Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Random Observations on the RNC Orgy and Klan Rally (Night 1: That Was Some Weird Shit)

 

Random Observations on the RNC Orgy and Klan Rally (Night 1: That Was Some Weird Shit)

1. The theme of the Republican National Convention, which started last night from various locations in Hell, was "All glory to Trump." There was no attempt to reach out, even in the smallest way, to people who might live in what we colloquially call "reality." Nope. You either rode the MAGA express straight to the Trump Pole where Trump would bestow upon you all the toys you could ever want, or you were a miserable leftist fuck who only deserved Marxist lumps of coal. Honestly, every single speaker could have gotten up there and talked about how great it was to give enthusiastic blow jobs to Trump and it really wouldn't have made one bit of difference. If Steve Scalise had sauntered up to the mic while wiping cum off the corner of his mouth, I'd've thought, "Yeah, I assumed."

2. There wasn't a word of sympathy for the 200,000 people in this country who have died of COVID-19, as if that never happened. In fact, in the telling of the RNC, some sneaky Chinaman defiled our virginal American shores and infected us with coronavirus, probably on purpose. And while all those evil Democrats ran around saying that it wasn't a threat, one man knew right away what to do, and that man was Donald Trump, and Donald Trump allowed the United States to suckle from his orange breast, his milk filled with the medicine that would heal us. This wasn't spin. We're used to spin, where you take the facts and make them look good in a context of your choosing. No, this was a complete, Soviet-level revision of recent history, where Trump never said it would go away, never said there would only be 1 or 15 or 60,000 deaths, never claimed there were cures and treatments that didn't exist, never accused governors desperately trying to get PPE and ventilators of just trying to make him look bad, never demeaned the scientists working on saving us, never politicized every fucking aspect of the pandemic. It has become an article of faith among the delusional MAGA hordes that Trump saved millions of lives by doing something, never allowing the corollaries, that the only way millions of people would have died is if he did absolutely nothing and prevented anyone else from doing anything and that, if he'd done more, we wouldn't have this ridiculous, ongoing death rate, to enter their empty minds. It's a madness that is so complete, so all-engulfing that they couldn't even pause for a second to acknowledge the piles of dead bodies that their bullshit convention was stepping on.

3. I don't get this strategy that the world is fucked and we need to re-elect Donald Trump to unfuck it. We were treated to videos of protests that turned violent and unemployment porn. We heard from coked-out morons like Donald Trump, Jr., saying shit like "Anarchists have been flooding our streets and Democrat mayors are ordering the police to stand down. Small businesses across America, many of them minority owned, are being torched by mobs." Or the repulsive St. Louis couple who, when not destroying a synagogue's beehives (no, really), pointed guns at peaceful protesters who walked past their home. From their mansion they said, "They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single family home zoning." Does it need to be said that these rich cuntmites sued to prevent a gay couple from moving into their 'hood? (No, really.) So the country is on fire, protesters are in the streets, coronavirus is rampaging, the economy is in tatters, and Republicans' message is "You see how shitty everything is? We need the guy who made it shitty to fix it." Sure, sure, if a mad bomber has planted bombs all over the city and half of them have gone off, you want the bomber to tell you where the rest of 'em are. But then you fucking lock the bomber away forever. And at least everyone would agree that bombs are real.

4. The racist dog whistles were loud last night from the very beginning. Alien with a wig Charlie Kirk declared that "Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization" and "the defender of Western Civilization," which is such a thinly-veiled code for "white" that it's pretty much Saran Wrap. Rejected Muppet Matt Gaetz said of Democrats, "They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door," a sentence that is racist and makes no sense. Every mention of the border or "take away your guns" was code for "the dark people are coming and you need to be able to shoot them." Then there was Sen. Tim "Useful Idiot" Scott, who got in some anti-Semitic jams by saying that Democrats "want to take more money from your pocket and give it to Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls." Most absurd was former governor and UN ambassador and future failed GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who is Indian-American. A couple of seconds after saying, "In much of the Democratic party, it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country," she talked about she and her family "faced discrimination and hardship." Yeah, motherfucker, because of the racism.

5. So much of what they speakers celebrated was because of Democrats. Angry meat loaf Sean Parnell talked about how "In a century, we went from ground bound dreamers gazing to the stars, to doers who created the means to reach them," which was, you know, the doing primarily of JFK and LBJ. Teary Castro-hater Maxiom Alvarez talked about how he came to America during Operation Pedro Pan in 1961, when, you know, JFK was president. Ill-informed nurse Amy Ford talked about the expansion of telehealth services, which exist primarily because of the Affordable Care Act and Republicans at the state and federal level blocked it being paid for Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP. 

6. Holy shit, Kimberly Guilfoyle must have done bath salts before heading out to yell at an empty auditorium like she had lost out on the part of Evita at the East Hampton Community Theater. I would not have been surprised if she had chewed the face off a kitten.

7. Joe Biden stories are about him forming relationships with ordinary people across the country. Donald Trump stories are about how he occasionally acknowledged that other people exist.

8. The news networks talked repeatedly about how the RNC was like reality TV. They're right because, see, reality TV is all bullshit. It's fake. It's a bunch of manipulated situations where people are prompted to act like their shittiest selves in order to fool stupid people into thinking that this is reality. So...well-done, RNC. You set the bar below ground level and managed to reach it.

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

 

Michelle Obama Scared the Hell Out of Us (For Good Reasons)

As inspirational and aspirational as former First Lady and current media superstar Michelle Obama's keynote speech on the first night of the Democratic National (Virtual) Convention was, what hit me hard was just how downright frightening it was. See, Obama is as level-headed, rational, and non-hyperbolic as anyone in public life, so if she's telling us that shit is scary out there, shit is definitely scary. The overriding message was, to quote Geena Davis in The Fly, "Be afraid. Be very afraid," with the addition of "And you better fucking well vote like you're afraid." Honestly, I was frightened of the possible dystopian Trumpian future. Now, I'm pissing myself in fear. 

What was also remarkable was how Obama went straight for Trump's jugular with attacks on his easily-bruised ego, delivered in a calm yet impassioned voice. Calling out people who chose not to vote in 2016, she said, "Whatever the reason, in the end, those choices sent someone to the Oval Office who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3,000,000 votes," following up that uppercut to the gut with a knee to the face: "In one of the states that determined the outcome, the winning margin averaged out to just two votes per precinct — two votes." You barely won, Obama is telling Trump, puncturing the whole myth of the great and mighty victory that Trump has touted for four years. When Michelle Obama is out of fucks to give, the national fuck tank is empty. 

When Obama said the brutal and much-quoted part of the speech, "Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is," she framed it in terms of her "When they go low, we go high" dictum. Essentially, the speech was less a corollary to that and more a clarification: "[G]oing high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold, hard truth. So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can."

Again, while certainly not silent, Michelle Obama has steadfastly stayed above the fray. But even she recognizes that this path is unsustainable, that if the United States is going to stay, well, united, even by the frayed threads that barely hold us together now, we need to vote, as in all of us, including you motherfuckers on whatever side who want to sit out an election because your ideology hasn't been 100% validated by the Biden/Harris ticket. Your house is on fire. You can grab a bucket or watch it burn. 

Yesterday, in another nonsensical screaming narcissism session, this time in Mankato, Minnesota, Trump himself was giving the mirror image of Obama's speech. "We’re going to have an election that’s all about the survival, our nation," he said, later adding, drama queenly, about New York City in particular, "Our beautiful diamond of this country has been let go to hell."  He ranted about how quite moderate Joe Biden was going to be a puppet of some imaginary extreme left who "will kill the stock market, he will kill everything that we’re talking about today. He’d also abolish immigration enforcement, abolish bail, abolish the suburbs, abolish effective policing, abolish American energy, and abolish the American way of life." 

The only way Trump can win is by cheating or by convincing enough idiots that, sure, everything is shit now, but, wow, would it be shitty with the Democrats in charge. 

Of course, Trump doesn't see anything as shitty. He sees it all, all the deaths and poverty and rising hunger and homelessness, as magnificent and he's magnificent and no one but he could have made it all so magnificent and even those things that were doing well before him certainly don't count, like the economy he brags on, the pre-pandemic success of which had everything to do with President Obama and very little to do with Trump. 

But as Michelle Obama pointed out, Trump didn't just squander her husband's legacy. He chewed it up, shit it out, and then told everyone how awesome his shit is. She said, "When my husband left office with Joe Biden at his side, we had a record-breaking stretch of job creation. We’d secured the right to health care for 20,000,000 people. We were respected around the world, rallying our allies to confront climate change. " And Trump just decided to fuck all that up for the sake of rage and envy. 

There is no sitting on the sidelines. Like Michelle Obama, I've seen the devolution of the Republican Party that started with Ronald Reagan (yes, you can argue it started with Nixon). I've seen how Reagan and H.W. Bush fucked shit up and Clinton corrected it, to a degree. I've seen how W. Bush fucked shit up even worse and Obama corrected it, to an even greater degree. A lot of us know of what we speak when we say that shit is really, really fucked up and that, yeah, more than usual, this is an existential crisis right now. 

I loved Obama's near-last line. "We have got to reassert our place in American history," she said. Yep. It's time to take the narrative back from the motherfuckers. Again. 

Monday, June 29, 2020

The Storm Is Here, I Guess
For those of you not familiar with wingnut jargon, "The Storm" is when President Trump finally unleashed the forces of justice against the Deep State and begins serving those 165,000 secret arrest warrants that have been issued against his opponents.  (by the way, no wonder he never gets anything done.  How can he work with 165,000 pieces of paper on his desk?) I guess the legions of QAnon followers out there must be getting tired of being told every single day now for three years that justice is going to come raining down within a couple of weeks, only to be endlessly disappointed, because today, the following list of people that have already been arrested by Trump and the "Justice" department has appeared online.  Get ready for it; it's a doozy:

Mitt Romney ARRESTED & AT GITMOBritney Spears ARRESTED SERVING LIFEChristina Aguilera ARRESTED SERVING LIFEMiley Cyrus ARRESTED SERVING LIFEBette Midler ARRESTED SERVING LIFERobert Downey Jr. ARRESTED & EXECUTEDDwayne Johnson (The Rock) ARRESTED & EXECUTEDGeorge Clooney ARRESTED & EXECUTEDAdam Sandler ARRESTED & EXECUTEDNicholas Cage ARRESTED & EXECUTEDKevin Spacey ARRESTED & EXECUTEDCharlie Sheen ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJames Clapper ARRESTED & AT GITMOHillary Clinton ARRESTED & EXECUTEDBill Clinton ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJames Comey ARRESTED & AT GITMODiane Feinstein EXILED TO CHINAEric Holder ARRESTED & AT GITMOMeryl Streep ARRESTED & ON HOUSE ARRESTRobert De Niro ARRESTED & EXECUTEDRichard Gere ARRESTED & ON HOUSE ARRESTJoe Biden ARRESTED & EXECUTEDHunter Biden ARRESTED & EXECUTEDMike Pence ARRESTED & AT GITMO, POSSIBLY EXECUTED, UNABLE TO CONFIRMAnthony Fauci ARRESTED & RELEASED FOR A TIME TO HELP TRUMPHuma Abedin ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJohn Brennan ARRESTED & AT GITMOGeorge H. W. Bush ARRESTED & EXECUTEDGeorge W. Bush ARRESTED & EXECUTEDLaura Bush ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJeb Bush ARRESTED & EXECUTEDDick Cheney ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJames Baker ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJames Clapper ARRESTED & AT GITMOTom Hanks ARRESTED & EXECUTEDRita Wilson Hanks ARRESTED & EXECUTEDMadonna ARRESTED & EXECUTEDLady Gaga ARRESTED & EXECUTEDOprah Winfrey ARRESTED & ON HOUSE ARRESTEllen DeGeneris ARRESTED & ON HOUSE ARRESTStephen Spielberg ARRESTED & ON HOUSE ARRESTHarvey Weinstein ARRESTED & N PRISONJeffrey Epstein ARRESTED & SEERVING LIFE IN PRISONPope Francis ARRESTED & EXECUTEDQueen Elizabeth ARRESTED & EXECUTEDPhillip Windsor ARRESTED & EXECUTEDCharles Windsor ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJustin Trudeau ARRESTED & UNDER HOUSE ARRESTScott Morrison ARRESTED & UNDER HOUSE ARRESTHarry Windsor ARRESTED & UNDER HOUSE ARRESTMeghan Markle ARRESTED & UNDER HOUSE ARRESTAngela Merkel ARRESTED & UNDER HOUSE ARRESTAndrew McCabe ARRESTED & AT GITMOBarack Obama ARRESTED & EXECUTEDMichelle Obama (Big Mike) ARRESTED & EXECUTEDBill Gates ARRESTED & UNDER HOUSE ARRESTMelinda Gates ARRESTED & UNDER HOUSE ARRESTDebbie Wasserman-Schultz ARRESTED & AT GITMOGeorge Soros ARRESTED & EXECUTEDMaxine Waters ARRESTED & AT GITMOSally Yates ARRESTED & AT GITMONancy Pelosi ARRESTED & AT GITMOJoel Rogosin (writer) ARRESTED & EXECUTEDMatthew Seligman (musician) ARRESTED & EXECUTEDCharles Gregory ARRESTED & EXECUTEDHilary Heath ARRESTED & EXECUTEDHal Wilner (producer) ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJohn Prine (singer) ARRESTED & EXECUTEDHunter Biden ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJohn McCain ARRESTED & EXECUTEDRoy Horn of Siegfried & Roy ARRESTED & EXECUTEDTroy Sneed (singer) ARRESTED & EXECUTEDFred the Godson (rapper) ARRESTED & EXECUTEDEric Holder ARRESTED & AT GITMOJohn Kerry ARRESTED & AT GITMOLoretta Lynch ARRESTED & AT GITMOLisa Page ARRESTED & AT GITMOTony Podesta ARRESTED & EXECUTEDJohn Podesta ARRESTED & AT GITMO

I was going to make fun of some of these entries.  For example, why was the producer of Knight Rider and Magnum PI included on the list, or some middling-famous English rock bassist?  And John Prine or Roy Horn?  But what really made me wonder is what the idiots who propagated this list are going to do when a large number of these people show up within days, going about their business?

Well, never fear.  An answer is ready for all of this:
"If this is remotely accurate I say  ‘In come the Clones like never before’ What a sad announcement for all Humanity this actually is. 
God Bless"
Yes, what we will be seeing will be nothing but clones, something unknown in the real world until now, because cross my heart and hope to die, all of the above people are out of circulation, arrested for eating babies or something.  And that will be far more believable to the blind hordes who still support Trump, than the notion that they are all being played for suckers.

And that is why our country is teetering on the brink of oblivion.


Friday, May 29, 2020

The President Is the Enemy



May 4 was the 50th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, where the National Guard opened fire on Vietnam War protesters on the campus of Kent State University, killing 4 people. The authorities shooting unarmed protesting Americans was a thing that happened with ludicrous regularity in the 1960s and early 1970s. Really, for most of our history, but it was particularly intense five decades ago during the era of civil rights unrest and antiwar marches. Still, Kent State was different because of the involvement of the National Guard, because it wasn't state police or local cops doing the shooting, but an arm of the military. President Nixon, the commander-in-chief, was the enemy that needed to be stopped.

Another incident shortly after was not met with bullets. On May 8, 1970, a large group of construction workers stormed through an antiwar protest on Wall Street in New York City. They were violently confrontational with the protesters, and then they stormed City Hall, where Mayor John Lindsay had had the American flag flown at half-mast in honor of those killed at Kent State.  According to the New York Times, "A postal worker who had joined the fray managed to climb onto the roof and raise the stars and stripes to its proper, prideful position. When city officials returned it to half-mast, the workers rushed the building, leaping over police barricades and running over the hoods of cars. Fearing a disaster, officials raised the flag back to full mast." The protest at Kent State had been non-violent. The Hard Hat Riot, as it came to be known, was not, with workers wrecking property and beating protesters, with 70 people injured. The marches of the hard hats continued for days after. Nixon embraced the movement, made up of white conservative men who supported the president and hated hippies, and, after a huge march in NYC on May 20, he invited the leaders of the construction unions involved to the White House to honor them. 

Nothing is new. Not chaos of the MAGA movement. Not the conservative hatred of the left. Not the racism and violence. And not the idea that the president has become the enemy of the people. 

We have example after example, an overwhelming amount of evidence, really, that Donald Trump is actively trying to harm the large numbers of people of the United States, and I don't mean in the usual way that policies affect people. I'm not even thinking about his rollback of environmental rules or his gutting of regulations on food and drugs. It's not even his embrace of the gun lobby to the point that the only thing that slows down massacre after massacre is a pandemic. Hell, all that's just your run-of-the-mill Republican murder racket. 

Donald Trump's actions during this pandemic show a callous disregard for the lives of Americans. It's not that he tried to do something and he failed. Putting aside his nearly useless limitations on travel from China, he has refused to act or acted grudgingly in small ways to mitigate some of the damage caused by COVID-19 in the United States. His hyping of hydroxychloroquine was harmful, his musing about the positive effects of disinfectant on the human body was a ludicrous (and harmful) distraction, and his refusal to wear a mask and support even the simplest measure, social distancing, gave a message to his followers that what his own CDC and own medical team were saying was a lie. We know that his failure to respond with the urgency that many of his own advisers were asking for allowed for the explosion of coronavirus. We know, for sure, that tens of thousands of people died not just because he bumbled the response. They died because he abjectly, proudly refused to respond. He is essentially the parent who thinks God is going to heal their sick child. The parents are to blame for the kid's death, not an invisible sky wizard, not the kid. 

Again and again, President Trump says things that are meant to show his toughness - and, to be fair, the coterie of morons, freaks, and goons that support him probably believe this pampered pansy of a man is tough - but are ultimately signals for violence against what he perceives as undesirables, or those who don't love him, which, honestly, is the majority of the country. His tweet in reaction to the riots against the racist actions of police in Minneapolis is only the latest call to harm Americans. "Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts," he wrote, in an echo of racist cops and leaders in the 1960s. That isn't a racist dog whistle. It's a racist air horn, especially since he also called the people rioting "THUGS" (his caps, not mine). And that's on top of Trump's support of armed white people having protests to reopen businesses, undermining governors and medical experts, and probably leading to even more death just to get the economy moving again and boost his standing in the polls.

And I haven't even talked about Trump actively trying to make climate change worse by promoting coal and other fossil fuels while hindering the development of alternative energy sources. That's the massacre to come. Or the continued mistreatment of migrants, which has gotten worse during the pandemic. 

The capper to all of this is Trump's stern refusal to mourn deaths properly. He can shed crocodile tears, as he has done disgustingly over the murder of George Lloyd, but this is the same man who said he wanted cops to rough up suspects. This is the same man who just called for extrajudicial killings of unarmed thieves. He has said barely a word about the over 100,000 Americans who die and continue to die of coronavirus, as if acknowledging them is a weakness, as if they were too weak and deserved to die. 

The message that sends is that those deaths don't matter, they are an inconvenience, they are to be swept under the lumpy rug of failures because they just distract from the one thing that Trump wants you to believe: That Trump is great. 

The President is the enemy of the American people. He's not just a buffoon or a loser or an idiot. I've used the word before, but it becomes clearer and clearer all the time. He's evil. He's actively, intently evil. Yes, the cruelty is still the point. But the impulse behind the cruelty isn't merely the will to power. It's actually evil. 

I don't use that word lightly. Donald Trump doesn't see people as individual human beings, he doesn't want to lead the nation, and he sure doesn't care who lives or dies, as long as he lives. He sees the world as divided into for him and against him. Only the former deserve to exist, and he's doing everything he can to make sure the latter don't.

I don't know what other word you'd use. 

He had a chance today to say something about Lloyd and about the civil unrest in Minneapolis and elsewhere. He refused not just because he's incapable of empathy, but because he is capable of apathy.

The President is the enemy. Not just of Democrats. One thing about evil people: if they aren't going after you yet, they will be soon.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Oh, Fuck You, Trump Voters. Just Fuck You




Do you think they realize how fucking stupid they look, these man-children (and the occasional woman-child) playing soldier dress-up except with real guns who show up at these rallies to try to force states to open up while we're deep in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic? It's just pathetic that they believe they seem strong when they just look like a bunch of people who have been rendered brainless from a toxic stew of oxy, Facebook conspiracy madness, and One America News. And when I say they look fucking stupid, I mean objectively stupid, as in anyone looking at them from outside the whole bullshit zeitgeist we're damned to live through would think, "That's hilarious and absurd, and, c'mon, they can't be serious."

Think about that for a second. Think of someone arriving here with no understanding of American gun culture or the fetishizing of militia chic or the condemnation of science and education or the really warped ideas of "liberty" and "tyranny," and then they see the protest yesterday in California or last week in Michigan. Think about informing that outside someone that the costume cavalry was protesting for the right to gather in large groups and go to stores and salons and they don't care if those actions end up causing mass death. Oh, and, by the way, the president of the whole goddamn country thinks they're awesome for doing it. Oh, and, by the way, that same president has refused to do anything to make the nation safer for supermarkets and salons during the two months the country was shut down.

Everything that Trump has done and is doing is fuckin' owned by his voters, and their utter refusal to believe that Trump has fucked up just about every aspect of the response to the COVID-19 crisis is on each and every one of them. They fucked up this country worse than it was already fucked up, and they will stand on a pile of corpses to bray their devotion to Trump while popping hydroxycholoroquine with bleach shooters. If that corpse pile happens to contain their family members, well, fuck, they died so the rest of us could go eat at the Longhorn Steakhouse by the highway because freedom or some such shit.

Story after story about what went wrong and what continues to go wrong with the federal coronavirus response shows that the Trump administration has screwed the pooch on it. Fuck, they screwed the pooch then turned the pooch over and screwed it again and then when that pooch was dead from all the screwing, they tossed it aside and took another pooch from the Strategic Pooch Reserve and screwed that one, going through all the pooches they could screw and then they imported pooches from China which were flawed but screwable so they screwed those. Alas, pooches. Alas, America.

See, it’s not just that you’ve been fooled, Trump voters. It’s that you stick by your foolishness. You listen to bloviating assholes loudly farting from their home studios about how you need to get out there for the good of the “economy.” You insist that everything Trump says is real, on the useless drugs, on the bullshit cures, on the supposedly fake death toll, on the masks, on the drive-thru testing centers, on the number of tests, on every fucking thing, despite the absolute proof, in a factual way, as in indisputably, that he's totally fucking lying or just making shit up.

Most contempt-worthy is the fact that you think we who haven’t drunk the tainted Diet Coke straight from Trump’s dangly nipples actually want to be in quarantine, that we want tens of millions of people out of work, that we want schools closed and restaurants closed and supermarket shelves bereft of toilet paper. No, you poor, dumb motherfuckers. We’ve lost jobs, too, and we’re sick of having nothing to do but post memes about how fucking stupid you look. But we know that the price of reopening is the likelihood of all the gains we’ve made being erased and far more death, and, well, I guess we’re just pro-life.

And it pains us, really, it pains us deep in our souls that you can’t be reasoned with. That Trump, by any measure, has failed and continues to fail at this monumental task and that the reason he has failed so enormously and tragically is because he thought the virus was just there to spoil his chances at reelection. He is going to toss out truth and reality and replace it with everything filtered through his selfishness, his avarice, and his unending, crazed belief in his own superiority. Yet you'll just go the fuck along with it. It's fucking sad, man. The deepest wells of Obama worship never even came close to the cultish, mindless Trump veneration. I mean, c'mon, Trump refuses to wear a mask, but his campaign is going to start selling official MAGA masks. That's how stupid he thinks you are. That's how cynical this whole thing is.

And you know what else pains us? It’s that it would have been so ludicrously easy for Trump to have been the big shot hero, ordering companies to produce swabs and masks, amping up testing far exceeding any other country (for real, not in his fantasy world), demanding Congress pass funding for salaries so everyone could keep their jobs, and telling people to stay home. He could have led a genuinely positive national reawakening of community and patriotic service. He's not actually capable of that, but he could have faked it, like he's faked being a successful businessman.

And what pains us even more? You credulous simpletons would have bought into it whole hog. And you would derided anyone telling you to go back to work as an unpatriotic dick who just wants Trump supporters to die. Your media would have said that Trump was the greatest man who cares so much about us that he's willing to sacrifice the economy for your lives. In other words, you have no beliefs. You only have Trump. Goddamn, how empty you must be to think that's all you need.

Trump has wrecked our alliances and degraded our country to the point that the world thinks we’re just a pathetic vestige of our former selves, worthy of pity and derision, and that’s because of you, and you’re so full up with gobbling his shit that you don’t even think that matters as long as he lets you be openly racist and keeps owning the libtards, which means “anyone who doesn’t gobble shit from the MAGA trough in Donald Trump’s pig pen." It’s too bad. We could have used the help of the world, which, even in good times, we do need to buy our goods or your job is in permanent jeopardy. (Which, to be fair, it already is.)

You just don't believe in what the country ever aspired to be, to the world and to itself. Instead of believing scientists and doctors, you believe TV bullshit artists like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Rush “How the fuck is he still a thing?” Limbaugh, agreeing with Trump that popularity somehow equals depth and knowledge. Instead of people qualified to lead an effort, you think that feckless pricks like Jared fuckin’ Kushner are true polymath visionaries and not just vile charlatans and egomaniacs. Instead of seeking those who have earned the right to lead you, you turn to Donald Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., a devolved version of his devolved father, a pile of shit that has dried out.

This is all on you. You’re fucking adults, for fuck’s sake, and I just won’t treat you like children who need to be forgiven and hope you learned your lesson. You decided to overlook Trump’s blatant greed and corruption. You decided that someone accused of more than a dozen rapes and sexual assaults, including multiple under oath allegations, is just a jocular party guy you wanna hang with. You decided that it was better to spend money on his trips to golf and on tax cuts for the wealthy than on roads and health care and fucking pandemic preparation.

I know that we’re supposed to feel some kind of pity for you, that you’ve spent decades being inundated with talk radio and Fox “news” and YouTube videos and conspiracy mongers and politicians and preachers who either believe this shit or fake it because they know how easily you’re manipulated. You have been hit hard by the wealth disparity in the nation, with shitty jobs for shitty pay and shitty people telling you that your shitty job for shitty pay is somehow honorable and that it’s better that you suffer than government take care of your medical needs. You would rather walk around with your guns and your camo and pretend you're free than admit how much Trump has fucked you over. And when he's no longer president, you'll whine about how it's all rigged and unfair, echoes of his miserable voice. Yet we're supposed to feel sorry for you.

Fuck that. And fuck you. You are to blame for this madness and this death. You did this to our country. You made this decision. You won't see what's right before your eyes. You proudly refuse to take off your orange-tinted glasses with the sphincter-shaped lenses. So you're into it. You're good with it. You don't care how many people are hurt, how many people die, how many people suffer. You're good with it. As long as you can blame anyone but the wealthy in this country for every fucking misery, you're good with it. As long as the racism continues, you're good with it.

You decided that Trump isn’t evil. Or else you decided that he is evil and you just fuckin’ like being evil.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Trump Stupidly Self-Owns on Pandemic Deaths


Ever since the first death from COVID-19, President Donald Trump has brayed like a howler monkey getting a tree branch stuck up its ass about how allegedly terrible President Obama handled the H1N1 outbreak in 2009-10. On a daily basis, we have heard about how the incompetent fuck-ups in the Obama administration personally went out and murdered, depending on the day, between 12,000 and 18,000 people with the swine flu. (The 12,000 is roughly the number the CDC came up with; the 18,000 is the upper estimate of U.S. deaths from H1N1.)

On March 5, Trump tweeted, "Gallup just gave us the highest rating ever for the way we are handling the CoronaVirus situation. The April 2009-10 Swine Flu, where nearly 13,000 people died in the U.S., was poorly handled." Watch what happens with that number as the weeks go on. 

On March 12, he decided to make it as political as possible, tweeting, "Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record." For the record, Joe Biden was not in charge of the response to the swine flu.

Praising himself (as he has done over 100 times on the coronavirus response) on March 13, Trump said, "Interestingly, if you go back — please — if you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this. They didn’t do testing like this. And actually, they lost approximately 14,000 people. And they didn’t do the testing. They started thinking about testing when it was far too late." Reminded that the Obama administration had tested over a million people by the same point during the H1N1 crisis, Trump retorted pissily, "Ask them how they did with the swine flu. It was a disaster."

On March 17, Trump once again offered a middle finger to the previous administration: "If you look at swine flu — the whole thing in, I guess it was 2009, and what they did and the mistakes they’ve made, they were terrible. They were horrific mistakes. Seventeen thousand people died. And I’ll be honest, they shouldn’t be criticizing because we’ve done a fantastic job."

This very week, on April 7, he seemed to sense what was coming and moved the goal posts: "Take a look at the swine flu.  Right?  That’s H1N1.  Take a look at that.  And it’s not the other way around, by the way.  It’s H1N1.  Take a look — you know what I mean by that.  Take a look at the swine flu.  It was a disaster; 17,000 people died.  The other administra- — they didn’t even know — it was like they didn’t even know it was here.  And that was peanuts compared to what we have, in terms of the power, the magnitude of what we’re going through.  This is attacking 182 countries, simultaneously." For the record, according to the CDC, 214 countries had H1N1 cases simultaneously.  

Still, even as he hiked the death stat, from 13k to 14k to 17k now, it's like Trump understood that the metric he had been using as an indicator of the "disaster" of Obama's response was about to be lapped by COVID-19. 

And guess what, motherfucker? Today, the number of deaths in the United States has topped 18,000, the upper number in the estimates of H1N1 deaths. That's a goddamn self-own right there, bitch. If this cockzit had any shame at all, he'd be out there flogging himself, weeping and blubbering, "I'm the disaster. I'm the debacle. I'm the mistake. I'm the worst." But he won't. 

And fuckin' no one will hold him to account for his constant slanderous debasement of the Obama record. In a just world, Barack Obama would get to punch Trump in the dick every time the bloated tangerine of hate talked shit. But, no, no, we have to pretend to be dignified when dick-punching would be more appropriate. 

This is the shit that Trump's been allowed to skate on. He repeats a lie so fucking often that it's the only thing even semi-rational people believe. Like the one that's gotten in my craw and plunged in its nails. Trump says over and over that he "shut down" travel from China early in the coronavirus outbreak. He says he "closed the border" and shit like that. Except he fucking well didn't. Read his own fuckin' proclamation on it. It applied to "all aliens who were physically present within the People’s Republic of China...during the 14-day period preceding their entry." And there were a shit-ton of exceptions, including Americans and people with green cards, spouses and children of Americans and people with green cards, and many other categories.  It's like saying, "I've decided to be celibate. I'm not gonna do anal anymore, but blow jobs and firm handies are always welcome." And when those 40,000 or so exceptions to the ban came back into the U.S. from China, they faced almost no health checks. 

On top of the general lie about the "ban," the date it started, which was on February 2 in the U.S., was two weeks after the first confirmed case in Washington state. The fucking virus was already here. So the sieve of a shutdown of Chinese travel had virtually no effect, despite Trump constantly saying that he himself saved "millions of lives." No, that was the social distancing and hospitalizations. Oh, and one more thing: Trump didn't issue the "ban" until the day after the WHO declared COVID-19 an international health emergency. That's right. Mr. Blame-the-WHO took his cues from the organization.

Look, this motherfucker, this loser of a president, this despicable, soul-free, degraded carcass of something that appears human, he's trying to spin shit every which way so that he escapes blame, again, for something that is his and solely his responsibility. He'll blame the WHO, Democrats and impeachment, governors, Obama, fuck, I'm sure Hillary will get in there at some point. 

But it should never take away from the truth: He failed. He is failing. He is a failure. He will be a failure. He needs to wear his failure like a hair shirt for the rest of his miserable and hopefully imprisoned life. If Trump can slip away from any kind of comeuppance for this murderous ruin and wreckage, this country is even more fucked than it seems. 

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Trump: Ivanka Created 10% Of All US Jobs


On Tuesday, President Trump hosted a call with business leaders to discuss efforts to provide financial relief to small businesses. During that call, he made an astounding claim: that his daughter Ivanka personally created 15 million jobs.
To put this claim in perspective, as of January — before the coronavirus pandemic caused the US economy to start hemorrhaging jobs — about 152 million people in the United States were employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
So Trump is claiming that his daughter created about 10 percent of all the jobs in the United States. Ivanka has apparently been working overtime in recent months: During an event last November, Trump claimed that his daughter has “gotten jobs for” 14 million people.

Saturday, April 4, 2020

Fuck Jared Kushner




There's a certain kind of Ivy League college graduate who is just a total wad of fuck. Usually, they come from inherited wealth, are legacy admissions, and barely had to do any work the entire time they were in school because they have never had to any kind of work. I've had my run-ins with these louche fucks who believe that every word out of their inbred idiot mouths is a gold coin of wisdom and not a dingleberry of nonsense.

I'm remembering a Princeton microbiology major at an Atlanta pool hall telling me how the way I was doing archival research was wrong. I asked him if he had ever crawled around an attic at a local library, opening boxes that hadn't been opened in decades. That didn't matter, he said, because it was much easier than his work so my problems were easy to solve and I should just listen to him. It wasn't worth arguing with the cockflea, whose advice was worth a cockflea's piss. I ignored him until he tried to convince my date to leave with him and then there was a fistfight and then we got kicked out of the pool hall and when someone told me he died of a brain aneurysm a few years later, I said, "Guess his work was too hard for him."

This is a long way of saying, "Fuck Jared Kushner. Fuck him hard. Fuck him with his Harvard degree. Fuck him with every implement available to fuck him with and then invent a few more and fuck him with those."

Donald Trump's wan, soft-voiced, soft-skinned, creepy-as-fuck and evil-as-hell son-in-law, who probably describes boning Ivanka in detail for Trump, either gets tossed into whatever issue Trump is too paranoid to actually ask an expert to get involved in - Israel/Palestine peace negotiations, the opioid crisis- or, more likely, he's gotten a whim about something and thinks he can solve it. More than probably, he's figured out an angle on how to profit from it.

So when this ghost of a serial killer showed up at yesterday's daily Trump circle jerk in front of the media, it was to get tons of shit wrong, belittle people who know better than him, and actually drain whatever remained of hope in this hopeless age. By the time he was finished with his brief spiel, you could sense the coronavirus itself licking its lips at all the Americans it was going to get to kill.

Here's what Kushner said about his job on the coronavirus task force: "What the President asked is that all of the recommendations that we make be based on data." That seems like as innocuous a statement as one could make, but think about it. Were they not making recommendations based on data? What the fuck were they making recommendations based on? I think they are actually this stupid, all of them, everyone remotely fucking associated with the Trump family, all mutated by privilege and a false sense of their own intelligence and general worth as human being.

Why are we putting up with this? Why are Democrats not shrieking with outrage, "What the fuck does a shitty real estate developer know about epidemiology?" The reaction to Jared Kushner being trotted out to throw in some corporate bullshit-speak should have been for Benjamin Franklin's skeletal corpse to show up and beat him with a femur right when he said, "The President also wanted us to make sure we think outside the box." Motherfucker, we're dying here. The box is a goddamn coffin.

Kushner blathered on with cliches about "innovative solutions" and, really, "leave no stone unturned," and he turned to the real villains in the alibi the Trump administration is coming up with for its criminally-cruel abandonment of its basic duties to protect Americans: It's those motherfucking governors' fault. They're out of their league. They don't understand their jobs. He said that some governors "don’t know what’s in their state" when it comes to medical supplies and ventilators, an accusation that he offered no support for.

Then he tossed in, "What a lot of the voters are seeing now is that when you elect somebody to be a mayor or a governor or a president, you’re trying to think about who will be a competent manager during the time of crisis.  This is a time of crisis, and you’re seeing certain people are better managers than others." This brainless dipshit has no idea how much he was talking about his hulking, moronic father-in-law who still thinks people give a single rat fuck about his popularity.

Then he accused governors of "asking for things that they don’t necessarily need at the moment," which, no shit, bitch. That's called "planning ahead," something the Trump administration didn't fucking do at all. And Kushner said about the Strategic National Stockpile of medical supplies: "the notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile; it’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use." Or "Fuck you. Buy your own shit, blue states."

So, just to get this straight, it's up to the states to solve the problems, but if the states want materials from the National Stockpile, they shouldn't get it because that's "our stockpile." Putting aside that it sounds like Trump is hoarding shit for him and his awful family, it seems like Kushner is saying that the federal government will decide who gets it, but that would seem to require that the states have a say, except that they don't, although they are on their own. Or something.

By the way, the website for the SNS used to say, "When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency." After yesterday, it was Jared-ized to say the stockpile "is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well."

Every time it seems like Trump couldn't make things worse, he makes them worse. He has the worst, most incompetent fucknuts around. And they all believe that they are smarter and better than they are. Their failure to see what failures they all are is literally killing us now.

And fucking Jared is now in the middle of it. Jared Kushner is a pile of shit who thinks it's a man, and until someone steps on him and wipes him off their shoes, he'll always think he's more than a foul lump of excrement.

Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Trump announces new rally after his own team warns nation about public gatherings



Soon we will find out who has more credibility among Trump fans:  A phalanx of physicians, scientists, and epidemiologists telling them to avoid close contact with others? Or those happy talking heads on Fox and Friends who dismiss the pandemic as a Democratic plot to bring the president down?
Let’s see how many Trump supporters will take the Darwin test and pass.

Saturday, February 29, 2020

First known death from the coronavirus has been confirmed in the US.

So I guess it’s not hoax is it?
Courtesy of ABC News:
The first known death in the United States from coronavirus has been confirmed. According to health officials in Washington State, there has been one death from COVID-19 in Kings County, Washington, and new cases.
The number of coronavirus cases in the United States is now at least 66.
There have been 85,406 cases in at least 60 countries and 2,924 deaths.
It should be noted that while the official number of cases in America stands at 66 there are only a small number of testing kits available, so the number might be mch larger.
I am not saying it is time to panic, but it is time to start taking real precautions, the first of which would be to stop listening to this Administration, and to turn off Fox News. 
There is plenty of real accurate news available and many actual experts are sharing their opionions with reliable news outlets.