Unfucking What You Can: A Case for Voting for Harris Even If You're Pissed About Israel

I'm going to try to be as clear as possible here in where I'm coming from.

I'm not going to make this about Israel's war with Gaza and Lebanon except to say that I stand with the large number of Israelis and Palestinians and the Lebanese people who want a ceasefire and the hostages and prisoners brought home. Nor am I going to talk about the Biden/Harris administration's continued policy of arming Israel. I've been pretty clear that I oppose the blank check on weapons the United States has given Israel and that conditions need not only to be met but enforced when it comes to massacring civilians. I want the mass killing of children to end. Dismiss me if you want because of that.

This is really about voting for Kamala Harris for president despite her response to a grave and horrific situation in the Middle East. I understand the impulse to withhold your vote because of this. I don't agree with it, but I understand it. As I've said before, I went through it with Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996 (I was pissed at him for his inaction on the Rwandan genocide and welfare reform), although I ultimately voted for Clinton because I didn't want Bob Dole picking Supreme Court justices or other federal judges. 

But I haven't had the same impulse with Harris. It's not that I'm deluding myself into thinking that Harris is going to completely change US policy towards Israel once she gets into office. See, I have a few things I believe about this whole situation when it comes to the politics of this fucked situation. I think that Biden’s treatment of Benjamin Netanyahu has been ludicrously naive and ineffective and based in a fear about an electoral backlash to any hint of opposition to Israel, a fear based in the politics of 30 years ago. I think that the refusal to condemn the actions of Israel and to hold them to international law lessens the credibility of the US in holding bad actors to account. 

However, Harris is still a part of the Biden administration. She cannot state a policy completely at odds with the policy of the president, and I think that Biden has unintentionally screwed over Harris by letting Netanyahu roll him so completely. Harris is showing some tiny signs of shifting away from Biden's position, as when she was asked about supporting Netanyahu on 60 Minutes and she responded, "I think, with all due respect, the better question is, do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people. And the answer to that question is yes." If this means something, it's hard to say, but the right people are freaked out by what she said. It feels like she's testing the waters. 

Again, I don't believe that Harris will all of a sudden take a stand on limiting or stopping weapons flowing to Israel. She might, but I won't hold my breath. But it's pretty clear that Trump will be worse, aiding and abetting whatever extensive war crimes Netanyahu wants to commit, with the added bonus of threatening to deport anti-Israel protesters from the United States and reinstating his ban on people from Muslim countries. I also believe that Netanyahu is, at least partially, prosecuting this war in a way specifically meant to interfere in the US presidential election in Trump's favor.

It's a fucked situation, one of many fucked situations going on right now. My vote can't unfuck everything that's fucked. Even if the most perfect candidate in the world were nominated, it still wouldn't unfuck it all. I will disagree with something; I will still see something as fucked. But I have a responsibility to unfuck what I can unfuck in whatever way I can unfuck it. Frankly, we all do.

If I vote for Harris, I accept that I am probably not doing anything to unfuck the current situation in the Middle East. But I also accept that I am doing something to unfuck so many other things and preventing many more from becoming fucked (or further fucked). I know that if Harris isn't elected, the parade of what's fucked will be grotesque and long, from the suffering of women over abortion restrictions to the suffering of families over mass deportation and threatened denaturalization to the suffering of everyone over the reversal of policies trying to mitigate climate change to the suffering of children in this country over the mad proliferation of guns. I know that rights will be taken away from queer and trans kids and adults. I know that Ukraine will be handed over to Russia and that an emboldened Putin is gonna fuck things up a great deal more. I know that people all over the world will be harmed by the United States moving into an isolationist and racist posture, with the potential for more wars. I know that free speech rights will be trampled by right-wing courts, workers' rights will be crushed by the elimination of regulations, and civil rights will be beaten and shot by the police. And the Supreme Court will be lost for the next generation, at least. That's just scratching the surface of fuckery that Trump and his more effective MAGA apparatchiks are planning to do, along with a huge helping of Christian nationalism. 

I'm not trying to minimize the suffering caused by Israel's decimation of Gaza and its threat of decimating Lebanon. I get the raging anger over it. I'm not even going to pretend I understand your feelings if you're from one of the countries involved or have family there. But not voting for Harris isn't going to solve it at all. That never fucking works. 

Whatever you thought about Hillary Clinton in 2016, you didn't make things better by not voting for her. Whatever you thought about Al Gore in 2000, you didn't make things better by voting for Ralph Nader or not voting at all. The losses in those elections didn't bring about some lesson for Democrats or some great ideological shift that wouldn't have happened otherwise. But we know what they did bring about, and it was fucked. We know that factually and demonstrably. You didn't make anything better. You didn't save a single person. You made yourself feel better, and maybe that's enough for you. (And, by the way, I'm including myself here. I voted for Nader, albeit in a state that was going for Bush anyways.)

So I'm gonna vote for Harris not because I agree with her on everything. I disagree with her on quite a bit. But I know she's the only candidate in a position to unfuck things I want unfucked or at least stop them from being fucked more. And that's a trade off that I'm at peace with. 

Three Things That Matter from Last Night's Vice-Presidential Polite-Off

My quick take on the vice-presidential debate last night between Peter Thiel's gimp and Governor Care Bear is that it doesn't matter who "won." If you give a shit about reality, Walz won. If you prefer your political leaders to be smooth-talking sociopaths spewing bullshit, Vance won. Otherwise, beyond a surprise line or two (like Walz saying that his son witnessed a shooting), it was a disappointingly normal debate where the Democrat was overly deferential and polite and the Republican was a merry liar.

But three things stand out for me. 

First, to that liar point, the most important moment in the evening was when the moderators corrected Senator JD Vance. Talking his usual fuckery about immigration, Vance said, "In Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes." After Walz spoke, quoting the Bible, moderator Margaret Brennan added, "And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status." And that's absolutely, completely true. Vance tried to lump legal immigrants in with undocumented ones. 

And that led to Vance whining, plaintively, "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check" and then his mic was cut off when he tried to explain how something legal is actually illegal, which it isn't. TPS was established by the Immigration Act of 1990, which was passed on a bipartisan basis by wide margins. It's the fucking law, upheld against court challenges up to the Supreme Court. You can't just say you don't like the law and therefore actions using it are illegal. It would be like saying, "I don't give a shit if your stupid laws tell me to pay people. I say it's illegal to force me to do so." You're just an asshole if you try to do that. (Yeah, I know who I'm referencing.)

Even more importantly, when Vance got pissy about fact-checking, he was saying, really, "I was told I could lie and get away with it and now you're telling everyone I'm lying. How dare you." He tipped his hand. He showed his cards. He did other gambling metaphors that show how every fucking word out of his smarmy, bitch mouth is a lie. If you fear fact-checking, you fear being found out. And that ought to be the headline: "Vance admits he's a fucking lying piece of shit" or however you wanna couch it. (Yeah, I know what I did there.)

The other significant moment was when Vance couldn't bring himself to fully lie. It was the end when Vance climbed to the top of fuckery mountain and planted a flag, saying that Donald Trump proved he's no threat to democracy "when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th." Yeah, but that's like saying the rhino that was just charging your jeep is a peaceful creature after you've hit him with the tranq darts. Walz challenged Vance's bullshit head on, in his strongest moment of the evening: "This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?" Vance started babbling some conspiracy theory nonsense about Harris censoring people over Covid and then Walz interrupted to say, "That is a damning. That is a damning non-answer." Vance wouldn't say Trump lost. He couldn't bring himself to say the one thing that would alienate the fucking animals on the MAGA side. And he couldn't bring himself to say Trump won, which would have discredited him immediately with future voters he's trying to sucker into supporting his cruel ass after Trump dies or collapses into an amorphous pile of raging orange goo. It was a moment of utter cowardice that should tell you everything you need to know about this amoral, squamous rich fuck. 

One more thing is worth noting. Throughout the debate, Walz kept talking about what Harris would do as president. Vance kept talking about what Trump would do. Neither of them talked about what they themselves would do as vice-president because what they want to do doesn't fucking matter. It's not the job. As I've said, sure, they can offer advice, but ultimately, they are there to preside over the Senate or replace the president, both on an as-needed basis. Vance and Trump keep attacking Harris as if she is the president, saying that Harris has had four years to do shit. That's another goddamn lie. She's had four years to carry out the policies of Joe Biden that he wants her to carry out. But the policies come from him. (And let's not even get into the "Border Czar" lie.)

The thing that annoyed me most about the whole fucking thing, which I really do think Walz won on points and on likability, is that, with a frustrating assist from Walz, Vance was allowed to seem kind of normal, which he most definitely is not and would not be if in power. Vance is Ted Bundy to Trump's Vlad the Impaler. Trump's slaughtering people left and right. Vance is gonna try to charm you so you don't see the crowbar behind his back. 

The Climate Crisis Should Be a Bigger Issue in 2024

I was finally able to reach my friends in Boone, North Carolina and Damascus, Virginia by text today. They said that they are physically fine, but they have no power, no internet, no water, scant cell service, and no way out, really, right now. Both towns are flooded, mud-covered, devastated. One texted that he's "emotionally wrecked" as he waited in a line to get a shower at a truck stop. Because he's my friend, of course he added, "Just found out I didn't have to blow the attendant." We went back and forth a bit on this lucky truck stop employee before I figured I should let him go for the sake of his battery. He probably had more important things to take care of, like getting the tree off his car. I didn't get to ask him how his dogs did. 

Hurricane Helene was going to be a motherfucker of a storm. Forecasters saw that from the moment it formed, and they predicted the storm surge and the wind damage that would hit Florida, which was, in context, pretty fortunate that Helene didn't turn slightly more east and directly hit Tampa/St. Petersburg. The area that was hit is not densely populated, but it badly fucked up towns in the Big Bend coast, like Cedar Key and Steinhatchee, wiping a couple off the map. 

Helene was a fast storm, which not only meant a significant storm surge, but also that its wind and rains would last as it headed inland. So, yeah, parts of Georgia, NC, SC, Virginia, and Tennessee got drowned. Appalachia was hit ridiculously hard; a good chunk of the tourist town of Chimney Rock in NC is just gone. Weather experts predicted flash floods, landslides, and death, and that's exactly what happened, with roads, bridges, and highways just slammed, making getting supplies in that much harder. This is a catastrophe that will change regions of the country.

And it was made significantly worse by the climate crisis that we've been warned about widely for a couple of generations. If you wanna read the science about how warming waters and seas rising has made things worse for Helene and other recent storms, you can do much better than me summarizing smarter people. 

The climate crisis is the most significant issue facing the world. Period. It's more important than immigration (although it's tied to migration because of how climate change is rendering places unlivable). It's more important than the wars going on or crime or inflation. How can that be? Because you can end wars in a heartbeat if the people at war want to. You can arrest criminals. You can do shit that has an immediate impact on almost anything. But not the climate crisis. You're not shooting your way out of a typhoon. We're a few decades behind where we should be in doing anything, and even if we go full force into mitigating the things that cause climate change now, we're a few decades, at least, from preventing shit from getting worse, let alone better. It's possible (see the ozone layer, which is healing but is about 40 years from finally being whole again). 

But before we get anywhere close, we are going to have to deal with the clusterfuck of awfulness that's going to tumble down on us like a Jenga game we couldn't help but play until the end. That means more weather events - floods, fires, droughts, and more - and it means dealing with the massive refugee crisis that is going to play out as areas of South Asia and elsewhere become too hot for human habitation. 

So you'd think that we might want to hear more about their plans to deal with the climate crisis from our presidential candidates. Well, I mean, really, we should hear more from Democrat Kamala Harris because Donald Trump and his Republican death cult have just decided, "Fuck it. Burn it all. We don't fucking care." 

Trump has stopped calling the climate crisis a "hoax" because someone finally told him it didn't poll well (Trump has no problem sounding like a fucking moron if people applaud the moronic statements). Instead, we get snide obnoxiousness. His brain ever stuck in the 1980s, Trump likes to say, as he did in Michigan this month, that the real global warming is the possibility of nuclear war, "not that the ocean’s going to rise in 400 years and eighth of an inch, and you’ll have more seafront property if that happens. I said, is that good or bad? I said, isn’t that a good thing? If I have a little property on the ocean, I have a little bit more property. I have a little bit more ocean." It's all so obviously false that it's shameful to have to fact check it. Otherwise, all Trump says is "Drill, baby, drill" (which is a line he stole from Michael Steele, who coined the phrase in 2008) and both he and Project 2025 talk about eliminating any restrictions on oil, gas, and coal and just basically letting the earth die as rich fucks get ready to leave for Mars in Elon's rockets or what the fuck ever. In other words, more "Fuck it."

It's a perfect opening for the Harris campaign, perhaps another way to appeal to young people, and Hurricane Helene provides the opportunity to bring up how Trump wants to kill any effort to shift to greener energy. Yes, oil production is higher under Joe Biden than under any other president, but Biden is also lighting a fire under the green economy, using the climate crisis as a way to develop new industries and more jobs. Trump would cancel all of that. It's a perfect foundation for Harris.

On her campaign website, here's the entirety of what it says about the climate crisis: "As President, she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all. As the Vice President said at the international climate conference, COP28, she knows that meeting this global challenge will require global cooperation and she is committed to continuing and building upon the United States’ international climate leadership. She and Governor Walz will always fight for the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis." Her economic plan only mentions it in terms of those jobs. It's honestly a little more vague than it should be.

At the presidential debate, asked directly about it, Harris said, "Well, the former president had said that climate change is a hoax. And what we know is that it is very real. You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up. You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go. We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue." And then she said, "And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels" before using that to pivot to manufacturing and autoworker jobs in a clean energy economy. 

That's all well and good. I mean, hey, jobs that might help are awesome. And, obviously, when it comes to climate policy, Harris is not just head and shoulders above Trump. In terms of relatively giving a damn, she's a goddamn superhero while he's a dried up turd. And I get that campaigns have to respond to the issues that people say they care about, but mostly they care about those because politicans (and right-wing media) are lying to them, hyping things that aren't real. There is no crime problem. There is no immigration problem (other than the need to fund so many pieces of the immigration system better, from courts to caring for migrants). And, yes, there was an inflation problem, but the rate has slowed tremendously.

The climate crisis is very real. People are far more likely to be victims of a weather-related event than they are ever going to be victims of violent crime or get their throats cut by migrants (which Trump actually said yesterday). Voters deserve to hear how fucked things are and how fucked things are getting and they deserve to know Harris is going to work to unfuck it and Trump is going to ensure that they are fucked even more. 

It's more than just oil vs. wind or coal jobs vs. battery plant jobs. It's about communities and lives being wiped away.

Springfield, Ohio Is a Warning About a Second Trump Administration

As odious as the vast majority of her statements and her beliefs are, former Republican presidential candidate and winner of "Most Predictable Hypocrite of the Year" Nikki Haley did get something right about Donald Trump before her defiance crumbled. She spoke frequently about the "chaos" that follows in Trump's wide wake, like Godzilla without the personality marching through Tokyo again. She even had an ad called "More Chaos," where the narrator says things like "The chaos that surrounds him is bad enough" and "with Trump it’s just more chaos." It's an apt, if relatively benign, word for the clusterfuck of madness, violence, hate, and stupidity that Trump brings to pretty much every situation. 

If you want an object lesson in that chaos, you can look at what Trump and his campaign to stay out of prison...sorry, for president has done to Springfield, Ohio. In just a couple of weeks, it went from a community that was more or less functioning, growing, even succeeding, because of the influx of migrants from Haiti to a tangle of anger, threats, and division. The Haitian migrants are there completely legally thanks to getting Temporary Protected Status from the Biden administration, which means that they can stay in the United States as long as that status is renewed (currently until August 2025). They got that status because of how violent and terrible things are in Haiti. The people there really are living with gangs taking over the place, unlike the bullshit that Trump tosses around about that kind of thing here. 

Why did 10-15,000 Haitians (not the 32,000 that Trump is stupidly tossing around) head to Springfield? Because they heard there were jobs that they could get and that the cost of living was low. That's it. It's that simple. It's no different than what any other immigrant ever wanted from this country. See, TPS is different than just letting migrants in while they await asylum claims going before a judge. The migrants under TPS can work. And that's what they did in a town that was on a downslide. They took jobs that were going unfilled. They opened businesses. They worked their asses off in this city of 58,000 and most of the people there were fine with them. Sure, there were motherfuckers because there are always motherfuckers, and, yes, tempers flared after one Haitian ran a stop sign in August 2023 and crashed his minivan into a school bus, killing one of the kids. When Trump and Vance started using the dead child as a prop weapon against immigrants in general, the boy's father told them, in essence, to keep his son's name out of their filthy whore mouths. But mostly, everyone, including the Republican mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio, saw the influx of migrants as a positive, as an opportunity to make the place grow economically. Indeed, employers are thrilled to have the migrants, with some saying they would have had to close down because of the lack of workers.

And then Trump and Vance fucked it all up by bringing chaos to Springfield. They fucked it up by latching onto a hysterical, third-hand Facebook lie about migrants eating people's pets. You know they have have pets in Haiti, right? Just like people everywhere? Then it expanded to ducks and geese from the parks being taken and eaten. Again, none of it, not a single goddamn case, turned out to be true. But that didn't slow Trump, Vance, and all the MAGA masturbators from spewing hate jizz in the faces of the people of Springfield, like the goddamn Attorney General of Ohio, who has been kissing Trump's ass like it's made of candy and money. The truth didn't fucking matter, not even when Trump got fact-checked during his debate with Kamala Harris. 

He doubled down and expanded the hatred of [non-white] immigrants, and skeevy simp JD Vance went right along with it, declaring that even though the Haitians are here legally, he considers TPS an illegal program (that Trump used to protect Venezuelan migrants - no, really) and thus the Haitians are "illegal aliens" to him. Except you can't fucking do that. You can't just jabber out some bullshit and say that's reality now. They are here legally until that legal status is rescinded by assholes like Trump and Vance. One dick's rhetoric doesn't change that fact.

Every single fucking thing they accused the Haitians of turned out to be a lie. Vance said the Haitians caused more communicable diseases. But according to the Wall Street Journal, "Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015." They said that the Haitians are causing more car accidents. However, the number of car accidents in Springfield has declined in the years since the migrants have arrived, reaching a five-year low. They said that the Haitians cause more crime. The county jail has 199 people in it right now. Two of them are Haitian migrants. None of it is true. Not a single goddamned thing.

And the result of all of these lies is that the anti-immigrant right has turned life in Springfield to shit. No,  again, it wasn't perfect. Obviously, a surge in people moving to a town, no matter where they're from or what their race is, is going to tax the resources of said town, and that has certainly happened. But, for the most part, that was being worked on. 

Instead of steady progress, Donald Trump and JD Vance have plunged Springfield into a fucking nightmare of death threats and bomb threats against schools and hospitals and public buildings, taking away more resources from the town. Yes, the threats have been hoaxes, but you still have to have evacuations and securing the location because you don't want to be wrong if it turns out to be real. Events large and small have been cancelled, like a Culturefest and an art project that were supposed to celebrate the diversity of Springfield. Or a debate between candidates for local and state offices, which was to be held in city hall, the site of several bomb threats. 

The Haitian community is frightened, as you imagine, with some saying that they're afraid of leaving their homes. By the way, home prices are rising because one of the things the Haitian migrants do is buy shitty houses and refurbish them. Yeah, they are directly making Springfield a wealthier town. 

And imagine how fucked this must be for the kids in Springfield. Forced out of their schools and back into online classes for the past week, now funding has been diverted to make the school buildings more secure so the kids can return to the classroom on Monday. More childless cat ladies have given a shit about the kids in Springfield than self-proclaimed champion of children JD Vance has. 

The fuckery is not ending, not with Trump promising to visit, despite pleas for him not to. Bottom-feeding child of immigrant parents Vivek "Fuckboi" Ramaswamy held a town hall in Springfield, and every kind of racist backwards-ass fucknut showed up to say how bad the Haitians are. Everything they said was a repetition of a lie they heard from Trump, Vance, and right-wing media twatfleas. And that’s the point, isn't it? Nobody cared about this shit and then Trump and Vance started talking about it and now because a small group of people listened to those fuckheads, they have made this something that we’re supposed to give a shit about. They essentially willed the problems into being. And now all these assholes are giving a shit about something they didn’t give a shit about before, but the only thing that they are right about is that there are Haitians living in Springfield. Beyond that? Nothing. 

It's chaos and it's terrorism, purely and simply. MAGA is a terrorist movement, and we should be treating it as such. Trump and Vance know exactly what their idiot hordes of voters and their conservative media click whores will do when they say something. It's ludicrous when they pretend they don't. And what's going on in Springfield is a warning about the chaos of a second Trump term. Think about what happens if he's reelected, rescinds TPS status, and deports all of Springfield's migrants. The city would be decimated. Businesses would close. Home prices would plummet. The city would die or need a massive amount of aid.

And that's just the beginning. If they can do this to Springfield, they can do it to any decently-sized town they want. Hell, if they start rounding up all immigrants that either are here undocumented, or the ones who are here legally who they just fucking declare need to be deported, it would fuck up the economies of so many places. Or the entire nation, really. 

Trump's doing this because he fucking well can because no one is trying to use legal means to stop him. He is knowingly causing terrorism. He doesn't care how many kids are scared, how many people are hurt, how much it makes communities take economic hits. He doesn't care if he turns neighbor against neighbor. He would rather all that happen than declare he is wrong. His ego is more important than your life. In his quest to get reelected and avoid prison, he will gladly drag all of us down with him. He will make you cater to his racism and his hatreds or he'll make life a living hell for you. He will sow divisiveness and chaos because it benefits him. 

By the way, before you think Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine is some kind of profile in courage, he says that he still supports Trump for president and he refused to call what Trump is saying "a lie" because "I don’t know what’s inside his head." So, you know, ultimately, they're all totally fine with this shit.

The Joy of Watching Kamala Harris Beat Down an Old Man

It's not hyperbolic to say that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, beat the shit out of former president (no, really, he was once president. Of the whole United States) and current GOP nominee Donald Trump at last night's debate. She didn't just get the best of him, throwing down genuine facts and insulting observations in equal measure. She beat him down in a way that he probably hasn't been beaten down since his hideous father likely pounded him. She degraded his record, reduced his presence, and obliterated his talking points. She was, to this incredibly biased observer, near perfect in her execution of the execution of Trump's ego. Harris fucked him up good. 

And, goddamn, we needed it. We needed to see someone say exactly who he is with clarity and energy, someone willing to go there, to all those weird and dangerous alleyways where his brain resides, and someone willing to call the Devil "the Devil" to his stupid, evil face. The dichotomy was stark. She's smart; he's dumb. She's poised; he's belligerent. She gives a damn; he couldn't fucking care less. She's lively; he's a fucking lump.

On that last point, Trump barely physically moved the entire debate. It was weird, like he was a mannequin. He looked at Harris very few times. The biggest motions he made were to lean into the mic for emphasis on some moronic point or other or to contort the mushy flesh of his face into a shit-eating grin. Gravity has not been kind to Trump. Always a frowner, his jowls are now pulled earthward by time and weight into a bullfrog-like permanent scowl awaiting a chance to bellow.

Meanwhile, Harris, at her lectern, danced around him with the physical lightness and fierce confidence of a boxer who knows exactly when and where to punch. She baited him constantly, and he fell into every single trap. And when he fell, she hogtied him again and again, like a rodeo cowboy who lassoed a steer. Unlike that steer, which might learn to not leave the pen after a few hog-tyings, Trump would rush out crazily every time, only to end up with his hooves in the air. 

On substance, it was laughable to watch Harris, an accomplished, experienced woman who worked her ass off to get where she is, go up against a convicted felon and rapist whose TV celebrity and blatant racism inspired the worst fucking people in the country to vote for him. You were literally seeing a prosecutor take on a game show host and it went exactly like you'd think that would go.

Every time Trump lied, she tore him a new asshole. When he said, "Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote," she ripped into him about the suffering that the end of guaranteed abortion rights has brought to women in places where it's banned. When he refused to answer whether or not he'd support Ukraine in its war with Russia, she gutted him by saying that he would let Russia have Ukraine and "Putin would be sitting in Kiev with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland. And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor" and talked about how world leaders think he's a fucking joke, an easily flattered bitch boy. By the end, she had torn so many new assholes in him that he'll be shitting out of his arms, legs, and chest for months.

And when Trump would say something completely divorced from reality, Harris would smile as if she thought it was time to give Gramps his pudding cup, shut off Fox "news," and tuck him in. He couldn't deal with her constant emasculation of him. You could see his brain, which is always ready to overheat from the slightest usage, short circuit when she brought up how people leave his rallies because they're bored or when she pointed out all the people who worked with him who fucking despise him now. Once that happened, he couldn't get control again. 

By the way, bragging that you fire people you just hired a few months or a year before isn't the own he thinks it is. It just says that you suck at management. 

But the most disturbing part of the debate was how Trump brings every fucking issue back to his warped view of immigration. Harris nailed it early on when she said, "I’ll tell you something, he’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight, even when it’s not the subject that is being raised."And she was right. Jobs? "We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they’re coming in and they’re taking jobs that are occupied right now by African-Americans and Hispanics and unions." His rallies? "What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States." January 6? "I ask what about all the people that are pouring into our country and killing people that she allowed to pour in?" Trump was flailing and always returned to this well. It's like watching the world's stupidest gorilla fall out of a tree again and again and instead of giving up, he shits in his hand and rubs his face with it, thinking it shows how strong he is when all it does is make him have a face full of shit.

The other thing that's clear is the only source of information for Trump is right-wing media because it is constantly fawning over him.  At one point, he cited "Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse, all of these people" for debunking something. The whole "Haitians eat pets" thing came from click-seeking bullshitters on the right and no one who isn't terminally online would understand a single fucking thing about that (trust me - I've had more than a few people ask, "What the fuck?"). When he was fact-checked on that by moderator David Muir, Trump said one of the most pathetic things I've ever heard a grown up say, let alone someone running for president: "But the people on television are saying their dog was eaten by the people that went there." I'd go into hiding from embarrassment, but I'm capable of feeling shame. 

There were too many idiotic things that Trump said to mention. When he said about Putin, "He’s got nuclear weapons. They don’t ever talk about that. He’s got nuclear weapons. Nobody ever thinks about that," I thought, "Yeah, they do, motherfucker. If he didn't have nukes, NATO would have bombed him into submission." When he said that Democrats wouldn't vote "to change" the Affordable Care Act, I thought, "No, motherfucker. The bill wasn't to change anything. It was to get rid of it and then hope your replacement plan might go beyond the concept stage at some point."

Harris has faced so many smarter, sharper, quicker opponents. It was a joy to see her treat him like the skeevy corner masturbator that he is. 

And, yeah, I know, I know, I fucking know that this debate didn't change many minds. One thing I hear often about what I write is that I'm preaching to the choir. And my response is always the same: "The choir deserves to be preached to. That's why they go to church all the time." If I were to expand on the metaphor, I'd say that there is always a chance that a few sinners will come into the church and get religion. That's not the only reason to preach, but it sure as hell is nice when it happens. 

Harris's evisceration of Trump and the entire empty charade of MAGA ideology might sway a few people in the narrow swath of voters who are still persuadable. But the real accomplishment was in pumping up the rest of us, we the choir, and getting us geared up to get out there and work to make this presidency happen and end the tyranny of Trump's drain on our national spirit. She showed us how to handle it: with the sword of muted rage and a dagger of a smile. 

Note to Corporate Media: You Don't Have to Act Like Trump and Vance Are Serious People

Let us say, and why not, that Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz is asked about his GOP counterpart and declares in an interview, "JD Vance's whole purpose in this world is to blow goats." When asked what he means, Walz could clarify, "I mean that Senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has one reason for living, and that's to suck goat dick. His entire life would be unfulfilled and he will be miserable if he doesn't fellate goats on a regular basis. And I mean the whole act. From gently tongue-bathing the goat's enormous testicles to bring it to full erection and then going down on that straw-sized dick until it ejaculates in his mouth. A goat dick-less JD Vance has no real value system or meaning in his life and he would have chosen a path to misery."

How should the major media outlets react to such an absurd thing? Would CNN ask Vance if Walz is correct? Would they have a panel discussion on the idea that orally pleasuring goats is Vance's purpose? Would commentators on the left quickly agree with Walz and insist that Vance's lack of blowing goats clouds his judgment and the only way he can be a contributing member of society and not some sad goatless dude is to take the goat jizz regularly? Would other Democrats praise Walz for being brave enough to say the truth about Vance and goat blowing? 

The answer is "Of fucking course not." It would be treated as deranged and baffling, as sign of Walz's unfitness for office and of the depravity of Democrats. The condemnation would be general and widespread, including from Democrats, likely leading to Walz being forced to drop off the Democratic ticket. Oh, sure, there would be some of us (me) who would defend Walz for being fucking hilarious. But we know that the outragegasm would be unending, and no reporter would ever let Harris or any Democrat get away with not constantly responding to it. Some things are beyond the pale, and they should be. There should be some things that politicians say that are disqualifying. 

Like, I dunno, maybe being on record constantly that women only have value and worth in American society if they breed. See, it's not just that JD Vance has said and keeps saying shit like that a woman who emphasizes her career is a "miserable person who can’t have kids because [she] already passed the biological period when it was possible." It's that the Most Important Newspapers and other media treat Vance and Donald Trump like they are Very Serious People with Very Serious Ideas that need Very Serious Consideration when, actually, no, they absolutely do not. Anyone espousing a philosophy that says that women who don't give birth to children are innately unhappy or that people without kids don't have a serious stake in the future of the world is an obvious fool and kind of a dick. 

We don't need reporting about how saying such nonsense affects voters. We need journalists saying that none of that is true and no one should believe it. It's that recent canard that if you have one person saying it's raining and the other person saying it's not, it's the journalist's job to open the goddamn window and tell everyone what's real. If someone is saying completely untrue shit, it's actually objective reporting to say that what they're saying is completely untrue shit. And it's completely valid to question other Republicans about what Vance has said and not let them get away with avoiding whether or not they think "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female" is to help take care of grandchildren.

Last Thursday, in another of his rambling bullshit sessions, this time for the poor suckers in Potterville, Michigan, Trump went on a rant using the lie about transgender women at the Olympics: "You see the boxing in the Olympics, two transitioned people, they transitioned from men to women, did you see? Fighting, a young, beautiful Italian boxer, top boxer, they thought big things from her. And then bing. A left jab, just a jab. She go, 'Whoa, what? I just got hit with a horse.' Again, bing. She said, 'I’m out.' She quit. She couldn’t take it. Two punches. The second one likewise got into the ring with a couple of very talented women, just beat the hell out of them. They both won the gold medal, shockingly."

Trump likes to say that all of his incoherent, disorganized storytelling is called "the weave" by English professors and he says it has a point. Let me assure you, as an English professor (no, really), it's not called that. The only weaving is Trump creating fiction out of lies and the point is to spread hateful propaganda. News media should report that he's lying and then figure out if it's intentional or if he's fucked in the head or both.

There is no realm where this or anything Trump says needs to be taken seriously except as evidence of how delusional he is. And also how confused. In that same speech, without anything that anchored it to what he had been talking about, Trump seemed to swing into talking about his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton: "And look, we did something that they’re very angry about. We beat somebody that should have been beaten in an election that we weren’t anticipated to win. But I thought we were going to win, because I came to Michigan the night before. We had 49,000 people. She came to Michigan the night before because she was told she may lose it. And this was an upset, so they had a fast tour. She had like 300 people. I said, 'Why would we lose?' We had the crowd you wouldn’t have believed it." 

Prior to this he was talking about electric cars and then, I think, President Biden at the Democratic National Convention. After this he introduced a soldier who was there supporting him. At no point did he mention Clinton. "She" in that quote is simply not defined. Can you show me a single moment from Biden where his brain seemed to leap to something so out out of context it was like he was giving another speech? No, you can't. 

The fact that the GOP ticket consists of an elderly man plainly declining mentally and a guy who lies about women in order to enslave them to childbirth and child care is the story that needs to be covered and simply isn't. And if it turns out that JD Vance is blowing goats, yes, that deserves some mention, too.

(Note: At the beginning, am I comparing having children to goat fellatio? Yes. Yes, I am.)

(Note 2: You are so right. I could have gone with couch-fucking. But, to me, that joke is played out, like a loveseat with too many secret sex holes.)

(Note 3: Yes, there is a cynical side of me which says that, of course, CNN would act like goat-blowing is now worthy of discussion because we'd all click on the clips of that panel to watch odious Scott Jennings talk about how goats need love.)

(Note 4: I couldn't figure out where to put this line, but I liked it, so here it is: "When Walz is asked if he would do anything to help JD Vance blow goats, like buy him a goat or bring him to a goat farm, Walz can put up his hands and say, 'Whoa, whoa, let's not get carried away.'")

A Poem for the Laborers

"Resistors"
by Brandon Som

"I just felt like he was fighting us with his machine."
             —Nellie Jo David

In Guadalajara to see where Motorola took the line
            my grandmother worked on, I can’t find the site
but spend the days in naves of a deconsecrated church

looking up at frescoes by Orozco. Here is a horse:
            a tow chain for tail, train piston for hock & hoof.
Over murdered Mexica, Cortez stands: lug nut hips

& kneecaps, gauntleted hand at the sword hilt, silver
            as a knot of solder. Opposite him: the Franciscan
& his Latin cross—miter-sawed angles hewn down

to dagger point—& an angel in assembly-line armor
            lifting a bloodied banner with the stenciled letters
of an alphabet, the one I must have started learning,

sing-song in the pitch & timbre of milk teeth, at 48th
            & Willetta, a one-bedroom duplex west of Papago’s
greasewood & buttes of sandstone & a block down

from the Motorola where my grandmother punched
            in nights to look after a conveyor of semiconductors—
those nascent ancient rotaries strung up to starlight

& empire (gaslighting like that Gast painting of progress
            & whiteness wrapped in telegraph wire, lithe & looping
as cake shop box string). No wall on O’odham land,

I hear the woman today protest from the bucket
            of a front-end loader—a Caterpillar, by her presence,
dumbstruck on tread wheels tall as vault doors, its maw

metal hollow, a confessional or old Mountain Bell
            phone booth she stepped into amid the felled saguaro
& ribs of organ pipe. Her body where dirt goes says

her body is the land the wall wants to eat. I stream this—
            download by data plan, by bandwidth, from the cloud
servers deep in their grid deserts to the crystalline

& rare earth minerals making my cell phone
            black box theater, making her code, making her
algorithm—both soprano & Mario Savio—the solder

seemingly quantum leap from soldada & solidarity.
            Still, I remember the ram’s horn baritone in my nana’s
King James, imagine her driving those years with riders

to shepherd the sound through solid state & know
            the harder truth: the defiant mic this woman makes,
resonates with her body beneath the digger’s teeth.