Category Archives: current events

The People rest

To the solid 35% who love Trump, no matter what, who regard him as God’s gift to Christianity and as a savior to every unborn fetus everywhere, plus the Klan members and those solely motivated by greed and narrow self-interest who want every penny of their inherited wealth protected forever, no evidence of the big orange turd’s unfitness for office will ever change their minds about their guy.

For voters who are still persuadable, we get things like this regularly:

On Friday, Trump told the Concord, NH crowd: “You know, by the way, they never report the crowd on January 6th. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, you know, they did you know, they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything deleted it, destroyed all of it. All of it because of lots of things, like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people.”

Those who love him can easily defend this typical Trump word salad. They know he was obviously talking about the hated Nancy Pelosi and that he was, understandably, attacking Haley and defending those innocent J6 hostages.

Anybody else will understand that the man who ordered the destruction of all evidence of the plans for and riot on January 6th, all secret service texts and phone calls, all White House logs and everything else, is a dick fingered reflexive practitioner of projection and an insane, wildly confused bastard who should never be anywhere near a nuclear button, let alone inserted as the Heritage Foundation’s dictator.

51% of 17% of right wing white people in Iowa dig Trumpie

Read The NY Times and you will be told this is a historic mandate, an unprecedented margin of victory in a sparsely participated in election against two opponents afraid to criticize the mad boss and vowing to lovingly tongue bathe his crusty nether regions should he be unfairly convicted of any of the 91 felony counts against him.

Meanwhile, here’s some history in the making, its antidemocratic animus explicitly stated:

“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, said last year. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power Day 1 and deconstruct the administrative state.”

Heather

Heritage Foundation, funded by radical Libertarian Charles Koch and company, an influential political action “think tank” dreaming big, Nazi-colored dreams of complete control, ending all hated government regulation and programs for the masses, in the name of better serving our unquestionably most important citizens. Fuck those fucking putos.

Grey Lady — nuanced, super-polite and complicit in maintaining the status quo

This passes for sober analysis by the New York Times, in our current Age of Narcissism:

Donald J. Trump’s decisive victory in Iowa revealed a new depth to the reservoir of devotion inside his party. For eight years, he has nurtured a relationship with his supporters with little precedent in politics. He validates them, he entertains them, he speaks for them and he uses them for his political and legal advantage.

This connection — a hard-earned bond for some, a cult of personality to others — has unleashed one of the most durable forces in American politics.

source [1]

You won’t read in the New York Times that millions of Americans have been mercilessly screwed for decades by a system, designed to protect the interests of the super-wealthy, that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them. It’s not a hard-earned bond between Trump and the people who support him. He constantly validates their rage, which comes from his own rage at being the world’s greatest winner, yet still not having everything. Trump’s enraged inner child snarls resonantly at the enflamed inner children of his supporters. They love the thought of being him, able to grab women by the pussy (and brag about it), orchestrate a scheme to overturn an election, steal secret documents, lie about having returned them, incite a violent riot to keep himself in power, etc.

Super-wealthy and poor alike get the transgressive thrill of loving a powerful cartoon character who has never been wrong about anything, ever, gets a pass for fraud (his shuttered university, the shut down of his “charity”) and is applauded for doing what they’d all love to be able to do: constantly launch vicious attacks against those you hate and lie in your fucking face you goddamned fucking fuck.

As for a deep bond with little precedent in politics — what the devil are you talking about, Grey Lady? There’s plenty of precedent, all of it ended very badly for those who didn’t like being annihilated by an insane demagogue/cornered rat with a deeply devoted following willing to kill and die for their leader.

[1] The Grey Lady’s headline and lede:

The Most Durable Force in American Politics: Trump’s Ties to His Voters

If Donald Trump’s rivals want to stop his rise, they’ll need to break his bond with his supporters. They didn’t come close in Iowa.

Political pundits often suck ass

I sent this email to a friend just now, in response to a couple of political opinion pieces he’d sent me.

These are all good points that you raise. The US has the lowest rate of social mobility, people born in poverty becoming middle-class, of any wealthy country.  Privilege is perpetuated by law (as you say, they killed the Death Tax) and elite institutions, like Harvard, that are not available to any but the top recipients of an excellent education (and funds for public education are constantly being hijacked by Christians and others to pay for their private schools), or those whose families have a connection or are generous donors.  (Example, Jared Kushner, C yeshiva student, Harvard alum after felon dad Charles gives the school a few million shekels)

There are a lot of factors about why things are so fucked up and so demonically divided right now. Of course Fox is a huge and horrible one, for the reasons you describe.  It’s really grotesque how much influence one ninety year-old billionaire reptile can have on the media for the entire world.  Neither of these big picture articles about our current crisis (Mother Jones or Stephens) even so much as mentioned one of the scariest elephants in the partisan divided room:  the many-headed nightmare emanating from climate change, global warming, increasing deadly storms, sea level and ocean temperatures rising and ocean ecosystems desalinating as ice caps melt, drought, floods, wildfires and famine and eventually no food or living space for tens of millions, and then billions, displaced by rising sea levels and unlivable heat and turned into roving hordes of hungry on-the-move cannibals, and a final world war caused by scarcity of things like now monetized water.  Talk about a refugee crisis, they’ll probably decide to nuke these ravenous cannibal migrants. Talk about elites.

My problem with Bret Stephens is really the same problem I have with Mother Jones. They are pushing a thesis, motivated by an ideological position, so Stephens talks about these corrupt, cancelling, illiberal  radical left elites out of touch with the person who’s lost his job in middle America, completely disconnected from the millions of deaths of despair, and the murders, and the hopeless lives of millions of abused Americans, but he is also one of the same corrupt , out of touch elites, being a respected opinion writer for the New York Times.  Both he and the Mother Jones writer resort to simplified arguments that leave out nuance and tremendously important details to advance the particular case they are making.

The Mother Jones guy dismissed the idea of any kind of conspiracy at play in the crisis that our country has come to, pointing out, irrelevantly but at length, that belief in conspiracy theories is about the same as it’s always been, even if the wife of history’s most corrupt Supreme Court justice is a far right Christian political operative, on the board of the influential, secret nonprofit Council for National Policy, who brokered the deal between Donald Trump and the evangelical leaders in 2016, was in and out of the West Wing regularly during 45’s administration (and heads would always roll when she left) and also was in a religious frenzy in the Jesus-invoking texts to the Chief of Staff as Trump’s January 6 coup was sputtering, in the hours and days after she attended the Big Guy’s rousing speech in the freezing cold earlier that day.    Then all White House phone logs, texts, secret service texts and calls, irretrievably deleted, all Homeland Security heads’ communications also gone, from the hours before, during and after the riot at the Capitol for which hundreds are being, eh, vengefully held hostage.  There are complex right wing conspiracies at work all around us (for example, the association of Republican state attorneys’ general that met to work out how to limit drop boxes and things like that prior to the 2020 election, are probably meeting right now, the fake electors, election deniers overseeing upcoming elections, continual destruction of evidence, lies about the existence of evidence never produced, etc). and it doesn’t take Oliver Stone to tell you that.

Stephens does something similar when he focuses on the corrupt idiot asshole privileged  heads of elite institutions (accurate enough)  and uses them to prove his larger points that misguided, hypocritical, often tyrannical liberals suck and only sober conservatives like him see the world as it actually is and are prepared to lead it (debatable, like all political positions).  

The worst one in this category, for my money, is fucking David Brooks, who also writes for the New York Times.  I avoid his stuff the last few years, too aggravating to read that know-it-all’s confident conclusions about his opinions.   The insidious thing about Brooks is that he can make very reasonable points while he hides his ideological agenda most of the time but then sometimes it just pops out in a grotesque, tell-tale aside, like nonchalantly dropping in a gutter formulation of what’s wrong with poor people in terms of their moral character.

Anyway, it’s occasionally interesting to read some of this stuff, but I don’t put any more stock in the opinions of these folks that I do in my own reading, thinking and talking to people whose opinions I respect. Political commentators are in the business of simplifying things, convincing readers of their astuteness and expertise, and making difficult, complicated, scary things seem to make sense, but the version of reality they give you is always missing essential ingredients that you need to have a nuanced, really intelligent conversation about the subject. That’s just one reason I resent these fucking pantloads. 

A Narcissist can never be wrong

You will learn this in your personal life when you have a conflict where a loved one suddenly becomes inflexible, implacable, impervious to nuance, and grimly determined to win at any cost. You will wonder where this monstrous willfulness comes from and then come to understand that it happened to them very early, disabling the faculties most people have to take responsibility when in the wrong and compromise in order to restore trust and peace. This type is capable of any kind of destructiveness to avoid the terrifyingly soul crushing feeling of being wrong, ever, about anything. Being wrong, to this type, is a kind of soul death, a loss of self-esteem that makes a them a “loser”, a “fate” too horrifying for them to contemplate.

Check the news today and you will hear the insane former president’s lawyer argue to the DC appeals court that unless there is a political decision to remove a president from office for a crime, conviction after impeachment, something that has never happened to a president in the history of this great nation, that he is free to order the murder of his political opponents while in office.  A ridiculous argument, to be sure, but not an unusual one for a narcissist to make. Their style of argument boils down to “I know you are, but what am I?” and “make me”. They don’t need arguments, they only need power. 

With power you can do anything you want, without power you are alone, weak, contemptible, powerless and despicable. Especially if you are articulate, have a decent memory and are able to keep your focus while under attack.

Happy turd anniversary, patriotic traitors

Time flies during a prolonged, tireless fascist takeover attempt. Already three years since some of the best people overran outnumbered police and sacked the Capitol, in the name of democracy. Of course, team MAGA blamed the government for staging this riot (never mind that they controlled the government) as well as lying woke cucks, who, they insist, dressed up in MAGA gear (on behalf of George Soros and Barbra Streisand) to make the big guy look bad by injuring 140 officers and urinating and moving their bowels in the corridors of Congress while their fellow patriots chanted for Chrumpie’s enemies to come out and be lynched. They fought like hell, or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. 

A team of MAGA lawyers is now ready to convince the Supreme Court that these fighters never disrupted an official proceeding just because they stopped the official Electoral College certification of the president-elect’s victory that was going on in both houses of Congress. Disrupting an official proceeding involves messing with official documents, according to these far right “originalist” sticklers, and few of the convicted rioters did much of that. So, according to this legal theory, they are improperly imprisoned after being convicted on shaky legal grounds.

Voltaire had the right take on all this, as we wait, during an ongoing monsoon of angry death threats to the countless targets Chrump selects, for the wave of political murders to begin:

The painter Goya had it right too: the sleep of Reason produces monsters.

“We love you…never forget this day.”

Cherub-faced Jesus intoxicated defender of a rapist’s right to see his fetus born

Pictured above, face flushed from his amorous exertions, his master
looking very satisfied with the recent rim job from his boy.

The slimy little motherfucker is down on the southern border right now, with sixty of his fellow MAGA lick spittles, pretending the worst and most pressing problem America, this nation of immigrants, faces is the immigration that his fellow Republicans have done nothing to address, except by staging aggrieved photo ops and demanding capitulation from Democrats before they will release money to our allies, and desperately needed humanitarian aid to the victims of war criminals, including the victims of some of our allies. Same with aid to farmers, same with everything else, aside from campaigning for a demented criminal.

USA! USA!!!

Psychopaths and Narcissists often seem to “win”

Who is more determined to win than someone who sees “losing” as the utter destruction of their sense of themselves? The competitive ruthlessness of this sort is off the charts. If the price of not “winning” is a humiliating death during life, your motivation to dominate, or to kill your opponent, cannot be higher. It’s impossible to understand that someone you care about is like this, until you encounter that fatal conflict, which will often be the first and last. 

Of course, these words you are reading are being written by a quintessential loser, so take that into consideration. I have no power, political, economic or social. In such conflicts I have only my mind, my integrity and my sense of right and wrong, puny tools, it must be said, against the will of someone who will not be defeated, no matter what. Day to day there is also my sense of humor, which will not be evident in these pages, but that too can be turned into another reason to string me up by people given to that sort of thing. Trying to be funny, and making people laugh as though I am, when I am actually the most despicably camoflagued Nazi on the scene!!! Think of how quickly any funny man’s humor can turn to acid when you learn the guy is, say, a rapist who drugs his victims.

To a narcissist bent on victory, no matter what the facts may say about a given contest, there is always spin – your version of the facts that makes you, in fact, the winner, completely in the right. All you need to do is shut down the so-called facts of any so-called witnesses. Nobody is brave once the brave guy next to them is tortured to death, disemboweled and had their head placed on a pike. If there is evidence that can be used against you, bring pressure to bear to make that evidence go away. If the evidence is needed in a timely manner, say to avoid the statute of limitations, or to get past the ‘stop being an asshole and get over it’ deadline, keep the matter of its admissibility tied up in court until you run out the clock. All one needs is the will to do these things, and the power, and nobody can defeat you.

Oh, you can marshal the supposed facts into a so-called logical, arguably persuasive version of what you say happened? You can speak dispassionately and make your case appealing, intellectually and emotionally, to common sense, fairness and basic goodness? Good for you! I will utterly destroy you, funny man. Those “qualities” of yours can easily be turned against you, vicious hypocrite. I can cry, I can wheedle, I can rage, threaten, appeal to loyalty, to love, mercy, forgiveness, to the head on the fucking pike, to God, family, tribe, country, I can refute your “truth” with very compelling lies that will turn you into the irredeemable liar I say you are. Watch how fast most people will fall in line with this kind of thing, clown.

Watching this horror show play out on the national news every day, with one of our political parties, it is particularly unnerving to see it reenacted by a group of my oldest, closest friends. One day none are my friends, because I’ve had a conflict with another friend in the group who felt I defied her. Defying the will of a friend, boys and girls, a crime only a monster would commit, think about it. Then I made her feel terrible after her husband humiliated her by forcing her to apologize to me for flying into a sustained rage. She was not going to take this defiance from her spineless sadomasochistic husband too, and so he told me, after weeks of aggrieved, tooth-sucking silence, “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.” His wife regarded me coolly as her husband made this announcement.

His threat reminds me of a ridiculous ultimatum issued by another old friend, a guy I knew since fourth grade. A very nervous man, uncomfortable in his own skin to an alarming extent, he texted me that we could not talk on the phone, that it had to be in person. He drove to meet me so we could have the conversation his marriage counselor had urged him to have with his closest friend. He arrived with his eye ticking and face atwitch. After a few moment of small talk, in response to my question, he told me why he’d insisted on meeting in person. He had to confront me because I had, either intentionally or thoughtlessly, tried to deliberately destroy his marriage. His marriage, one should note, was a long hellscape featuring all the ravages of war. I was puzzled, but instead of telling him to fuck himself and his nightmare fucking marriage, and the fucking marriage counselor who had told him “your wife cannot respect you if you’re too much of a pussy to confront your closest friend after what your wife claims he did to you”, I talked things through with him, tried to help any way I could. Needless to say, I couldn’t help.

His divorce a few years later did nothing to improve our chances of being friends again, in spite of my efforts to do so. After all, he had been completely innocent and a good person during the years of our long friendship, while I… he didn’t even have the words to describe me. I was simply wrong, about him, his motivations, everything.

This is often the case, we learn, when you reach any sort of impasse with this kind of person. It is the reason Trump’s lawyers argue he must have an immediate adjudication of his complete immunity from all lawsuits and prosecution in one case against him and, at the same time, that he must be given maximum time to have the issue of his complete immunity decided in another case. He can argue an urgent rush to avoid irreparable harm in case one, and an equal urgency to have the court to take as much time as possible to decide the identical question in another case where delay is his only hope of “victory”.

These motherfuckers are never constrained by a need to be consistent, logical or fair. They have only one aim: victory at any cost, because winning is worth any price – since losing is a fate worse than a tortured death itself.

The haunting power of one small word

From a recent Heather Cox Richardson Letter from an American, with an ominous reminder of what we’re up against:

At the time [Trump’s second impeachment], Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that although he was voting to acquit, the proper place for Trump to face accountability was in the legal system. “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen,” McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything. Yet.”

“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office as an ordinary citizen,” McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything.”

“Yet.”

Also in that same letter, this horrifying little nugget (with an admission about why a parade permit was never sought for the “spontaneous” march to the Capitol):

Today’s revelation showed text messages between Women for America First official Kylie Kramer and MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell in which Kramer told Lindell: “[W]e are having a second stage at the Supreme Court again after the ellipse. POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol.  It cannot get out about the second stage because people will try and set another up and Sabotage it. It can also not get out about the march because I will be in trouble with the national park service and all the agencies but POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly’… Only myself and [White House liaison] know full story of what is actually happening….” 

Heather