This Just In

As we all assumed, HFC has picked Tim Kaine as her running mate. This might bug a few true blue pwoggies out there, but it's the safe bet. Kaine is a pro-choice Catholic from a swing state who speaks fluent Spanish, and is by all accounts a decent egg. Nothing brilliant, but nothing risky, either. Nothing's perfect, and you can bet I'm going to be carping in the coming weeks and months about how HFC's baggage has made what should be a blowout against a preposterous man-baby into a horse race. But it's a damn sight better than what the Suicide Squad has to offer.

[Update 7/23/16 1:15 PM PDT:  Jim Wright advocates eloquently for Kaine's selection. About the only thing I have a problem with is Kaine's support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but that's nowhere near a dealbreaker, especially as Drumpf gets more ignorant, incompetent, and insane by the day. The choice should be clear; you may not like HFC, but she's not incompetent or insane, and there's a real dragon to slay running against her. "More of the same" may not be inspiring, but it stands up pretty well in comparison to "unbridled catastrophe".]

In Logo Parentis

You may have seen the logo for the just-finished Republican National Convention, featuring an elephant trumpeting along the neck of a guitar (although the wise bet would be that the most popular musical instrument in that arena is the accordion), like so:

Of the four nights, I don't think I watched more than ten minutes per night, with the exception of Hair Fuhrer's dirge last night. I can't sit and watch these things, and don't plan to watch more than the bare minimum of the DNC next week either -- like the State of the Union, it's easier to just read the high points later, than to try to keep up between spontaneous chanting and eruptions of applause. I hate that shit.

But after all the reading, and the consistent pattern of "flaming hellscape" rhetoric, culminating in Deadbeat Donald's jeremiad of cherry-picked nonsense, the conclusion is inescapable that a more appropriate logo would have been to have the elephant with a gun in its mouth, ready to splatter its brains out the back of its head.

Who knows, if I get bored enough this coming week (we have a ten-day heat wave hitting the NorCal area, starting tomorrow), I may fire up GIMP and do some graphics work, maybe put up a bumper sticker or button on CafePress. I've been thinking about doing a fundraiser, but I don't want donations, I want to create something that will give people something fun, something to talk about and share with others.

I have some other ideas in this area that will be coming out very soon, as this campaign season really gets rolling. Life hands you this much stupid, might as well make some stupid-ade. Stay tuned.

Cleveland Steamer, Day 4: Make America Dump Again

It's finally over -- and the real nightmare is likely just beginning. Hair Fuhrer went into an epic stemwinder, prolonged by the arena cult's incessant chanting and stopping him with their applause and adulation. Then they lined up at the side of the stage, and took turns coming up and sucking his wee, shriveled old-man cock.

Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Drumpf.

Okay, I made up those last bits, but not by much. This is a cult of personality -- and of anti-personality. They are motivated by an inordinate love for Drumpf, and an equally inordinate hate for HFC. They have no sense of logic or proportion for either.

Drumpf's speech, which was actually semi-competent since he did himself a favor and used a teleprompter, fixated mostly on "law and order" and "safety". This has to be the single biggest gathering of nervous, cringing ninnies ever. It's a fucking wonder they screwed up the courage to come to The Cleve and gather in the arena.

Broken Hearts Are For Assholes

Continuing with the all-Drumpf-all-the-time theme....

In the course of the last year, I've tried to balance the criticism of Drumpf with hopefully equal measures of criticism for his flock. If anything, they collectively are well due for a larger amount of contempt. As Rebecca Traister points out, a sui generis piece of shit like Drumpf doesn't just happen in a vacuum. Part of it, as always, is the ongoing addlement of large swathes of people who have marinated in "reality" teevee dipshittery for the past decade or so. They can no longer think straight, pure and simple.

But a more pernicious idea that must be confronted is the notion that Drumpf has taken over the party against its collective will. This is nonsense. Given its increasingly aggressive and fact-resistant rhetoric over the last couple decades, it was due for a toxic fuckhead to jump in and start driving the short bus. Someone with built-in name recognition just made the takeover that much easier.

News of the Whirled

Holy fucking shit:

During a 45-minute conversation, [Drumpf] explicitly raised new questions about his commitment to automatically defend NATO allies if they are attacked, saying he would first look at their contributions to the alliance. Mr. Trump re-emphasized the hard-line nationalist approach that has marked his improbable candidacy, describing how he would force allies to shoulder defense costs that the United States has borne for decades, cancel longstanding treaties he views as unfavorable, and redefine what it means to be a partner of the United States.

He said the rest of the world would learn to adjust to his approach. “I would prefer to be able to continue” existing agreements, he said, but only if allies stopped taking advantage of what he called an era of American largess that was no longer affordable.

Giving a preview of his address to the convention on Thursday night, he said that he would press the theme of “America First,” his rallying cry for the past four months, and that he was prepared to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada if he could not negotiate radically better terms.

He even called into question whether, as president, he would automatically extend the security guarantees that give the 28 members of NATO the assurance that the full force of the United States military has their back.

To the extent that he has discussed foreign policy at all, Drumpf has repeatedly leaned on his distaste for allied countries "free-riding" on organizational responsibilities and participation. Obama has mentioned his annoyance with this issue as well, as (for example) NATO requires each member nation to spend a minimum 2% of GDP, yet only five member nations (US, UK, France, Greece, Turkey) comply. Of course, since Drumpf doesn't read anything but Page Six and the Enquirer, he wouldn't know that he and Obama actually agree on a very important point, albeit with different results in what should be done about the issue.

So yeah, a lot of these countries are free-riding, but you know what? We keep bases and troops and missiles and nuclear warheads in many of them. We keep troops in South Korea and Okinawa (for which, contrary to yet another of Drumpf's countless lies, Korea and Japan do foot some of the bill) in order to preserve the balance of power (in other words, to guarantee we still call the shots) in the region.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if everyone paid their fair share, they would also expect to have more say in the overall strategy, and rightly so. Sometimes those interests don't align perfectly with our interests. But they paid their share, right? So some of this extra dough on our part is insurance against potential headaches. Part of getting to be the big dog means paying the extra freight.

For someone so obsessed with wealth and its seedier trappings, Drumpf seems completely ignorant of the concept of checkbook diplomacy.

This may actually be the most telling part of the article:

Mr. Trump repeatedly defined American global interests almost purely in economic terms. Its roles as a peacekeeper, as a provider of a nuclear deterrent against adversaries like North Korea, as an advocate of human rights and as a guarantor of allies’ borders were each quickly reduced to questions of economic benefit to the United States.

After enduring over three decades of this fucking asshole's self-regard in the national media, I have to say this encapsulates the core value I identified with Donald Trump way back in 1984, when I first heard of him:  virtually all of his relationships are purely transactional. This does not necessarily mean that he doesn't genuinely like anyone -- I believe he loves his kids, and probably even likes his current wife -- but it is clear that he mostly calibrates his regard for other humans based on the value they provide him and his all-important brand. Hell, Chris Christie and Mike Pence can tell you that.

More and more Drumpf is proving to be a pathologically sick -- as in mentally ill, seriously -- individual, a person whose inner demons, bizarre temperament, and sheer lack of impulse control should automatically disqualify him from any position of actual responsibility. Despite his and his sons' pathetic attempts to cast him as a friend of the working-class dog, Drumpf knows nothing of the world outside of the fancy hotels he jounces to and from, and he certainly has no clue about the longstanding alliances, relationships, arrangements, and histories that underpin the foreign policy of the United States of America.

He was obviously never qualified for any position of governmental power, but after this, it's debatable whether he should be in charge of anything more complicated than a banana stand.
 

Cleveland Steamer, Day 3: The Derpening

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Cleveland Steamer, Day 2: Double Down

Watching the "establishment" GOP hacks half-heartedly try to convince their audience that their golem has merit, between the junior golems' mythologizing of their dear ol' duddad, is nothing short of priceless. Aside from Uday and Marla, Jr., the only one who really seemed to be having fun with this was (of all people) Chris Christie, who of course led the Volkssturm in their nightly Dolchstoßlegende hate chant. Might as well; Fatboy surrendered what was left of his soul months ago. He's literally beneath contempt at this point, simply too low of a worm to bother with.

These people are freaks, fixated on a target created by their fevered imaginations. They will parse every single thing HFC ever did or said via email, whether or not it was classified when she sent it, the ramifications of using a NIPR (unsecured private server) over a SIPR (secured gov't server). Ask them about the 22 million emails that went missing from Cheney regime private server, to cover their tracks over firing eight US attorneys in their movement to politicize the federal prosecutorial system, and their heads will explode as they fumble for a response.

Cleveland Steamer, Day 1: The Purge

I tuned into the first round of the shitshow a couple times very briefly during South Park and Full Frontal commercial breaks, but really, there's no point, is there? Who actually watches these things, much less attends them? At best, it's something to do for the elderly, like watching Lawrence Welk reruns on PBS. If anything, it mostly seems like an activity for the mentally deficient.

Which brings us to the media commentary. Because they are inept thinkers, and sincerely believe that maintaining a face of studious "objectivity" in the face of a monster is the central mission of their job, they pounced on a few dozen clearly plagiarized words. This will be their bright shiny objet du jour, and it will come at the expense of any useful reportage or analysis.

Interview with the Vampire

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Another Day In Paradise

Here we go again, this time in Baton Rouge. Three cops dead, three more injured. The conventional clickbait hot-take would be to ask ponderously, are we headed toward a civil war?, with the combatants and sides rather poorly defined.

The smart take might be to seriously consider the possibility that we are already in one, not formally declared, but underway nonetheless. One could loosely describe this ongoing series of skirmishes as between law enforcement and blacks, but that would be unfair to both of those overly generic group designations.

Yet it's impossible to ignore any longer the specter of lying and obfuscation on the part of a few (by no means all or most, he hastily disclaimed) law enforcement officers. When cops routinely treat "certain communities" like third-class citizens, when they act like an occupying force trying to pacify Fallujah, the people who live in those communities day after miserable day and put up with this dehumanizing bullshit eventually snap.

None Dare Call It Reason

As long as we're making up crimes and punishments, I call for this worthless cocksucker to be strung up in a filthy back alley, and his bug-eyed corpse to be dumped in the nearest outhouse. I mean, it's West Virginia, so you know there's a fuckin' outhouse within earshot.

Look, I'm as skeptical of HFC as the next cat, but this is ridonkulous. These crazy assholes need to beaten down, hard. No mercy. Twenty points is not enough of a spread; 99-1 would be more suitable. These knuckle-draggers must be repudiated wherever they crawl out of the woodwork. If they cannot mount a campaign of principled disagreement and proportionate response, then the gloves must come off.

I don't know if Michael Folk has noticed, but there is a climate of violence brewing across the nation right now. Cops are abusing and killing citizens, madmen are murdering cops that had nothing to do with any abuse issues, terror attacks are occurring hither and yon, and people are kind of on edge. We do not need this sort of incendiary rhetoric.

Additionally, Folk may want to review the tape of Jim Comey declining to prosecute HFC for her email issues. I can take it or leave it, but Comey is not a Dem partisan hack, by any means. If he says he saw smoke, but not fire, we're all just going to have to leave it at that and move on, especially considering that General Petraeus' issues with classified emails was much more egregious and criminal, and he walked away from it.

Not only that, but even if Comey had decided to prosecute HFC over the emails, it's not a hangin' offense. Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people? One expects this sort of dipshit booga-booga from random YouTube or Twitter assholes, places that treat their comments section like the bathroom wall at the filthiest rest stop on I-80. But Michael Folk is a state legislator. Is it too much to ask that he behave as such? Apparently it is.

(Just a reminder:  Jim Comey was Patrick Fitzgerald's assistant prosecutor in the Scooter Libby trial. You may recall that one, where a CIA field agent was outed, endangering her life, as well as those of her field contacts. That was not a hanging offense either.)

I don't know about you, but I've had enough of these people, and their tedious bullshit. I do not seek rapport or common ground with them, when they talk like that. Fuck them, fuck their voters, fuck their families, their communities, their social clubs. Everything they touch is tainted, and must be razed to the fucking ground. I want HFC and the Democratic Party to go scorched earth on them, burn them to the ground, salt their ashes and the earth beneath them, take a healthy dump, and plow it all under.

They won't of course; the Democrats are as feckless and gutless as the Republicans are stupid and spiteful. It will be enough of a challenge to get the Dems out of their natural circular-firing-squad posture. But there's always hope.

Ramblin' Man

Let the ritual humiliation of Mike Pence begin. Couldn't happen to a nicer asshole.

Runner(heh)-Up

Now go get your fuckin' shine box.

Ass Ipsa Loquitur

If you have the stomach and patience, here's last night's Drumpf putsch in Cincy, complete with suckup / pseudo-historian Newt Gingrich introducing him. You have to see one of these to believe it, to really put it all into context. Everything you've read and heard about these things is true, the nonsense, the lies, the bloviating, the hooting and bellowing from the crowd.

For the terminally obtuse, on his two main defensive points:

• The deal with the star is not that Drumpf is anti-Semite; the deal is that the graphic originated at one of these sleazebag white supremacist outlets. And this is not the first or second or third time this has happened, that Drumpf has re-tweeted something that originated from places with names that ought to be a clue (for example, "White Genocide"). Whether it's social media dickhead Dan Scavino or Drumpf himself stumbling across these little gems, maybe take two minutes and check out where it came from. Otherwise it's just another dog whistle to the white power animals going whole-hog for Drumpf. (Not to mention that Drumpf, who holds events at his own places so that he can funnel campaign donations right back through them, is at least as corrupt as he claims HFC to be.
• Does Drumpf admire Saddam Hussein? No, of course not. (Hopefully, that is.) But again, the pattern is there. Over and over and over again, the guy professes his admiration for the ability of tyrants and despots to "get things done." Even if one accepts that Saddam was effective in rooting out real terrorists (as opposed to internal dissidents and political opponents), the direct implication Drumpf is aiming for is that the current administration is allowing ISIS to proliferate. And it's simply not true; the area of territory they control in Iraq and Syria has been cut in half. There are bombing sorties and Special Forces in-country. Unless Drumpf is proposing to simply nuke Baghdad and have done with it, civilians and all, this is a complex issue that takes some time.

I've watched three or four of these events over the past year, drink in hand of course. And every time, I come away thinking -- wishing -- that Drumpf's cult followers could get what they wish for, and the rest of us could avoid the consequences. Much like the Brexit dopes, who are going to feel the consequences the most directly, these people should have to own every ounce of impact that this lunatic would hit them with: trade wars, actual wars, shitty business practices. This guy fucking talks up Don King and Mike Tyson about 43 minutes into this mess, and it gets worse from there.

Nothing has changed. These are truly the dumbest fucking people on the face of the planet, and they deserve everything that's coming to them. I sincerely hope they get every last drop of it.

Street Executions

I wish I had more to say on the two state-sanctioned street executions in the last forty-eight hours, but Ed and many others have pretty well covered it. Plus, res ipsa loquitur and all.

Noting that Louisiana is an open-carry state (though Alton Sterling, as a convicted felon, should still not have possessed a gun), or that Philando Castile had a concealed-carry permit and is seen on video as alerting the officer to that fact as he tried to hand over his identification, will mean nothing to the usual cops-are-always-right-even-when-they're-wrong morons. Nor will you hear a peep from the gun nuts, for obvious reasons.

It would be nice to think that the Department of Justice would crawl up the ass of every national, regional, state, and metropolitan police union and fuck them sideways on excessive use of force, but we all know that won't happen either. But whether or not it does any good, it needs to be pointed out that -- for starters -- Jared Loughner, James Holmes, Robert Dear, and Dylann Stormfront Roof were all brought in safely and alive after they had killed multiple people, forty-two people total between them.

Keep that in mind some lying piece of shit from the FOP gets in front of a mic and lectures you about how scary the job is and how they had no other choice. Bull. Fucking. Shit. Ten bucks says no one loses their job over either of these most recent civilian shootings.

This is how it is in a police state, just as it is in a true authoritarian or totalitarian state:  conformity is culturally enforced, compliance is expected and enforced, by violence if necessary, and frequently even when it isn't necessary.

[Update 7/7/16 9:27 PDT:  Well, this isn't going to help.]

Another Man's Freedom Fighter

Would it be too much trouble at all for someone, anyone in the Responsible Corporate Media to ask the once and future Kanzler von Clownstick about this weird admiration he professes for various and sundry strongmen?

More to the point, his most recent burble about how Saddam Hussein -- Saddam Fucking Hussein! -- really knew how to take care of terrorists, what precisely does he think Saddam considered a "terrorist"? This is where Clownstick's pig-blind stupidity becomes not only a thing of wonder, but a thing of danger.

This is all of a pattern, the (for now) impotent threats to shut down the nation's fourth-largest (and the national capital's largest) newspaper; the empty promise to "toughen" the nation's non-existent libel laws (libel laws, of course, vary by state, but to Mister Man that's a difference without a distinction, except States' Rights, amirite?); the refusal when asked to bear witness to Vladimir Putin's track record of murdering dissidents and journalists; the long-ago admiration for the Chinese government's role in the Tiananmen Square massacre of its own citizens; the North Korean regime's ability to run a tight ship; and now, Saddam's brutality against "terrorists".

Careful What You Wish For

So Feeb Director Jim Comey has finally weighed in and decided not to put his thumb on the electoral scale. There goes my dream of HFC's indictment, followed by Joe Biden running and beating Drumpf like the rented, tick-eaten mule he is, instead of this derping along with a polling lead barely above the margin of error. What the fuck exactly does Hair Fuhrer (Cheetolini? Kim Don Un? Mobutu Sese Fuckface?) have to do to lose by the margin he richly deserves?

The problem, despite the braying of the horserace corporate media, is not so much a matter of HFC's "trustworthiness" (although there's certainly an issue with that, and always has been). This imputes that we cannot know how closely her actions would align with her rhetoric, which is ridiculous. She's been playing this game for a quarter-century now, we know exactly what she'll do -- stand and fight tepidly for more gutless incrementalism, for meaningless compromises with avowed enemies who have nothing to gain and everything to lose being seen working or even cooperating with her.

We'll Create a Cure; We Made the Disease

A couple posts back I linked to the new George Saunders exegesis of the Drumpfsters in the upcoming New Yorker, but it deserves its own reference. It makes sense to be charitable and assume that Saunders' effort was at least in part to humanize them more, make them look less like hateful morons.

And yet, afaic, it fails utterly in that regard. This is about more than the mere clash between two opposing sides with "non-intersecting data sets and myths," this is about cult behavior in the political arena, people motivated by nothing more than foolishness and lies, hatred and spite. It's not even wanting to burn the village in order to save it, but merely the pyromaniac's impulse to simply burn the motherfucker down, without worrying about who might still be in the edifice.

Fire in the Hole

Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts And Prayers. THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS YOU GUYS!

According to police, Stephen J. Brumby, 14, and his dad, William C. Brumby, 64, were practicing in a shooting lane against a wall when the accident took place.

"After firing a round, the spent shell casing struck the wall causing it to deflect and fall into the back of (the elder) Mr. Brumby's shirt. Brumby then used his right hand, which was holding the handgun, in an attempt to remove the casing. While doing so, he inadvertently pointed the firearm directly behind him and accidently fired," a police statement reads.

....

No charges have been filed.

[emphasis mine]

Nothing could have been done, you see, nothing at all. Accidents happen, right? The idea that an old dumbass using a loaded gun basically as a fucking back-scratcher is, for lack of a better word, STUPID, does not enter the discussion. It's funny how guns are the only implement where criminal negligence not only goes completely unpunished, but seems not to exist at all.

Does Anyone Here Know How to Play This Game?

A couple of weeks ago, Brazil -- a giant, swampy, third-world slum masquerading as a real country -- had a ceremony to celebrate its hosting of the Summer Olympics this year. During the ceremony, a jaguar -- which had been rescued as a cub and brought up at the zoo where the ceremony was being held -- was shot dead after it got loose from its handler and attacked a soldier.

Considering that Brazil is also the country that, just two years ago while hosting the World Cup, transported materials up the Amazon for the sole purpose of building a full-size stadium just for the World Cup, that sounds about right. I assume their national anthem is played on a sad trombone.

This is the future of Olympic games in particular, if not world sporting events in general. Real countries are no longer interested in the enormous expense required to host the events; the "prestige" conferred by hosting is just not worth it for American and European municipalities and states that are already cash-strapped.