Chess is a helluva game. It's meant to imitate war, of course, but in a civilized fashion. The best strategies are born of an instinct to think far ahead about the ripple effect of a single move. Your decision on whether to move your pawn one or two spaces initially can decide the entire thing. It takes patience, concentration, and planning.
Of course, there's one way to make sure you always win your chess game. That's to walk up to the table, slap the pieces to the floor, pick up the board and beat your opponent bloody with it, set the pieces on fire and shove them up your opponent's ass, and, if necessary, slam the table itself down on your opponent until they resign from the game.
This is the difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats will get another chess set and place the pieces nicely in their rows and await a rousing match. And when Republicans shit all over the game and sphincter-plant the pieces, Democrats still crawl back to the table and set up for the next time. Oh, and if Democrats attempt to pull a flaming knight out of their ass, Republicans will accuse Democrats of cheating by moving the pieces and Democrats will agree and sadly shove the knight back into their ass.
I've been saying this shit for nearly 15 years now. Democrats keep pretending there are rules. That didn't start with Trump. Democrats were playing badminton while Republicans were playing with flamethrowers during the Clinton administration. There are no rules except the ones Democrats keep making themselves follow. That's all so naive.
Look, there's no sugarcoating what happens if Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is replaced by a conservative in the Gorsuch/Scalia/Ghengis Khan model. We're fucked beyond fucked. All the lunatic cases that the savage right has been jonesing to bring to the court will get brought, and kissing Roe v Wade goodbye will just be a start. These robed cockheads are gonna gut civil rights, environmental law, financial regulations, the scraps of the Affordable Care Act that will be left. It's gonna be horrific and the effects will be felt for at least a generation.
But let's not sugarcoat how badly Anthony Kennedy fucked up our democracy. He was not only in the majority in Bush v. Gore, the case that set the nation firmly on the bullshit path we find ourselves walking, he was the justice who urged the court to take on the dispute over local election laws. And his majority opinion in the Citizens United case blew a hole in election financing that turned the idiocy of American political campaigns into a grotesque exercise in graft, grift, and greed. Yeah, on abortion and gay rights, it was good he was there. But, obviously, that didn't matter enough to Kennedy to stay the fuck in his seat. He wants his legacy to be conservative. So fuck him. Hard. With a barbed bear dick.
We've been working on the fight in November for one or both houses of Congress. And that fight stands. But another fight is here now. Democrats have to be willing to fight dirty. Oh, sure, there are a lot of less dirty things that we can and should do. But these motherfuckers have gone too long without having their faces shoved in the mud.
Let's wallow in anger and shock for moment. Yet don't get caught up in the bullshit blame game. We have no time for childish things. I don't give a fuck about who voted for what in 2016 anymore, not in the election, not in the primaries. We either put that aside for this fight or we may as well just roll over and wait for the fucking. (By the way, that doesn't mean ignoring important election results this year or the utter failure of Democratic congressional leadership on this and other issues.)
Tomorrow, I'll get to how to fight dirty. Legal, yes, but fuckin' dirty, man. Getting chanted out of restaurants will look like a tiptoe through a meadow. Fuck chess. It's time for a barb wire cage match.
