War Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derp Throat; Or, The Best People

Interesting parlor game going about that Vichy Times op-ed, no? The smart money seems to be on it coming out of Pence's shop, but Charles Pierce floated an interesting possibility that it could be Kellyanne Conway or her husband.

Doesn't matter, of course, so long as once the person is identified, they are never hired for anything beyond burger-flipper again in their worthless lives. It's difficult to imagine the warped conceit of a person who can pretend that they are "serving the country" by sabotaging a chief executive they know to be unstable and incompetent.

Whoever the worthless cocksucker is, they seriously should be shunned by all, rendered completely unemployable forever. They are loyal only to their own gutless careerism, whatever they deluded themselves with after writing that thing. It's one of the most chickenshit things I've ever seen in my life, but it's entirely in keeping with the sort of people he would hire, and the sort of people who would be willing to work for him.

Obviously, in a much broader sense, this latest episode, as well as the Bob Woodward quotes that flooded the zone on Tuesday, show conclusively the monumental ineptitude that has always been the trademark of this preposterous grifter. The person who wrote that thing could literally be any of about a hundred or two hundred people. Huckabilly Sanders and Stephen Miller seem to be about the only two people you could rule out.

The White House is a snake pit, the administration is little more than an ongoing human centipede. It could be just about anybody. That tells you everything you need to know about the "best people" he selects. He selects people like himself:  dumb, narcissistic, marginally competent at best, willing to lie instrumentally, loyal to nothing and nobody.

This summer has been hilarious and highly entertaining, even as it's gotten weirder than any of us could have imagined. As I've mentioned before, I stopped being worried months ago, when it became clear that they are all even more incompetent than anyone could have supposed. These people could fuck up a shit sandwich.. The walls are closing in, and they are all turning on each other, and now this stupid, self-serving op-ed is going to set off an internal administrative massacre (sadly not a real massacre).

They are all just fucking awful, every last one of them. If they had any goddamned self-respect, they would commit ritual seppuku in the Rose Garden, for a live news feed. As it is, their professional lives will be ruined, so there is some karma. Stock up on some popcorn and hope that the tsunami comes through, because that will be the final nail in this shitshow.

In the meantime, this is a real body blow, and it is important for the cultists to see that rather than the libtard pwnage they thought they had, they really just have universal ridicule and revulsion. No one's scared of Fat Manbaby, sorry. We're all just tired of the four-year-old throwing an endless temper tantrum in the cereal aisle, but also waiting for that magic moment when either mom flips out and whips his ass finally, or he pulls off his pants and starts smearing his shit everywhere.

But yeah, that whole "piss off the libs" thing has passed, just to the point of strengthening the resolve to vote an end to this nonsense, once and for all. Hope it was worth it, assholes.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Rimrock Auto Arena in Billings, Montana, capacity 12,000. Depending on whom you prefer to believe, either there were about 10,000 of the usual cult losers wound up to rock-concert excitement, or an indeterminate number of bozos who received his requisite Putin praise with lukewarm enthusiasm.

And so it goes. It seems like the Deadline link provides a truer picture of the scene, a jabbering dunce decompensating before our eyes, but the Great Falls Tribune blowjob provides a truer portrait of the cultists and how they think, how they access and process the "information" and "facts" that they use to make their fantastic decisions to support this....this goddamned thing.

Debbie Robbins, too, ignored any negative news and said people opposing the president are making fools of themselves.

Robbins, 67, voted for the first time to vote for Trump. Her registration didn’t go through so she drove 60 miles to same-day register and vote in Dillon, the county seat.

She and Mike only wish he could be in office for 20 years.

She said the limited coverage of Medicare is a major concern.

Mike Robbins said Trump has an ambitious agenda and needs support to get it accomplished.

“We know how important it is to be united,” he said.

I almost wish that turd could stick around for a while, just so these dipshits could get the full brunt of the awesome health care reform their lord and master is, um, well, I guess there's something in the works, right?

But really, this is like the ultimate Cletus safari, these morons. It's not just the complete epistemic closure, the empty recitation of alternate facts. It's the knowledge of what they're waiting around all day in line for like a bunch of saps, because their time is worth nothing, their lives have nothing going on. I can't think of any politician I would have waited six hours in the sun to see. Especially a politician that just says the same three or four things over and over and over again: wow, I'm so great, no one is greater than me; everyone who disagrees with me is a traitor and a liar; everyone is so unfair, very unfair; did I mention how fucking perfect and awesome I am?

Seriously, these are people with absolutely nothing going on. They have utterly failed at the business of life. If they weren't so despicable they'd be pitiable. They don't seem to get that they are just as ridiculous as their empty hero. As it is, the fervent hope that they get everything they voted for -- good and hard, of course -- burns as bright as ever.

Elegy for Charles Ellis Schumer (Sad Trombone Accompaniment)

In this brief post at LGM, Paul Campos captures succinctly everything currently wrong with the country's political mechanisms in general, and the Democratic Party in particular. Deconstruct the dynamic in play there:  the Senate minority leader is pointing to a routine cynical column by a center-right (or perhaps in the current parlance, "alt-center") columnist writing for the most manicured poodle in the corporate media kennel.

Even the lede in the tweet ("John McCain knew that we are better than [Clownstick].") is at least implicitly false. We have no idea what exactly McCain knew or thought along that line with any real specificity. But with his slow demise and now his passing, McCain has been appropriated by the commentariat as this hybrid of The Last Honest Man and the avatar of What We Have All Lost.

That's bullshit, and worse yet, it is clearly more about the professional scriveners and their official catechisms than about John McCain. Once again, McCain proved to be a more complex figure than can comfortably fit into their hero-worship narratives. He wasn't afraid to call out the emperor as an asshole, but aside from one notable exception, he rarely bucked with any real impact.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Almost forgot -- the useless orange tub of shit that festers in the office of the country's chief executive had another gathering of the dumpalos, this time at the Ford Center in Evansville, Indiana. The official capacity of the venue is listed at 11,000, but according to the local newspaper of record, the use of a smaller stage enabled them to squeeze in another 500 losers.

The cost to taxpayers for each of these events will probably never be itemized or even made public. No doubt the M.O. is the same as during the campaign, where he would barnstorm these shithole towns, make empty promises to reimburse for law enforcement and cleanup costs incurred, and leave the local yokels holding the proverbial bag. Serves 'em right.

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.

Who Is America?

Slow holiday weekend, and I fully plan on indulging myself by doing as little as possible -- finishing up a couple of books, playing guitar, knocking back a beer or three, maybe doing a little writing (political and otherwise). So we're getting a free weekend of Showtime, featuring the Season 1 marathon of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest project.

Baron Cohen is a bit of a mixed bag for me; at times his cringe-inducing brand of comedy can be uproariously funny, at other times merely gross. Who Is America? fills both bills adequately right from the start, opening the first episode with SBC's southern conservative journalist character (complete with motorized scooter, natch) baiting Bernie Sanders, following that with a segment featuring SBC playing a paroled prisoner who "paints" with his own feces and semen, pitching his "art" to a credulous gallery owner.

I guess I'd give it a qualified recommendation -- there are few genuine surprises to be had, but that is probably in part due to the fact that we now live in a world where truth isn't truth, a demented old bastard runs the country, and nothing is really surprising anymore, primarily because we've all been forced to confront how said demented old bastard got into office. Reminding us that there are morons and assholes among us, many of them in positions of power, is no longer funny or cathartic. Irony suffered a mortal blow after 9/11, but now it's dead and ground into sausage.

That said, clearly a lot of work has gone into this, mainly in the variety of characters SBC has crafted to gull the dupes into revealing themselves. It's worth watching just for that, though again some segments are more worthy than others. Your mileage will vary, and you enter at your own risk.

One of the more relatively innocuous segments occurs in the second episode, where some interchangeable Bachelor dingbat gets tricked by the decadent Italian billionaire photographer character into doing a PSA for child soldiers. [rolls eyes] Yes, you read that right.

What makes this slightly more interesting is when a teevee critic decides to get in on the hijinks, and decry the seeming fish-in-a-barrel quality of the segment:

What is this segment trying to satirize, exactly? That a woman who’s already been used as a tool in multiple TV ratings ploys would make a fool of herself again? That she’s absurdly compliant with the demands of celebrity, to the point that she’ll go along with any script she’s given? At its most damning, the segment is a swipe at how happy Olympios is to be on television, and what exactly she’s willing to do for publicity.

....

But the segment does raise questions about Who Is America? and its goals. Why is this reality star a target? Why is the assumption that it’s hilarious to watch a powerful man manipulate a fame-hungry, clueless younger woman?

Those are an awful lot of questions that fail to see the (to me, anyway) rather obvious point of it all: what sort of "culture" routinely makes these random idiots famous and wealthy? Obviously, from movie B-girls to music and sports groupies, the entertainment industry has always used young women willing to do anything (and I mean anything) for what? Fifteen minutes of....well, it's not exactly fame, but let's call it attention of a sort.

The girl in question struck a very dim glimmer of memory, of someone perhaps seen in the "Entertainment" section of the Google News aggregator, a section that becomes increasingly irrelevant as it is overtaken by the children and stepchildren of one of O.J. Simpson's lawyers in his trial a quarter-century ago for murdering his wife and her friend. [Ah, fame! -- Ed.]

And indeed, Corinne Olympios first achieved the glories of name recognition when she caused the dating show she was on to be investigated for allegations of sexual misconduct, when Olympios got one of the male contestants to perform oral sex on her.

You want the epitome of meta-cynicism, folks, there you have it -- a cynical audience watching a cynical exercise in which cynical idiots pretend to be competing for love, filmed and edited to be as cynically manipulative as possible, and to encourage moral judgments from the audience. I've always considered myself a hopelessly cynical bastard, but this sort of shit is a depth beyond me.

Is it possible that that is at least part of what Sacha Baron Cohen is trying to send up here, using a character that is a crude, vulgar distillation of the gaudy Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless bullshit that captivated American couch potatoes for years? That's yet another level of cynicism that we've all just taken for granted for decades -- this idea that people who actually work for a living would like nothing more than to have their noses rubbed in the mostly unearned and inherited excesses of tacky swells and net-worth assholes.

In fact, that might have been the one way for SBC to top the routine meta-cynical excesses of the Bachelorette types, and the rotten, soulless anti-culture that's sprung up around it. There is a clear cultural connection between that sort of mindless Ow My Balls! bullshit, and its current political by-products. Maybe the teevee critic's error was in assuming that Baron Cohen was only interested in duping the Roy Moore types, and not thinking that maybe people like Corinne Olympios also participate in something that is ultimately harmful to the mental health of the people who are hooked on it.

When everything turns into a cheesy wink and a nod, a joke that we're all in on but continue to beat into the ground long after it stopped being funny or interesting, it can't be too surprising when we eventually get what we have now. Random jerkoffs with no discernible talent "monetizing" their side hustles on Instagram and YouTube, hoping to parlay that into some "reality" teevee bullshit, and thence into some Kardashian-Jenner quadrant of Satan's asshole, pimping collagen creams and taint waxes and such like.

Given the longstanding prevalence of this nonsense, it makes a certain perverted sense that a fake tycoon with fake hair and skin and a third trophy wife, a man who brags that he shits in a gold toilet in a marble tower, would be received by a sufficient number of certifiable dipshits as an authentic hero of the working class.

Ex Type Thing

It normally wouldn't be worth the time to read, much less repost, gossip-column bullshit from the third ex-wife of that vile fuckhead Ghouliani. It's hard to imagine what sort of person could possibly give a shit what such a person has to say about much of anything; listening to someone who took up with a married man with a long history of cheating has no right to whine about him when he inevitably steps out on her. You knew what you were getting into, honey.

What is interesting is that she strongly implies that Rudy's a fall-down, starting-to-pickle-his-aging-brain alky. Which would explain his summer of embarrassment, trying lamely over and over to get his story straight, never quite getting it right no matter how many tries the Fixed Noise flying monkeys give him.

And it also fits perfectly with the larger, greater pattern for the fucktards currently lawn-darting the country and sucking its blood -- not just blatant cronyism, but inept cronyism:  the dingbat daughter and failson-in-law; the two failsons-by-blood; the cabinet full of dipshits and dweebs and money-grubbing slime. The rest of Clownstick's lawyers come off just as stupid and venal as the "man" himself, so Count Drunkula fits right in with the rest of the lot. It's dipshits all the way down.

The end of the article is the cherry on the cake:

Estimates peg Rudy’s net worth at around $45 million, and to their infinite chagrin, his enablers cannot enable him now. The president’s lawyer doesn’t have a prenup.

Perfect. I hope she takes him to the cleaners, and then makes a large donation to Kirsten Gillibrand's and/or Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential run.

Verbum Dei

One of the more tedious ongoing narratives in the current mediasphere is the supposed rending of garments in the Catholic church over (surprise!) the roughly ten-millionth "revelation" of pederast priests raping and abusing children. That it's a subject yet again for "discussion" merely reiterates once again the utter paucity of ideas, of clear thought, of individuals in free societies deciding to once and for all during their brief existences on the mortal plane of flesh and futility to assert their own rights.

There are few good things about religion, any religion, and they're generally outweighed by all the bad things. But perhaps the best thing about religion, even in a frequently puritanical country like the United States, is that it's purely voluntary. No one makes any adult go to church, any church, and certainly no one forces anyone to stay in any church that preys on their children and their wallets.

No matter what this or any pope says about his internal anguish over these vile events, the prime directive of that position is to preserve the organizational structure, to do nothing that would threaten the authority of the hierarchy, and its sacred ability to prise cash from it eternal customers. That's not going to change, no matter how "progressive" the current pope's views are on gays and atheists and such. The job description remains what it's always been for two millennia.

The good news is that most of the major western churches have been losing younger customers, who simply aren't sufficiently interested or motivated to join a club with dues they can't pay and rules they won't obey. Especially in 'murka, where self-help books and lifestyle gurus function as the secular religion of the would-be upwardly mobile. The "solace" that religion can provide pales in comparison to the possibility of consumerist redemption in the temple of the holy kardashian.

So the dilemma for the spiritually conflicted is actually fairly simple:  either you support this, with your dollars and your commitment, or you don't. Rationalizing with "times have changed" bunkum won't help, not after the next eventual revelation, and the one after that, and so on. If they want to be Charlie Brown to the pope's Lucy, and keep on believin' that this time they'll get to kick the football, they are welcome to it. But the rest of us don't care and don't want to know.

Then again, like all "news" stories, the article and those like it aren't meant to reach or inform the ordinary reader, the peon with plenty of opinions but no power whatsoever. What we think of as news is really just the amalgamation of elites talking to each other, and filtered out to the masses as manufactured, pre-approved consent. Whether the priest wears a collar and speaks Latin, or wears a suit and spews state-sponsored bullshit, the result is the same.

Company Man

Well, it's the end of the line for the Straight Talk Express, and as we all brace ourselves for a weeklong onslaught of corporate media b-roll hagiography, it helps to keep John McCain's legacy in a balanced perspective. Erik Loomis at LGM has a pretty thorough rundown of McCain's career, warts and all.

And you know, turns out it really is mostly warts. I've written in this here jernt countless times over the years of McCain's genuine sacrifice in the Hanoi Hilton, and it would take a lot to offset that level of service -- regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War itself, and of McCain's job of dropping death on poor rural villagers. But a thorough review of McCain's personal life upon return from Vietnam, and especially of his actual record as a senator, shows that if it doesn't offset his brutal torture, he sure as hell gave it a shot.

To be fair, McCain does actually seem to have been mostly a right-wing reactionary by temperament. So that part at least wasn't cynical. And Loomis chronicles McCain's misdeeds quite well in the link, so I won't reiterate them.

Where McCain succeeded mostly was in burnishing his (admittedly respectable) quals as a tortured combat veteran, and in sussing out the very same thing that his arch-nemesis Fuckface Von Clownstick, Grand Imperator of the Empire of Dirt, First of His Name, figured out about marketing oneself -- the media are surprisingly willing to take your calls if you want to jump in front of their cameras and spout just about any old thing. McCain was funny and quick on his feet, and adept at exploiting that mediot weakness. Press the Meat would have had McCain on every fucking Sunday in a reserved luxury recliner, if he'd been available. And you can be sure McCain knew it.

So it's hard to just dump on McCain for being a bit of a bastard over the years. Like anyone, he had his flaws, he just happened to be better at using his personal history to conceal or override those flaws And most of what he did and stood for, he was quite sincere about. In the end, it was his most nakedly cynical move -- selecting the jabbering dunce Sarah Palin as his running mate -- that undid him.

We can remember John McCain for everything, good and bad. He willingly took more physical punishment than most people would or could, and he paid a massive physical (and no doubt mental and spiritual) price for it. He also made a reasonably good-faith attempt to atone for his campaign-finance corruption with the McCain-Feingold bill. And his midnight vote to save Obamacare last year probably saved many lives, and gave the finger to a lot of people who thoroughly deserved it.

And yet. Palin's selection as running mate accelerated the empowerment of the barrel-bottom dimbulb GOP base, which we are all now paying the price for, and will for decades to come, probably. And after McCain announced his cancer as terminal, as he vocally decried the perfidious machinations of the aforementioned Clownstick and his satanic minions, McCain could easily have made one last effort for his country, one that would have required no sacrifice at all, as he was already on his way out the door.

He could have stood with the Democrats on any number of recent issues, and preserved a 50-50 stalemate, instead of (like his fellow Arizona senator, Jeff Flake) indulging in cheap grandstanding about his damned principles, and then voting right along with this paper tyrant he and Flake kept squawking about.

McCain was much more establishment hack than gutsy maverick, but even there it's useful to observe how that weird dichotomy persisted, and to understand the mediocracy's role in perpetuating that myth. Politicians -- at least ones that stay in office -- are as much marketer as policy maker or anything else, and so if a politician is able to use "news" programs to effectively market transparent myths and falsehoods for decades, it is more an indictment of the media than of the politician who figured out how to use the media. That's not victim-blaming, that's noting that the game is rigged, and the refs are lousy at their jobs.

But whatever. Like many before him and many to come, McCain was wrong about many things, but as the saying goes, he was wrong within normal parameters. He was a true character -- pugnacious, funny, somehow managing to be self-deprecating and smarmy in the same sentence at times. He provided a solid contrast to the emotionally retarded thug sitting in the White House, and the cadre of feckless, gutless enablers on Capitol Hill.

The cultists think Clownstick is some kind of tough guy, that he's an alpha dog. Bullshit. McCain was a bona-fide tough guy, and it's a sad irony that so many of the pussy cultists prefer to piss on the grave of a mostly honorable man, in the service of someone who doesn't have an honorable bone in his fat orange body.

We wish he had been a better man, and done more good things that he could easily have done, but we'll also miss the guy. Rest in peace, Senator.

You Can't Be Neutral On a Moving Train

I think Steve is on to something here, that the one thing that could make Clownstick's base start to turn on him is if they felt like he wasn't owning libtards sufficiently. I would (and previously have, in various iterations) suggest that he really isn't doing that anymore, not that he ever really was. It just hasn't been adequately conveyed to them as such yet.

Don't bother reading or even skimming the soi-disant conservatard rags, your National Review and Weekly Standard and such like. We all know full well that your average basetard does not read such twaddle -- indeed, they clearly don't read any books or publications at all, preferring instead to get their talking points from whatever misspelled meme in their Facebook feed that rings their bell.

Strategically, it helps to step back and understand the base for precisely what they are, in as close to an ideological sense as possible. True, there is no orthodox ideology with these folks; it really does revolve around either whatever they think will annoy the librul caricatures that permanently squat in their fever dreams, or whatever jingoistic nonsense that strokes their outrage boner.

And so while they consider themselves "conservatives," what they really are is reactionaries. There is a difference, and it's an extremely important one. And among the cruder, more emotional and anti-intellectual of that breed, it's not even just about rolling the clock back, but about the fight itself. The struggle, the kampf, the jihad. The holy effort against the minions of the evil Other.

Ultimately they become identified -- and most critically, identify themselves -- by their opposition to things. What are they for, any of them? Beyond the ridonkulous spray-tan glow of their cult leader, they really aren't for anything. They just have an idea, carefully nurtured and watered by constant exposure to the UV rays of Fixed Noise, of what "liberals" are "like," and what "they" "want." All without ever actually asking or listening to or even just observing an actual liberal.

Cruz Control

This GQ article is a fine rundown of the Texas Senate race. Just read it, and soak in all the Rafael Cruz-y goodness. He's sticking with that "this human suit is getting itchy" schtick of his. Whatever works, fucko.

Seriously. The US Senate is teeming with assholes. Mitch "the Bitch" McConnell. Orrin "Saint Insufferable" Hatch. Marco "Pool Boy" Rubio. Rand "Serdechniy Droog" Paul. Obviously there are others. But Cruz manages to stand out even among that crowd of losers as a gaping asshole.

Cruz's worst traits are actually of the more subtle, nuanced type, but just as telling as (for example) McConnell's open-court poaching of two SCOTUS seats in less than two years. But you decide for yourselves which of these two salient Cruz facts paints him in a worse light:

• During the 2016 campaign, Clownstick called Cruz's wife ugly and insinuated that Cruz's father (who, to be fair, is both certifiably insane and, like his son, a gaping asshole) was involved in the JFK assassination. Cruz still sucks Clownstick's mini-cheeto every chance he gets, probably because he thinks he'll eventually get a SCOTUS appointment. Or maybe because he just has no self-respect. Does it really matter?
• As a child, Cruz sent money to Jesse Helms. Read that again, aloud if need be. AS A CHILD, RAFAEL EDWARD "TED" CRUZ SENT MONEY TO JESSE FUCKING HELMS. Maybe Cruz's whackjob evangelist dad made him sleep in the yard with the dog or something. But seriously, imagine the sort of "child" that sends money to a monster like Jesse Helms, instead of, I dunno, buying comic books and candy bars and the sorts of things Earth children buy with their money.

There's something deeply wrong with someone like that. He should consider himself lucky he's running against Beto O'Rourke, and not someone like, well, me. Because it's fucking Texas, where men are men and sheep are scared. And I can assure you, at every goddamn whistle stop I hit, I'd make damn sure to pick some random middle-aged gent out of the crowd, bring him up on stage for a minute, and it'd go something like this:

HEYWOOD J.:  Sir, can I ask you your name?
RANDOM MAN:  Rusty Shackleford.
HEYWOOD J: We've never met before, is that correct, sir?
SHACKLEFORD: Nope, never met.
HEYWOOD J.:  Mr. Shackleford, are you married?
SHACKLEFORD:  Yes, I am.
HEYWOOD J.:  Now, this might seem like a silly question but, do you love your wife?
SHACKLEFORD:  Yes, I do.
HEYWOOD J.:  What about your folks, do you love and honor and respect your parents?
SHACKLEFORD (growing concerned):  Well, of course.
HEYWOOD J.:  Yes sir, just establishing your bona-fides. This is Texas, and so I know you love your wife and your parents. So Mr. Shackleford, if another man disrespected your wife and your parents, what might be your reaction?
SHACKLEFORD (smiling, but also frowning):  Well, I guess I'd have to kick his ass. (chuckles)
HEYWOOD J.:  I expect you would, sir, as any decent man would. So what would you think of a man who called another man's wife ugly, and said his father killed JFK, and that second man not only didn't do anything about it, but tried to suck up to that first man who slandered his family? Now, we know how you'd feel about the first man, but how about the second man, the guy who had his wife and father insulted, and still wanted to be friends with the man who insulted them?
SHACKLEFORD (getting confused and a bit angry):  Well, shit -- sorry -- but that don't make any sense, what you're saying. You mean, the first guy calls the second guy's wife a pig, and then the first guy says the second guy's dad's a killer, and the second guy not only don't do nothin' about it, but he tries to pal up with that first guy?
HEYWOOD J.:  Yes sir, that's exactly what I'm asking you.
SHACKLEFORD (pauses, measuring his words):  Well, Jesus Christ, I really don't know, 'cause I honestly don't think I've come across someone that....shit, that gutless. Hell, I'd have less respect for the second guy, tell ya the truth. First guy's an asshole, no doubt. But that second guy, don't stand up for his wife or his dad? [widens eyes in exasperation] I'd say he needs a good ass-kickin' too!
HEYWOOD J.:  Yes sir, right you are. Just for the record, the first guy in the story is Donald Trump, and the second guy is Ted Cruz.

And I'd video that shit and put it up on fucking YouTube, over and over and fucking over again. Because it captures the intangibles that motivate people to vote with passion. They don't vote on this or that policy position, especially for a fucking senate seat. They vote on who moves them. And nothing's going to stir their contempt more than a smarmy little asshole who lets a clown shit on the mother of his children, and on his own father, and still fucking sucks up to him like a cheap Port Authority hooker to her pimp in a bad Starsky & Hutch knock-off.

I hope O'Rourke steps up and knocks his fucking block off, because it will win that Senate seat for him. That's the kind of thing that will galvanize the vote.

They Ask Questions

Not to single any particular person out, but this seems to sum up what a lot of people are supposing right about now:

Perfectly reasonable, right? Here's how the Human Centipede Administration answers that question:

The fuck you gonna DO about it, pal?

You have to admit, they're not wrong in that stance. What are you gonna do about it? Vote? Sure, if they allow you to, if Deripaska's Macedonian troll farm hasn't purged you off the rolls, if Brian Kemp hasn't prevented every black person in Georgia from voting against his enlightened despotism.

Recall that we've already had two (yes, two) presidential elections stolen just in this century, right in front of us, and no one did a goddamned thing about it. But just for sport, let's play along and say that you do get to vote and there is a blue tsunami and the Dummycrats reclaim the House and get to a 50-50 split in the Senate. Not enough to impeach and convict, but enough to control the House committees and jam up Traitor Bitch McConnell's daily efforts to skull-fuck what's left of the republic. Okay, now what?

We'll, I've been telling you since day one of this ongoing hemorrhoid what. The cornered rodent currently squatting in the White House will not only continue what he's been doing all along, he'll accelerate, increase, amplify. Because, again (you may have heard this one before):

The fuck you gonna DO about it, pal?

Everything is an act of defiance, a self-stroking of the imperial mini-cheeto, for no greater reason than to prove that he can, and to defy all comers to stop him. Imagine a four-year-old throwing a shit-fit in the cereal aisle for two years running, and a parent that lacks the will to step up and be a fucking parent. The supermarket workers are lamely standing at the edges of the scene asking the parent to take their asshole kid anywhere else, but the workers, the parent, and most importantly the asshole child all know they won't actually step up and shut it down.

And so the show goes on, because in this instant, the child has an entire propaganda network at his beck and call. Imagine -- dozens of supposedly professional careerists, basically just sitting around waiting for their marching orders from a demented old man who spends more time fixing his hilarious hair and skin than actually working.

When this is all over -- indeed, if it ever actually ends and this fucking turd is finally flushed for good -- there will be efforts from some corner to "reconcile," as if flat-out treason can ever be reconciled. At that point, lists need to be drawn up, and every single one of these Fixed Noise fuckers, right down to the kid that puts down the gaffer's tape, needs to be permanently blackballed from any sort of employment anywhere within a mile of government or news. They can all go ply their trade with fifty-cent blowjobs in the abandoned industrial park where the Beemer plant used to be before Cheetolini decided he knew more about tariffs than everyone else.

I'm not hardly kidding about this. If we ever get out of this jam, and if you really want to prevent it from happening again, they all have to pay dearly. Scorched earth. No quarter. What would General Sherman do?

Last Chance for Democracy?

With about seventy-five days and counting until midterms, it's important that voters -- well, let's be honest, Democratic voters -- need to not only be sure that they show up to vote, they need to take a few minutes beforehand and make sure they're still allowed to vote. These motherless fucks are perfectly willing to cheat and steal what they cannot win fairly. That fact should not be surprising.

So it's a good time to repost Ed Burmila's article about that very thing. Check in with your local county elections office, make sure you're still registered, that some teenager in a Macedonian troll farm owned by a Russian oligarch hasn't hacked the rolls and purged you and your neighbors off.

They are scum. They have no principles, no scruples, no reservations at all about stealing this thing. Take a few minutes while you still have time and make sure that they can't. Because if you think the last couple years have been hell, just imagine what it's going to be like if these bastards hang on to power, and assert an electoral mandate to do their worst.

Ladies' Night

Look, no one is ever going to mistake me for Brad Pitt, and I'm sure this will annoy many of my politically correct fellow travelers, but the takeaway from this Daily Crawler puff piece is that the four, um, females (I guess) are most notable for the fact that the Most Femnist Parsdent Evar would be the first to tell everyone how completely homely and unfuckable they are.

To paraphrase an old joke, if symptoms persist after four hours, don't worry about calling your doctor -- just look at that photo.

But the main point is not a joke. If Ronna RMONEY McDaniel takes her name back, or Baghdad Barb Huckabilly Sanders has a come-to-Jebus moment and renounces her ongoing service to Satan, or Kellyanne Conway has to make a decision between her marriage and her "career" as political fluffer, you can bet real cash that at some point, Mister Grab 'em by the Pussy will be sure to drop some sort of "looksist" shade on them. Count on it.

No insult is too small, no detail too petty. He's a doddering, senile piece-of-shit with a tenth-rate intellect and a memory of a concussion victim, but the one thing that asshole tattoos on his perfectly smooth brain is fucking grudges. They used to say that Barbara Bush knew how to hate, but Fuckface Von Clownstick lives for it. And if any of these dingbats turns on him, he will get personal. It's his go-to move.

In the meantime, if women have no problem selling their souls -- as well as other women -- to a serial predator, I have no compunction about calling 'em as I see 'em. They're fugly as sin, inside and out.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

The Charleston Civic Center has a maximum capacity of 13,600. It is not clear how full the arena was for the rally, but since this inbred-rube habitat of a state is still 2:1 in the tank for Commander Combover, it's entirely possible that it was packed, with more dullards milling around the parkin' lot bemoaning their luck. But hey, just being in proximity to his musky greatness has to be intoxicating, amirite?

Given the two shoes dropping yesterday, His Travesty has to be on the verge of a total meltdown, and he certainly had some moments last night. Remember, these stupid rallies are always under the pretense of campaigning for this or that local dipshit's congressional effort. In this case the stop was for whatever sap is running for Joe Manchin's Senate seat. But of course the candidate gets about two minutes to state his case, then he just straps on to daddy's back fat and rides for an hour or so.

There was one clip that's been replayed a few times already this morning, where Shithead repeats the word "collusion" five times in the space of about ten seconds, maybe twenty words total. The last iteration of the c-word is oddly singsong. It's like he thinks the repetition of the word has some sort of magickal property, as if Candyman or Sarah Palin will suddenly appear behind them. Certainly it does seem to lull the cult into their rally trance.

So here's the deal for these retard rally motherfuckers -- this is collusion, or more accurately, conspiracy. Disingenuous snipes about how Mueller's investigation has sprawled, or how Manafort is getting convicted for less-than-recent crimes, will only fool the willingly gulled. It's like they're suddenly finding out that racketeering investigations seldom end where they started, or that a serial-killing thug like Al Capone finally got tapped for tax evasion.

There's this show that's been on the air for some time, in multiple iterations, called Law & Order. Perhaps some of these epistemic-closure doofuses have heard of it.

The continuation of the "lock her up" chant, after all this time, may be the most salient point about the true intellectual level of these crowds. They are collectively dumber than a fucking box of rocks. You wouldn't trust a single one of these dopes to clean your gutters or change the oil on your car.

Not that anyone who would attend one of these rallies would be caught dead reading this blog, but there's always that off chance that one of the bigger librul fish sees this and amplifies this minor observation:

The Republican Party currently controls all three branches of government. If they wanted to initiate an investigation into Hillary Clinton for anything, from Uranium One to Her Emails, they could have started multiple such investigations at any time. At some point it may dawn on at least one (1) of these knuckle-dragging, cousin-fucking gastropods that there's a reason that no such investigation has occurred, or is even being proposed. DURRRR, WHY D'YA THINK THAT IS, GEEN-YUSS?

Hell, it might even dawn on one of our intrepid corporate mediots to ask that very same question, to the rubes and to the key players in this five-monkeys-fucking-a-football clusterfuck of an administration. Just keep asking it, over and over and over until their heads asplode, instead of stenographing his lies and their trained-seal responses to each of them.

It wouldn't hurt to also remind them periodically that the revenue from all that faggy magat swag they sport goes to pay off the skanks their hero porked a decade or so ago. For someone who's such a great deal-maker, he sure seems to pay a lot for sex.

Mouse

The Universe, God --
a celestial cat with infinite paws
      and infinite claws
            an infinite number of mice to play with
a lucky few get away for awhile
the rest are caught and let go,
      caught and let go,
for just long enough to think they're free
      in the light, in the clear
            out in the open air
if only for a moment

until the day, somewhere down the road
after all the hopes and dreams and ambitions
      all the love and sex and passion
            have come and gone
                  stumbled back and gone again
                        this time forever

....the mouse looks up, spent
      Just eat me, fucker.

Don't Do Something, Just Stand There!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synecdoche

Virtually every policy and personnel decision/indecision made by this human centipede of an administration turns out to be a reflection, writ small of the operational principles baked into everything they do (and don't do).

• The Cabinet appointments, aside from Jim Mattis, are clearly put in place to either monetize or implode the department they were selected to run. So you have Betsy DeVos, who would love nothing more than to turn the nation's public education system into a faith-based profit center. Rick Perry, who had no idea what the Department of Energy does, and who vowed to eliminate it in his high-larry-ous 2012 campaign, is in charge of our nukes and our efforts at renewable energy and energy independence. Ben Carson is barely qualified to sort aluminum cans at the ree-cycle center, and he's been put in charge of public housing, much to the thrill of the rentier class.
• Tax cuts for people who already have many lifetimes' worth of money, and price hikes everywhere else to offset the measly thousand bucks some of the peons got as a one-time bonus.
• Unnecessary tariffs and trade wars leading to spontaneous bouts of winning at companies across the country. The one saving grace of that is that the companies seem to be by and large comprised of people who voted for this, so thank the FSM they're getting what they wanted.
• Turning the Veterans' Administration over to his buddies -- his customers -- at the Maga-Lardo. Fucking golf club cronies. The only reason this isn't a scandal is because no one has the ability to keep track of and pay attention to all the mendacity at this point. It's shit all the way down.
• And now this stupid Space Farce thing. Look, there is conceivably a good-faith argument to be for the US to initiate a hegemonic program for space. So why not make that argument, instead of standing there like a jabbering dupe and saying DURRRR SPACE FORCE DURRRR FUCK YOU LIBTARDS over and over again. Could it be that the whole thing is bullshit? Nahhh, not these guys. Jesus H. Christ. Yeah, if you didn't know any better, you might get to thinking that this Space Farce bullshit is just a trillion-dollar defense-contractor scam with a classified budget.

The main thing is that some of these things -- again, especially the Space Farce -- are proposed only as post hoc justifications, after Mister Man gets a wild hair going and starts talking some nonsense. They have to go back and run some PR and photo-ops and pretend like, Oh yeah, this a totally real, legit thing.

Sure, just like the voting fraud committee that tried like hell for months to invent a problem that Shit-for-Brains had tweeted, until they finally had to grudgingly admit that it was even more difficult to invent than Benghazi. There are more examples.

To the extent that these shitheads will be remembered in history books and classes, it will be for singularly distinguishing themselves with this level of consistency -- that everything they ever did or said was at direct cross purposes with their supposed populism, and illustrated how they operate -- empty, venal slogans turned into half-assed policy simulacra.

Failsons of Minarchy

There should be a caption/fanfic contest for this pic:

We'll throw in a few easy ones to get the party started:

• So that's what a muscle feels like!
• He said he'd let me borrow the ass-less chaps.
• If we're pulling a train, does that make me the engine or the caboose?

So what bikes do these realest of 'murkins have to ride, now that His Travesty has expressed his immense displeasure with Hardly-Dangerous? Seriously, did you ever think you'd live to see a public official in high office openly call for a boycott against a private business that crossed him? It'll be interesting to see just how much more winning these saps can take.

I don't think they've had quite enough snapped off in their asses just yet. Another quarter or two oughta do it for some of them; unemployment benefits run out quickly, especially in this wondrous worker's paradise where the unemployment rate is nominally 3.9% (Fake Numbers!), yet real wages are as stagnant as ever.

But yeah, this "Bikers for Clownstick" thing is just too much, as is that "I'm so turned on by all this lea-thurrrr" duckface. Not that there's a danger of some Nochni Volki scenario; these fake rebels either are card-carrying bozos who can't put their fingers together in the dark without a flashlight, or they're suburban assholes with jobs and mortgages and car payments who can't afford to lose their place in the swinger block parties with some weird mayhem-related charge.