The Only Way to Talk About the Iran War Is to Say the US Needs to Stop

Over in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the always smart Will Bunch has a column out this week that warns that our current Iran clusterfuck is already reminiscent of our Vietnam clusterfuck and is already a lost cause: "We should still take one lesson from Vietnam. We should face the honest, painful truth. It took America 20 tortured years, an unspeakable death toll, and finally the image of desperate people climbing toward helicopters on an embassy roof to acknowledge the bitter reality that our nation had lost a war. Today, it’s clear after less than two weeks there won’t even be a premature 'Mission Accomplished' banner for Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s irrational gambit in Iran. Victory is unattainable, and arguably we have lost a war." It's a harsh acknowledgement, something anyone without their head stuck up the asses of Fox "news" bullshitters and craven right-wing podcasters already sensed from the frantic spinning of this colossal fuckup by Trump and his administration spokesworms. 

We know that one thing that turned the tide in this country against the Vietnam War was mainstream media finally stating the clear fact that this was a losing cause and American soldiers were dying for no reason. Yes, it took 7 years from when Walter Cronkite made his post-Tet Offensive commentary in 1968 for the war to finally end with the chaos of the fall of Saigon in 1975, but it set the tone for media coverage from then on. And while we no longer have a unifying news figure like Cronkite in our exploded information ecosystem, it would fucking well help if legacy (or corporate or mainstream or whatever goddamn adjective you wanna use) media didn't act in any way like this is some normal shit going on right now. 

Look at the New York Times, for instance. Yes, they have opinion pieces condemning (and supporting) the war and reporting on how Trump just bumblefucked into Iran with no idea what the fuck he was doing. But then there will be articles that simply treat this like it's a justified war and not the ego trip of a madman who doesn't give a shit about soldiers dying. Like this one: "How a Marine Unit in the Middle East Could Open New Phase of Iran War." It's mostly Pentagon propaganda about how the Marines would be used, quoting one defense expert explaining that "the Pentagon will be able to quickly launch raids onto the islands with infantry Marines who will have logistics and air support," and fuck that. Another way to frame the article is to say that Trump is putting Americans into a deadly situation for no reason. For nothing. That the entire "excursion" is a futile use of funding and lives and it's wrong to even contemplate escalating and not withdrawing. 

Even seemingly critical reporting is in the context that this war is somehow justified. Over on NBC News, an article titled "Trump wants other countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That might not be so easy" lays out how other countries are feeling about joining the war effort. Only once does the piece mention the easiest fucking way to reopen the strait: the United States can end the fucking war. And that's from a quote from the Energy Secretary of the UK: "the best and most conclusive way to get the Strait reopened is to get this conflict to come to an end," which leaves open who is responsible and who could stop it now. It's like you're burning down a forest with a flamethrower while trying to put out the blaze, and a reporter talks about how it's doubtful anyone is going to help you without saying, "Oh, hey, shut off the goddamn flamethrower. That's an option, too."

Democrats are falling into the trap, too, of being opposed to Trump but not firmly saying to fucking leave and try to put out all leftover fires and flareups before the whole forest is burnt down. Instead of having a unified call to cease operations for, again, another war based on lies that most everyone knows are lies, Democratic members of Congress are criticizing Trump and masturbating shitheel Pete Hegseth for not having "a plan." If you ask for a plan, that means you think a plan is possible. If you think a plan is possible, that infers that the war is, in some way, justified when it fucking well isn't. Or they call for an investigation and that "we need answers." No. What we fucking need, what well over half of the American public wants is no war. I mean, they took a vote on trying to stop it without congressional authorization. It failed, but they're on record against the war, so act like it.

Some Democrats, like AOC and Sen. Chris Murphy, are being crystal clear on the need to bring the troops home and stop attacking Iran. One high point of stupidity here was when Murphy was talking to CNN's Jake "Resting sneer face" Tapper. Last Sunday, Tapper asked Murphy about voting against an expected $50 billion in funding for the war. Murphy said he wouldn't support it, and Tapper said that might be seen as "voting against the troops." To his credit, Murphy didn't bite on the old canard that not supporting the killing of troops for maniacal reasons is the same as not supporting the troops. He said, "If you support the troops, then you should vote against this war so that we get our troops out of harm’s way. Virtually nothing good happened from sending thousands of Americans to die in Iraq in the 2000s and if we don’t learn that lesson then shame on every single one of us." 

See, we don't have to go all the way back to Vietnam for the lesson, although it was a much, much bloodier one for the US. We were just fucking here, in a quagmire, pretending like we knew what we were doing, with leaders who thought it would be a cakewalk and learning too late that those who counseled caution were right. We were just fucking here 15 years ago. I know memories are short and attention spans are fading, but, fucking hell, our media and our Democratic leaders need to be clear that this is an insultingly worthless waste of lives (American and Iranian and Lebanese and...), of money, and it's going to fuck things up for another generation. 

But, hell, it'll give Democrats something else to run on. And with FCC dickscab Brendan Carr threatening the licenses of broadcasters who speak ill of the war, maybe it's time to tell this administration to go fuck itself with its threats. Hell, it's not like they've gamed out the consequences of any of their actions.

(I just wanna add one thing: I'm pushing 60 years on this goddamned planet. There has not been a single fucking war or military intervention in my lifetime that wasn't based on lies or exaggerated bullshit. Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and now Iran, none of them were worth a single life. None of them were about protecting the United States or defending an ally who was attacked. It's pathetic that we keep doing this. It's pathetic that people still support leaders who do this.)

Living in and Paying for Trump's Fake World

This week, we got word that the Justice Department is finding it impossible to move forward on the autopen case against former President Joe Biden. See, current President Donald Trump thinks Biden didn't use the autopen correctly. Specifically, Trump believes that Biden was so out of it that the autopen was used to sign pardons that he was unaware of. Trump wants those pardons rescinded and people punished for this "crime." 

It should go without saying that Biden wasn't actually completely brain dead and still isn't; Biden's alleged mental incapacity is just a basic belief of the MAGA mob at this point, something that apparently every cabinet member is required to say at every appearance. Also, all those pardons, like for Gen. Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and Biden's son, Hunter, are of people that Trump wants to hurt because he thinks they made him look bad or just because, and the pardon is in the way. 

The reason the DOJ is having such a problem is that prosecutors can't find a crime to charge Biden or his aides with. And, when it comes to President Biden, the Supreme Court's utter disgrace of a decision granting presidents immunity from prosecution for things done in office doesn't just apply to Trump, even if it always seems that way with this court. But, of course, there was never anything there, just like there was never anything there with the case against six Democratic members of Congress who made the video that told soldiers not to follow illegal orders, just like there's no case against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell or James Comey or Letitia James. None of these are legitimate. They are merely vehicles for Trump to get vengeance on or harm people who don't go along with everything he wants or who want to hold him to account for breaking the law.

Think for a moment about the amount of time and money wasted on these investigations: the work hours, the use of materials, and, in some cases, the time of the grand juries. It's not simply that MAGA cretins support Trump in contorting the DOJ into his own private legal army to go after heretics and unbelievers. It's that they believe that all of those people have committed crimes worthy of prosecution by the federal government because Trump has told them they have. 

That's how we live now. So much of what the government does is because it's responding to Trump's warped delusions or to affirm the lies that he needs people to believe. Take the 2020 election, for instance.  Essentially the first tenet of the MAGA faith is that Trump won the 2020 election and it was stolen from him due to some combination of foreign interference, Democratic cheating, outright fraud, and possibly the devil. There is no evidence for this and it has been adjudicated literally dozens of times. But the federal government is currently spending millions of dollars "investigating" the election, including the FBI seizing the records of Fulton County, Georgia, to look for this alleged fraud. That's for a state where the election was run by Republicans, just not Republicans willing to throw their workers under the Trumpian bus. It's a lie, it's an illusion, and it's now the agenda of several agencies to "prove" this fantasy. 

Every major thing being done by this administration is happening because Trump wants to force us to exist in his fake world, the one where he's always right, anyone who opposes him is an enemy seeking his destruction, and everyone needs to be grateful that he's taking care of the joint. When I talk about the sheer amount of money being wasted on this effort, I'm not including the corruption that has enriched Trump and his family and other close to him. I'm talking about all the funds being wasted in our name.

The heartbreaking death and destruction of our "war" on Iran is part of this. It's all based on lies and delusions, delusions that go back to 1979, when Trump, like many wannabe hawks, reacted to the Islamic Revolution and the kidnapping of Americans by demanding that the US bomb Tehran into oblivion. Everything around the evolving reasoning for the war is an extension of this fake reality. Iran wasn't remotely close to building a nuclear weapon. Iran wasn't on the verge of bombing Israel. Everything is nonsense, but we're at war because Trump believes in it all. Or makes a good enough show at believing it.

Like I said, this is how we live now. We exist at this nexus between actual reality and a false MAGA reality. The problem is that the latter is where we're forced to fight. So it might be in actual reality that virtually all immigrants, documented or not, are hard-working members of communities who make the nation a better place and deserve the chance to become citizens. But in MAGA reality, most are violent criminals who want to cut white teenage girls to pieces. In order to get to act on what's really at stake, the fake stuff needs to be defeated. So we can't even get to immigration reform until we get over the mass deportations and ICE insanity. False reality is wrecking actual reality.

If you want a measure of how far we've slipped, there's this: On Saturday, at 4 in the morning, a plaque was installed near an entrance to the Capitol in DC. That plaque honors the members of law enforcement who defended the building during the insurrection of January 6, 2021. A law was passed by Congress in March 2022 mandating the installation of the plaque by March 2023 (Republicans took back the House in November 2022). Instead, the thing sat in the basement as Trump and the GOP contorted the reality of January 6, turning a violent riot by marauding idiots determined to keep their racist/rapist president in power into, as Trump puts it, "a day of love." The police who were there, getting beaten and maced, with over 140 injured and 4 committing suicide because of injuries and effects of that day, became seen not as the heroes they were, but as traitors to the MAGA reality, condemned, threatened, and demeaned. 

It points to something else that is chilling about all this policy based on unreality; it's as chilling as an HHS policy that will kill children, it's as chilling as the end of USAID causing deaths by the hundreds of thousands, it's as chilling as the war with Iran where the goal seems to be mass murder and suffering, and it's as chilling as the cruel and callous version of reality that the MAGA movement wants to impose on us. It's that Trump and the MAGA cretins don't care who gets hurt in order to make the world to fit their warped vision, and that includes children at a school in Iran and it includes us. In fact, Trump, the odious Pete Hegseth, their manosphere lackeys, all seem to thrill at the deaths that have happened and the potential for many more. 

This is beyond the fact that Republicans make policies based on lies. This is about forcing a certain kind of thinking, a faith as delusional as the followers of the Supreme Leader in Iran have. The question is how the fantasists will react when actual reality comes crashing in, as it will. Wars never go how you think. Court cases can keep maintaining some adherence to facts. But as long as Trump keeps forcing the entire operation of the government to act and react according to whatever beliefs he pulls out of his aggrieved, diseased brain or the phantoms that plague him, like his 2020 loss, we will not be free of the fake reality. And we'll have to keep paying for its continued existence.

(Note: I'm not saying that "both sides lies" because I can't think of a single lie or delusion that Democrats have believed while in power that so contorted the operation of the government.)

Random Observations on a Rapist Shitbag Farting Loudly

If rapist, convicted felon, and President Donald Trump had waddled up to the front of the House chamber last night and told the gathered Republican senators and representatives that they needed to masturbate furiously during his speech, every single one of those men and women would have unzipped or plunged their hands into their pants and gone at themselves. He could have said, "You better be thinking about me and I better see you cum," and they would have thrust into themselves, jacking it and rubbing it as they chanted, "USA!" over and over, as if they were humping an American flag like Trump did so many times. It wouldn't matter what Trump said, what open lies he told, what taunts and threats he made, what fascistic fantasies he spun out, what racism he expressed again and again, how out of it and bored by the effort he was, how he couldn't stop himself from not shutting the fuck up already, it just didn't matter to the GOP. Trump told them that the only way to show how much they loved him was by jizzing and squirting and moaning. As they started to orgasm, as ejaculations dribbled limply or shot into the backs of heads, as the women screamed in real and fake pleasure to show their loyalty, Trump might smirk, loving how much he controlled them, how he can still make them rub one out for him. The only things keeping Trump alive at this point are the chance to harm more powerless people and the delusional sycophancy of everyone around him.

At the end of the night, insatiable coprophage Stephen Miller and diligent dumbass investigators on Twitter would have noted which few Republicans didn't end up cumming, and they would be attacked on social media as RINOs, as having insufficient loyalty, as pathetic tools of Democrats. And speaking of, it wouldn't have mattered how disgusted Democrats were at the self-fucking Republicans. Anything they had to say would be sneered at on Fox "news" and other right-wing Trump-fellating networks, with Lindsey Graham declaring that he never came as hard in his entire life or Karoline Leavitt saying that every American she heard from said that they were proud their member of Congress spanked it for their president, who works harder than any has ever worked and should be honored this way. It was a waste of time for any Democrats to be present. Don't go to the circle jerk if you're not jerking.

What would have been different, other than the poor maintenance crew needing to clean up? Not a goddamn thing. 

Anyways, here's a couple of lines from the "speech" (if by "speech," you mean, "A poorly-constructed, tedious forced march through a phantasmagoric hellscape inside a decaying brain") that struck me as particularly fucked up.

1. For most of the thing, Trump didn't veer off into his usual crazed claims about the 2020 election being stolen. But one line referenced it and did it in an ominous way. He said, "So in my first year of the second term... Should be in my third term, but strange things happen..." That weirdness doesn't just imply that he still thinks he won in 2020. It's also him seeming to say that having a third term is possible. which, you know, fuck that.

2. Trump used the cherry-picked story of Sage Blair, a Virginia teen who was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, to attack trans kids in general. He explained that she was 14 "when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents." This is a minor point in a much bigger discussion, but Trump makes it sound like this took place in some crazy liberal area. It was in Appomattox County, which went for Trump by 50 points over Harris in 2024. In other words, Republicans were making these decisions. 

3. The motherfucker loves his blood and murder tales. He graphically described the killings of two young women by undocumented migrants, one of the most blatant ways to stir up racial anger and violence, going into details that were entirely over-the-top. There was Lizbeth Medina, whose mother "found her lying dead in a bathtub, bleeding profusely after being stabbed 25 times." There was Irina Zarutska, whose killer "viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body." Trump went even further, with Irina's mother sitting there, describing, "No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Irina's face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life." I mean, what the fucking fuck purpose does that serve? "Hey, Ms. Zarutska, I want you to think about the pain and panic and helplessness your daughter felt as she died." Sick flaccid cock of a president.

If I'm being honest, I just don't give a shit about this speech, and neither should you. The one thing that's actually in my head right now is the blatant coverup of Trump's sex crimes by the Department of Justice. Files related to a 2019 FBI interview with a victim who accused Trump of truly heinous shit are missing from the Jeffrey Epstein material. It's a felony to lie to the FBI, but the memos assessing the woman's account after repeated interviews are missing, too. I have a feeling that if they "totally and completely exonerated" Trump, we'd see them. 

So, you know, fuck his speech. Appoint a special counsel to investigate him. We know he's a rapist. Now tell us if he's a child rapist. Because that's who the GOP is jacking it to.

Conservatives Are Cowards About American History

Over in Munich a week ago, Secretary of State and man who looks like what an old sweat sock smells like, Marco Rubio, gave a speech where he related a fantasy version of the history of immigrants in the United States. He lied about Columbus, he lied about the first European settlements, he lied about how German immigrants were treated, he lied and lied and lied some more. He turned a complex, often dark tale that hinges on slavery and genocide into a happy little story of white people doing everything right and good and noble. Seriously, he didn't even mention the role that Black people played in the actual building of the nation. He didn't say the word "immigrant." It was like listening to some guy tell you that he's fucked all these women, but he leaves out that he's a rapist. (For more on Rubio's speech, head over to my Patreon.)

This isn't just a different perspective on American history. It's not looking at it and emphasizing the good over the bad or some such shit. It's not even revisionism because then you'd expect some remnants of the previous draft of history there. No, this is erasure. It's a bleaching of the complicated, racially-diverse journey this country has been on. It's like the Epstein files, with entire blocks just retracted, like we're not allowed to know or discuss what's really there. The Trump administration, along with the right-wing fucknut ecosystem, is in the midst of a spree of neutering, eliminating, or otherwise transforming the way in which history is presented and discussed, and, goddamnit, they're gonna force all of us to learn it like the good little Nazis they want the remaining population to be.

They're defacing memorials and museums, making them jingoistic and masturbatory. A federal judge this week called out Trump's fuckery in removing information panels that were displayed at the President's House in Philadelphia. The exhibit talked about the lives of the enslaved people owned by George Washington when he lived there. The bastards had taken the panels down in January and the city sued, saying, among other things, the contract the federal government had with the city said that the house couldn't be changed without the city's permission. U.S. District Court Judge Cynthia Rufe (it shouldn't need to be said, but she's a Republican appointed by W. Bush) compared Trump's actions to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984. Excoriating the defense attorneys for saying, in essence, that the government can control any message it wants, Rufe writes, "The government...asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power...An agency, whether the Department of the Interior, NPS, or any other agency, cannot arbitrarily decide what is true, based on its own whims or the whims of the new leadership, regardless of the evidence before it."

And, in one beautiful moment before ordering that the panels be restored, Rufe gets in a dig at Trump. She says of Washington that his "presence presiding over the Constitutional Convention graced it with the gravitas and spirit necessary to the creation of our government’s foundational document, and his restraint and modesty radiated strength and wisdom that defines the ideal chief executive to this day." Donald Trump radiates rage heat and shit odor and defines everything that's wrong with the country and the world. Of course, the government is appealing.

This erasure is happening elsewhere, with removals of information about the way indigenous tribes were pushed off land at the Grand Canyon and the Pride flag at the Stonewall memorial. Hell, they're even going after an exhibit on Brown v. Board of Education because it mentions "equity." Imagine.

The bullshit extends to other areas of the government. Brendan Carr, FCC Chair and man most likely to secretly spank it to Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl while whipping himself, has put out a document "encouraging" broadcasters to get more "patriotic" for the 250th birthday of the United States. He wants stations to start the day with the National Anthem or the Pledge of Allegiance. He says they should be "Airing music by America’s greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, or George Gershwin," which makes me think he knows nothing about 3 out of 4 of those composers. Aaron Copland was blacklisted by the State Department after lobbying from Joseph McCarthy. His passport was revoked in 1953, and his music was banned from libraries owned by the government. Even years later, in the late 1960s, conservatives would protest his appearances. As for Ellington and Gershwin, you might want to look at some of their works, especially Ellington's symphonies about the Black experience and Gershwin's satirical musicals mocking the US government and capitalism. All three of them were woke as fuck. 

Here's the thing: Conservatives are being whiny little bitches about history. You think that taking out all the horror stories makes it better? No, it makes it weak as the shits you take every time some non-white person talks to you like an equal. You're a fucking coward if you don't tell the whole story, shitty parts and all. You think it makes you more powerful to just say the good stuff. But it makes you pathetic because some of the good stuff is how we confronted and dealt with the bad shit.

Telling the truth about the country is patriotism. In her decision, Judge Rufe talks about one of Washington's enslaved people, Oney Judge, who escaped from bondage using the Underground Railroad. Rufe writes, "The President’s House displays recognized Oney Judge and focused on how her struggle for freedom represented this country’s progress away from the horrors of slavery and into an era where the founding ideals of 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness' could be embodied for every American." In order to celebrate ending slavery, you have to be honest about what slavery was and who was involved.

See, Trump and his MAGA cretins don't get that what makes America great isn't how white people did a bunch of shit. It's how all of us did a bunch of shit, good and evil, and somehow, at least prior to this vile administration, we were able to progress towards a more perfect union. What's patriotic is not to say you've gotta get down on your knees and blow Uncle Sam all the time. No, it's admitting that we've fucked up and we're trying to do better and we're gonna fail sometimes but at least we try. Or we did.

Of course, that's the opposite of everything these absolute pieces of garbage in the aptly-named White House believe. They can never admit error or complicity or guilt. They can never be held accountable, even in the telling of the story of what really happened. And that's why we cannot let them get away with gutting our past like they're gutting the present and murdering the future.

Taking Stock of How Very Fucked We Are

This has been a bad week for the future of (gestures at everything) the world. Decisions have been made that will fuck us for years, if not forever. As the savagery of the administration of Donald Trump, our rapist president, snowballs, as the 10,000 person concentration camp warehouses are purchased, as corruption of a scale that should make Warren G. Harding come back from the dead and sodomize Trump with his teapot dome happens on a daily basis, as the rights of speech and assembly and press are routinely flushed down the law enforcement toilet, it's become clear that if Trump isn't going to do anything good for the world to make sure he's remembered, he may as well wreck the joint so he's never forgotten, like a wound that will never heal. 

How fucked are we? Extremely. Just two examples:

We're fucked when it comes to fighting disease. This week, the Food and Drug Administration (motto: "For some reason, we're run by people who seem to hate both food and drugs") declined to review the application for an mRNA flu shot from Moderna. I'm not gonna pretend to know the science behind it, but mRNA vaccines are more effective and more easily updated, and a flu version would save a fuckton of lives. Oh, and the reason the FDA gave, having to do with how Moderna conducted its clinical trials, is a fucking lie. We can go fuck ourselves with our older, less effective vaccine, which you should totally still get, that our Department of Health and Human Services will not encourage anyone to get.

The extra-ironic part of the whole thing is how much the United States has invested in Moderna in order to get mRNA vaccines going. That includes billions of dollars in grants in 2020 to get a Covid vaccine done, which was done quickly because of all the research before, again, thanks to the United States. Remember Operation Warp Speed? Remember who was president then before he realized that he needed the love of the antivax nutzoids? That's fucked in the head, in the ass, everywhere.

How fucked is it? Even before this, because of the decisions of noted toilet seat coke snorter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Moderna had decided to not invest in any late-stage vaccine trials. Said the CEO, "You cannot ‍make a return on investment if you don't have access to the U.S. market." So that means that mRNA research on, say, vaccines for Lyme disease and HIV, is done at Moderna, as is, likely, the development of more effective cancer therapies. Also, the trials for a general norovirus vaccine, which would help prevent the next pandemic, may well be scuttled. It's just fucked. And it's one of those things that fucks us far into the future.

The question is also what is going to be permanently fucked, as in we'll never recover. Sure, we may one day catch up on where we should have been with medical research. But some shit never gets better. It's like the difference between breaking your arm and losing it in a giant meat grinder. In one of those situations, you are never going to be the same, no matter how cool your robot arm is. 

So it went when Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, another Trump administration official who looks at least 15 years older than he really is, smarmily announced that Trump was undoing President Obama's 2009 endangerment finding on greenhouse gases that led to regulation of emissions. It was an attempt by the Black president to do some goddamn good on the climate crisis, so, of course, in a White House filled with people for whom science is something you do when you saw the head off a beached whale for your own "research" and totally not so you can feel what it's like to fuck a whale skull, it had to go. 

The absolute dickish press release on it said, "The Trump EPA chooses consumer choice over posturing to climate change zealots every time." Apparently, simply believing in climate change makes you a zealot. I was going to quote from the press announcement from Trump and Zeldin, but just reading it made me want to throw the computer across the room. Just know that at one point, Trump dismisses any concerns about public health effects with "Don't worry about it because it has nothing to do with public health. This was all a scam, a giant scam. This was a ripoff of the country by Obama and Biden, and let's say Obama started it and got it rolling" and then he talks about prescription drug prices because of course he does.

It's the beginning of the end for the Clear Air Act, which is where the power to regulate greenhouse gases was found to come from by the Supreme Court in 2007. It's also of a piece with all the rollbacks of regulations and undermining of clean energy research and projects, with Trump's weird antagonism to windmills driving public policy. Instead, the Pentagon is being forced to purchase coal as a payoff to fossil fuel donors, and that's like saying, "Fuck satellites and cell phones. The military will now be investing in Morse code tappy things."

The laughable part of this EPA shit is the claim that it will save $1.3 trillion, a number that is an insult to asses to say that's where it was pulled out of. That will all come in the form of cheaper cars, which apparently is more important than a future for the planet. Emissions will grow until they are 3 times what they are now, according to one analysis. Beyond climate crisis weather, pollution will cause more death and illness, shit that, like measles, we thought we had mostly figured out how to move beyond (with some notably awful exceptions, like Cancer Alley in Louisiana). One estimate says it will cost $4.7 trillion in added expenses over the next two decades, and that's not even counting for the loss in research and innovation on other sources of power. As we're lapped by the Chinese and, well, just about every other industrialized economy on solar and wind and nuclear power, it will make us into the backwards third world shithole filled with dumbass white people, which I assume is when we'll be great again.

So, yeah, it's hard sometimes to comprehend how overwhelmingly fucked we are. But you gotta take stock and see where we are as we try to figure out how to unfuck some of this.

Trump's Goddamn Name

One of the more unpleasant things about living in the NYC area used to be that you were damned to see shit with the Trump name on it. That changed starting with Donald Trump's first election to the presidency. Then the people who lived at Trump Place on the west side of Manhattan pushed to have his big goddamn name taken off the front of the condo complex, and it was. They call it "Riverside South" now, which is what it was before Trump dick-stamped it. Used to be when you drove down the West Side Highway in the 70s, you passed a "Donald J. Trump" Adopt-a-Highway sign. That's gone, too. A lot of shit that Trump made agreements to hammer his goddamn name on no longer have that name there due to contracts not renewed and the fact that property values go down if that name is associated with it. 

It's one of those things that demonstrates what a moronic ego monster Trump is. He wants you to think his name is still associated with luxury (even if the supposed luxurious shit was never even remotely special) and success (which, well, other than tricking rubes into voting for him, raping girls and women, and laundering Russian oligarch cash, he isn't). And he wants some sense of permanence, a way to stay in this world even as he slips his morbidly obese mortal coil when he finally dies long after his expiration date.

Late last week, news came out that Trump made an offer to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a man who would fold with a full house in his hand. Back in October, Trump froze spending on an immensely needed new train tunnel between New Jersey and New York City, as well as expansion of the Second Avenue subway line. He then told Schumer he would release the billions of dollars if Schumer could get Washington, DC's Dulles Airport and New York's Penn Station named after him, Donald Trump. You got it? Critical infrastructure to the nation's largest city, which was delayed because another dickhead Republican, Chris Christie, had killed it, is being held hostage because the president of the United States needs to have his goddamn name plastered on it. He can't just do it himself, as he did with the Kennedy Center (which he really couldn't do by law, but it's not like anyone is gonna enforce the law with this chucklefuck) and the US Institute of Peace, just forcing his name on the buildings like they're 15 year-olds at Mar-a-Lago. 

Seriously, our simpleton president thinks his goddamn name needs to be on anything he's associated with, like he's spraying the furniture like a cat. It's like he saw "Obamacare" and thought, "I want that," forgetting that "Obamacare" was originally a derisive name that Republicans gave the Affordable Care Act because they thought it would fail. Now, like with his fake "university" and his garbage steaks, Trump keeps forcing the government to put his name on shit. There's Trump Accounts, which opens an account with $1000 in it for "every American child born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028." The funds don't come from Trump. They come from the US Treasury (with some donations). But Trump Accounts are what they're called, you unpatriotic twatmite. And there's TrumpRx, which purports to be some fantasy of cheap drugs with prices negotiated by the federal government, except the prices are easily lower elsewhere, and you aren't buying drugs from the government. No, that would be socialism, you commie leech. TrumpRx gives you a coupon with a discount code to take to your pharmacy, just like Good Rx or your local supermarket flyer. Indeed, Good Rx or Mark Cuban's website are cheaper than TrumpRx, which just seems to exist to funnel funds into Trump's gaping maw.

There is something so gut-level pathetic here, like Trump's pathological need to be loved has merged with his carnival barker scammer self and his fear of dying without leaving anything worth a fuck on this earth. But the other element here is the one that overrides everything, and that is his mob boss belief that everything he does needs to be some deal that is advantageous to him personally. "What are you going to do for me?" is the way his lizard brain operates, even if doing something for him has nothing to do with things like congressionally-appropriated funding for a desperately needed project. The corollary to that is "What have you done for me?" and that came out in a couple of dumps on Truth Toilet. There, he posted that he was approving disaster relief funds for Tennessee and Mississippi, both states, as he points out, "I won three times!" 

We can't live like this, with the whims of a single insane man determining who wins and who loses, with him insisting that we all must call everything associated with the federal government by his goddamn name. But we also can't live with this pathetic loser desperate to be recognized as having done something great because to do so is to reward him for lying. He made up wars that he "solved" to get his name on a Nobel Prize. He claims to have done "more" for the country than any president ever, a demonstrative falsehood as prices climb higher and unrest is growing in the streets over the ICE savagery. He put his fucking flabby face on the annual national parks pass so you have to carry around his scowl for the year. He wants a fuckin' coin made with his dumb head on it. It's all part of a propaganda effort to take his incompetence and violence and corruption and turn us into one nation under him. Jesus fuck, even Victor Orban isn't this needy. Even Vladimir Putin doesn't spray his name on anything he can like an anxious toddler scrawling his barely-readable letters on walls and toys to claim them as his own. Even Xi Jinping isn't tossing his shit at everything to leave a smear to show he was there. 

Trump's goddamn name will need to be purged when he's gone. Jackhammered away, cut out, or bureaucratically removed. When he dies, we need to rid our nation of his monuments like they were Confederate statues made of Nazis.  I'm tired of that goddamn name, its ubiquity, its use as a weapon, its omnipresence. It's not marketing. It's abuse. 

Maybe we do need to leave his name on something, just to remind ourselves of what a shitty, destructive thing we did to the world. Maybe a monument to the defeat of MAGAism, a half-melted statue among a bunch of eternally burning red hats. Or maybe, if he ever is incarcerated for the insane number of crimes he's committed, we can name the prison he's held in after him. The Donald J. Trump Penitentiary for Traitors, War Criminals, and Donald Trump. 

Why Are We Not Purging People in the Epstein Files from the American Government?

I’ve been trying to write something about the newly-released tranche of Jeffrey Epstein files for the past couple of hours, and every time I tried to come up with something worth saying, I'd come across some absolutely terrible thing that's repulsive or chilling or in someway stomach turning and, you know, I don’t even know what point to make anymore about all of this. We know it’s awful, we know it's fucked. 

I mean, like you read emails between people who are procuring "young girls" for Epstein, you read this from someone to Epstein's assistant Leslie Groff, where someone was obviously grooming a girl but then failed to close the deal and says, "I have to tell you that unfortunately my meeting with the girl didn't go well yesterday. I knew this young girl for a while. I thought she is easy going and open mind. I couldn't talk with her over the phone about anything. So, we finally met and I realized that she is very conservative," and you just wonder how many people fucking knew and you figure it must be dozens, at least, and I'm talking beyond the victims.

I’ll come across something that that reveals just what a complete utter fucking douche Jeffrey Epstein, and everyone around him was and how all of these people were just begging for his approval and blessings and access to his "pussy network," as one puts it, and I just want them all burned to the ground, even if that includes Bill Gates or Noam Chomsky. Oh, sure, I suppose I could say something about about the various people that have come up. There's Epstein messaging Deepak Chopra at what I assume is the Aspen Ideas Festival, another circle jerk of celebrities and rich pukes, "my very close friends joi ito. head of mit media lab, ehud barak former defense ministere and prime misiter of israel are both in aspen with you, i have sent them notes that you are one of the family, they will find you if you don't find them first." The fuck does that mean, "one of the family"? Creepy shit right there. And why can't he fucking type? It's like one hand is on his dick at all times.

I could bring up all of these other scholars and other people who were some reason enamored by this fucking guy. The thing that gets me is Epstein was shit, a garbage person. His own messages and emails are loaded with dudebros and chicks all talking about pussy. Literally. One email exchange is Epstein asking someone whose name shouldn't be redacted, "Any pussy today?" and getting a "thumbs-up" photo in reply. Another is Epstein asking someone else (a woman, I think), "Any dick or pussy yet?" In another long text exchange, he brings up what he'd say to Congress: "With sasse calling for a senate hearing, I guess I can mimic kavanaugh. Yes senator I like pussy , pussy, yes. Don't you senator." Another email is just him sending someone a link to a photo of "huge pussy lips." Or this exchange where someone asks him, "What would be the 3 questions you would ask to Paul Allen if you were meeting him today?" Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. He gives two serious ones and then "third questions would you like to see my pussy." It's just the shittiest people acting in the shittiest ways all the goddamn time, like they never grew after hitting 12 years old, like most men with any money or power. (Yeah, I put "pussy" into the search field for the files. Someone had to.)

It's not just that people flattered him for money. They really truly believed (and perhaps were) friends with him, ready to defend him even when the worst charges were coming out, like Chomsky did in February 2019. We get all of these just unexpected people in there like Roger Schank, who was an early AI theorist, because Epstein believed he was part of some intellectual vanguard, working with great "thinkers" to lead the way to the future, which I assume included being able to round up and fuck all the young girls he wanted, you know, part and parcel of the insanity of rich people thinking they can get away with everything because they are rich and enough fucking idiots think that endows them with some kind of supernatural insight and that convinces most of them that they really do have that kind of insight and that's how we get people like Epstein and Trump and Elon Musk.

So I guess what I keep coming back to is we know who’s involved here. We know that, in some way, at some level, perhaps extensively, starting with being a child rapist, Donald Trump is implicated. We know that US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is in there planning to visit Epstein's pedophile island. There's Musk, Steve Bannon, and all these people that are still somehow involved in our public life, and yet there’s no price, and I can’t get my head around that. I mean, I understand that rich people don’t get punished, but I also understand that rich people don’t get caught. That’s the thing. That’s why rich people get away with it. They don’t get caught. Everybody here is caught. 

Or at least accused, and accused with such detail and, in Trump's case, such consistency of stories, and so publicly (and we don't know what else still waits in the millions of pages that haven't been released, let alone the video recordings and photos), that it boggles the mind that we're not talking about a complete meltdown on Capitol Hill, if not the entire goddamned country. I remember when Barack Obama sat in the church where Reverent Jeremiah Wright preached and because Wright had occasionally said some controversial things, it almost undid Obama's candidacy in 2008. I remember Republicans (and some Democrats) losing their minds over the association and his presence in the space where Wright was. That proximity was enough. That was just with someone exercising multiple First Amendment rights. Here, it's with a motherfucking pedophile pimp who was convicted of hiring a child prostitute and was arrested for a shit-ton more a few years later. If you hung out with that guy, if you sent women to work for him, how does that not reflect poorly on you?

At the very least, Democrats and the Republicans who have made this a huge issue should be demanding a special counsel to investigate all of this, but that would mean independence from Trump and that shit just doesn't happen in this government. They should still push for it. And it should be in the front of voters' minds: you give us a majority and we will purge this government of the pedophiles. We will get justice for the victims who were treated so horrifically.

Wouldn't that be a delicious irony? According to QAnon, Trump was supposed to bring down the pedophile-filled Deep State of Democrats. Instead, he installed the pedophiles and protected them. And Democrats are the ones who could bring it to an end. Emphasis on "could."