic at hand.]

Since Hillary Clinton's account of last year's fiasco is coming out imminently, so are the virtual pitchforks and torches (tiki and otherwise) in response. It is rapidly becoming another Smug-ageddon between rump factions of erstwhile Clintonistas and ever-hopeful Berniebros, with the latter group wond'ring aloud why she refuses to kindly fuck off already, and the former group offering to kindly help the Berniebros over the nearest cliff.

As someone who voted enthusiastically for Sanders in the primaries, and nearly as enthusiastically for Clinton in the general election, let me offer some perspective in good faith. I don't begrudge at all Clinton knocking out a book as a commercially viable catharsis, for her and perhaps for many of us. Some are annoyed about the "timing," as if that were under her control, or that there would ever be an ideal time under the current reign of error.

In fact, I would say the timing of the book's release is damn near ideal. Consider the following:

• Senatorial leather gimp Addison M. "Turtle Fucker" McConnell may be heading into a death embrace over Reichenbach Falls with Emperor Snowflake. McConnell and soulless henchman "Better Call" Paul Ryan thought they had this one in the bag, that they could steer this "outsider" doofus into doing their bidding. Now it is starting to dawn on them that a bull in a china shop just means a lot of broken plates and bullshit everywhere. Hoocoodanode? At any rate, McConnell is "privately" (in other words, leaking to the Fucking New York Times) musing that Combover Caligula's dumbfuckery is bad for the Goopers' main business at hand, which is always and forever separating working people from their money and handing over to rich assholes who use it to keep score against each other.
• Apparently Congress will only be in session for twelve days next month, because it's only the end of the fucking fiscal year, and major portions of the budget, including the debt ceiling, are still being figured out (in other words, deciding whose poopchute the thing gets rammed into without lube). Herr Kanzler wants some money set aside to start that wall that the Meskins were are going to pay for. It is safe to assume at this point that his master plan is to get them to pay for it by hiring a Mexican contractor to build it, and then not pay them.
• Hillary Clinton, whose political career is truly over and done with, and who now has no conceivable thing to lose, is going to flood the zone promoting her book. She has absolutely no incentive to hold back with her opinions, and has already leaked a piece describing Shithead as a "creep." Oooh, shots fired!

At the heart of the criticism of Clinton (I think) is really the sinking feeling that the Democratic Party has failed to provide a sense of direction -- and more importantly, a new central figure around which to rally and take cues from. Patience (certainly not one of my strong suits) is the key here; yes, it's frustrating that the Dems are content to play prevent defense for now, but all eyes are on the guy down the road setting fire to his ammo shed, and there's not much they could say to draw attention anyway.

We all have this sensation of time accelerating lately, because that seems to be the overall dynamic anymore, and because none of us are used to having to worry several times a day what the occupant of the White House is up to. The corollary to that psychological effect is that it seems like it's taking forever to get rid of this motherfucker. And it is.

But he hasn't gotten a single meaningful thing done, and doesn't look to in the near future. His sole accomplishment in seven months is filling a SCOTUS seat that was stolen for him by the aforementioned turtle fucker. No health-care bill; no wall; no tax reform, as we head into the holiday season. That means that by the time he gives his first State of the Onion speech [rolls eyes], he will have exactly jack-fucking-shit to hang his hairpiece on. And that's only if Bob Mueller's team hasn't nailed his fat fucking diapered ass to the wall by then.

The Dem dynamic since November has been a weird muddle of contrition and bewilderment -- they're very sorry about fucking the dog, but they're not sure why, or even what breed the dog was. It's very difficult to apologize for something when you're not sure what you did, or if you disagree with people who tell you what you did wrong.

No matter, what's done is done. They need to move on, and do so with deliberation. The first thing they need to do is abandon this limp-dick "when they go low, we go high" bullshit. FUCKING STOP ALREADY. Look, people are pissed off, and not entirely without some justification, and many of them cannot articulate exactly why. They need catharsis. This is true on both sides.

It doesn't mean you send out Gavin Newsom (or whoever) to recite a laundry list of made-up anecdotes, like Snowflake. That's the beauty of it -- the Democrats don't have to lie at all, they can just point out the ugly truth. But they have to pack a punch now. They need to step up when Snowflake lies and flat-out say, That's a goddamned lie. He keeps lying. Why do people let this asshole keep lying about every motherfucking thing?

They need to look at this like it's a straight-up marketing campaign. Who are our rock stars for next year? Let's get them on the Sunday morning jerk-off chat shows, as much as possible! Get Kirsten Gillibrand (or the aforementioned Newsom) in there to tune up Poor Ol' Straight Talk or Huckleberry Closetcase or whatever dipshit warhorse they haven't shipped off to the glue factory just yet. Get an experienced media presence like Al Franken in there to fuck some people up with his impeccable timing. Let loose the House dogs, like Seth Moulton and Adam Schiff.

That's a big part of the frustration of the anti-Hillary crowd. It's not that they literally need her to disappear from public life, it's that they need to see where the party is going, and who's going to lead it forward. Someone under retirement age, for fuck's sake. That is not ageism, it's the simple fact that technology is altering the workforce and careerism much faster than our system has kept up, and there are some serious tectonic changes coming that Grandma Feinstein has no clue about, unless her great-grandchildren have told her about it during Murder, She Wrote reruns.

Seriously, I do not for the life of me understand the inner workings of the Democratic Party. They could crush these fuckers with a modest amount of coordination -- one or two personalities and messages to rally around, and they could kick this outhouse over. The Republicans, despite their numerical dominance, are on the verge of electoral collapse. The health-care fiasco proved it; they had seven years to come up with anything, and they thumbed their dicks. They're a shoddy operation, they're on the ropes.

Finish them off, this time for good. Sweep the knee, you fucking pussies. Either that, or recognize that both parties are good and dead, nothing more than shambling husks that don't know it yet, and adjust your social network strategy accordingly.

In Other News

Best wishes to compadre Outis Niemand, as he recuperates from a nasty bout of pancreatitis. These things happen in threes (that just science, folks), so I'll be looking over my shoulder for some time.

Dwindling Swindle

Again, by all means, the fake news media should keep up the rigorous fact-checking and parsing of every detail. It won't matter to his diehards, because they're morons and proud of it, but it matters to him, because he watches CNN, and he can't stand it when they call him on his LIES.

But what gets under his orange leather even more is when it's pointed out that far fewer people show up to listen to him whine -- and if you have the stomach, go find one of the streams of last night on YouTube and give it a spin. JESUS H. CHRIST, WHAT A FUCKING WHINING CRYBABY. It was 107 degrees in Phoenix yesterday (but it's a dry hate, ba-dum-bum); save everyone the headache and just buy some billboards saying THEY WON'T STOP PICKING ON MEEEEEE!

Biggest. Goddamned. Whiny. Bitch. Ever.

I can't imagine that he's a poker player, much less a competent one. He bluffs like old people fuck -- like he fucks. He has way too many tells -- verbal tics, hand gestures, body language, facial expressions. Even an average player like myself would fleece him out his decrepit Batman tower in about an hour.

Because he broadcasts to the world what angers him. He did it literally on his inauguration day, the day we for some reason decided to give this fat fucking assclown an official investiture, and not do the right thing and ship his ass to Russia where he belongs. And what angers him the most is people not validating his self-conception of Awesome Perfect Greatness. People not showing up in droves to listen to him whine for an hour about how hard governing is and how unfair the lying liars of the lying media are for recording the words he says and playing them back. Waaahhhhh!

So to go along with the fact-checking, the media would do well to check the venue capacity stats, talk to the fire marshals, get a reliable attendance vs. capacity comparison, and include that level of specificity in the article. He seems unable to go more than a few weeks now without traveling to a safe space and sucking up to the tardcore base. Include a count every time, every venue he hits. He'll either stop or snap. Either way, 'murka wins, to the extent that it actually deserves to.

But from photographic evidence, it looks like they were at half-capacity at best in the building, and outside the venue counter-protesters outnumbered supporters at a level comparable to Boston a few days ago. And even some of them were paid shills, because everything with these people is projection. They assume the counter-protesters are paid by George Soros because that's what they do.

But one of the most basic facts the media can provide is a reliable estimate of attendance. It's important. Lamely saying "thousands" tells people absolutely nothing. How many thousands? Two? Ten? Fifty? And how many "thousands" does the venue hold, did they pack the hall or was it only twenty or forty percent?

Qualitative analysis is all well and good, but ultimately pointless. We know he's going to lie about fucking everything. Bokay? This is never in question; it was never in doubt before he got into politics. He's been a fucking liar about every little thing since the dipshits in the New York media started taking his calls. It's important to chronicle and archive the lies for posterity, so future generations can see the abject nonsense some of our fella 'murkins marinated in, but for the time being, listing the lies won't move anyone on the dial. Everyone on both sides already knows he's full of shit; the difference is that his base is fine with it, so long as it pisses off the right people.

At one point in the Phoenix rally, Snowflake gestured out toward the media cameras across the hall, filming the podium, claiming that they wouldn't film the rally, that the lights were going off. The audience looked across at lights that remained as they were, not going off, and they jeered all the same. They are all in, fully vested, full-throated accomplices in what will be looked back on as a slow-motion crime, or a gathering muck ball of a million little crimes.

This is the logical outcome of people who become cult members with a narcissistic asshole as its center of gravity. Some of them will literally never back out, no matter what, because his failure is also their failure, and because they can't own the hard fact that they failed long before they ever cast their sorry lot with this moronic charlatan.

So the qualitative analysis only gets you so far. It's the quantitative analysis, even the modest perspective lent by actual numbers versus capacity, that will give us information, and let us know that whatever spell he cast on these fuckin' morons, it's finally starting to wear off on at least some of them.

Let 'em Eat Fake

Rather than dumping on Mrs. Munchin for down-punching a peasant on her Instagram feed, maybe we should thank her for her candor, at least in that she doesn't try to conceal her inflated sense of self-regard.

Of the many things I fail to apprehend about Today's Ute (or society at large, for that matter), it is the idea that anyone would "follow" someone like Louise Linton, or any of the Kardashians, etc., in their virtualized adventures. These are people who, as the old joke goes, are famous for being well-known; i.e., no one knows what they do because they don't actually do anything.

It's easy to understand why such useless, charisma-free z-list personalities would indulge the urge to turn every waking moment into a brand-building calisthenic, but it's incomprehensible why a rational, sentient human who presumably has their own life to lead would bother with this sort of nonsense.

Drumpferdämmerung; Or, Appetite for Distraction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.