A Poem for Memorial Day

Game Over 

by Eli Wright

Maybe it was our aimless idealism,

or misguided patriotism.

Maybe we just didn’t understand what we were

getting ourselves into.

Driven by the desire to serve some greater good,

or follow in the footsteps of our fathers.

Some of us needed money for college,

or wanted to see the world in a new way.

But we couldn’t find any other way to pay for it.

We wanted to prove that we were men,

So we took the oath,

then traded our Nintendo’s for M-16’s.

We started out pushing buttons,

ended up pulling triggers,

and it was like no game we had ever played before.

When we first tasted war, we became addicts.

Got hooked on bullet crack and artillery blast.

Every day one of us would overdose on sniper shot or IED.

Some of us never got sober, relapsed on 3 or 4 tours.

Wishing we could just go back

to playing video games or Cops & Robbers again.

But there was no reset button this time.

No getting back up after counting to ten.

Our eyes were sewn open,

unable to look away from horror stories

unfolding in front of us.

We came home incomplete,

with no words to describe

how our hearts are now beating us black and blue

for some of the things we had to see and do.

We all got what we asked for, in one way or another.

But maybe we bit off more than we could chew

and we’re still struggling to swallow it all.

We’re still choking on the truth that we were lied to.

And even though they said our war was over,

it sure doesn’t seem that way.

But hopefully,

one of these days,

we’ll finally make it back home.

(This poem comes from Warrior Writers, a non-profit organization that teaches and gives space for veterans to write and create art about their experiences. You can donate here.)

In the UK, They Banned Knives When Knife Crime Rose

As an American, it's easy to be cynical about knife crime in the United Kingdom. I'm here right now, and already I've seen multiple TV news segments about all the stabbings and threats of stabbings with knives and machetes. When I saw a BBC report with the chyron "Knives: can we end the violence?" my gut Yank instinct was to think, "Oh, England. You're adorable that you're only worried about one-on-one knife attacks. Try living every fucking day of your life damned to be in a country where mass shootings happen with a frequency approaching hourly." 

Last night, I saw the play Dismissed at the Soho Theatre, which I disliked a great deal for being didactic and over-directed and more. But it sure seemed to be relevant to the nodding audience. It's about a teacher reporting a student who brought a knife to school, and her agony and guilt over the boy's coming expulsion. Now, in the US, schools do freak out over any weapon brought to school property, even in a student's car. Hell, they freak out over Advil. But, again, I thought, "Damn, must be nice to live in a place where that knife is the worst of your worries on school grounds." 

I mean, the idea of getting knifed is fucking frightening, so I'm not trying to diminish or infantilize the amount of knife crime in the UK, which has risen since the fucking Tories have gone full austerity on things like government services, including the NHS. This is mostly a result of the utterly disastrous, laughably and obviously dumb self-inflicted wound of Brexit, which was supposed to bring a bounty of funding to the UK, especially the National Health Service. But it's a fucking failure, a pile of lies, and no one with any real power is suggesting that the nation unfuck itself, including the feckless Labour Party.

But, yes, it's true that violence with crime has risen under Conservative leadership, and, yes, the right-wingers are using it as an excuse to push for harsher punishment for knife crimes perpetrated by anyone over 16 and tactics like "Stop and Search," which is essentially "Stop and Frisk," except with a more polite British-sounding name. And, yes, that shit hasn't really done anything because the problem won't be solved until Brexit-driven inflation and Tory-driven austerity is brought under control. 

So far, pretty much like the United States except with far, far less murder (262 "sharp object" killings last year). However, one thing is very different.

See, in 2019, as a result of the rise in knife crime, the UK government, which, again, is led by the Conservative Party as it has been since 2015 (or 2010, depending on how you count a coalition), tightened a ban on "offensive weapons," as in "can be used in a criminal offense," not "they stink." Prior to the new law, you couldn't carry the banned knives in public. Now, you can't even own them. If you do, you can face up to six months in jail. The laws fully went into effect in 2021. And you know what? The level of knife crime declined. It's still higher than it was, but it's lower than it became.

Think about that. There was a rise in violent crime and they banned the weapons being used in the crime. No movement to halt the ban gained any traction because while, sure, a person with a knife is responsible for the crime, it sure is harder to hurt someone if the knife isn't available. 

One type of knife that has gotten really popular, especially with young people, is the "zombie knife," which is a supposedly cool-looking blade that resembles hunting knives in zombie movies and TV shows. And there was a loophole in the law that allowed for certain kinds of those knives to be sold online, along with machetes that aren't used for gardening. Right now, the UK Home Office is looking into closing that loophole because that's what the fuck you do. 

This shit isn't hard. In the United States, we make it hard because we pretend that the Constitution gives us the right to individually own the means to destroy ourselves. Here, that kind of thinking is seen as madness and completely antithetical to the safety of the public. Or, you know, common fucking sense.

A Brief Observation on the Verdict Declaring Donald Trump Sexually Assaulted E. Jean Carroll

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when it was just fine to sexually harass and assault women. Slapping a woman on the ass was supposed to be taken as a compliment. Discussion about women's looks and their fuckability was a constant in workplaces. And by "fuckability," I mean "rapeability" because it didn't matter if the woman wanted to be judged that way. Consent was something that was given the moment a woman agreed to be alone with a man. It was a bullshit, stupid time, and a good many men didn't buy into it. But a whole fuckin' lot of them did and not enough of those good men did enough to stop it. So there was a kind of impunity, especially since a woman who didn't "happily" accept the ass slaps and tit comments and sex propositions was seen as uptight and man-hating while a woman who didn't give in to fucking when alone with a man who wanted to fuck was seen as a cocktease and prude. And if you were a woman who was raped by a man, your entire sexual history would be questioned, as well as what you wore and what you did to make that man rape you.

This is the gendered world that both E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump came of age in. And when Carroll was alone with Trump in that dressing room at Bergdorf-Goodman, this fucked up sense of male desire being more important than female agency was overtly present. Trump (and, sorry, I'm not going to mince words because I'm not on a jury and I don't have to follow legal definitions) raped Carroll because, in his own words, he felt he could. Because not only did the unwritten rules of celebrity demand he be allowed to, but everything that Trump believed about masculinity said it was his right. And those same fucking terrible ideas about female sexuality and the treatment of rape victims affected E. Jean Carroll, which is why, despite being the wise, witty feminist that she was, she mostly stayed silent. Hell, one of her friends who she told about the incident even advised her to shut up about it because "He's got 200 lawyers. He'll bury you." It wasn't just the lawyers. It was the toxicity of Trump's ideas of masculinity and his proprietary belief about women's bodies. And that was the 1990s, for fuck's sake.

The difference, as revealed at the trial, is that Carroll evolved and Trump did not. Carroll was emboldened by the MeToo movement and contemporary ideologies of bodily autonomy. That propelled her to an act of exceeding bravery in suing Trump for her rape and for his defamation of her. Knowing the onslaught of threats and insults, of barbaric attacks on her credibility, her looks, her career, her motives, everything, she still took him on, even as it meant the end of her long career at Elle magazine, even as it placed her in a limelight she never asked for. Most of us would never be that courageous.

Meanwhile, Trump insisted that Carroll was a crazed liar. He said that she wasn't his type, implying, quite plainly, that there was a type that he would deem rape worthy. He insisted that every famous man could do what he said on the Access Hollywood tape and could get away with it, that it wasn't anything different than what's been done for "the last million years...unfortunately or fortunately." And that last word, "fortunately," is just fucking galling. Women are supposed to be grateful that a star sexually abuses them? Fuck him. Fuck him utterly and completely.

At the end of the day, it took only a couple of hours for the jury to decide that Carroll was telling the truth and that sometimes even Donald Trump has to be told, officially, that he's a fucking liar. No, they couldn't call him a "rapist" (but, again, I can and I will), but they could say he was a fucking monster. They could say that the past is fucking dead. Everything Donald Trump believes is dead. Let it fucking rot. And let's move into a future where women can name their rapists and be heard. 

No, everything is not going to change overnight. It's only changed disappointingly little since that older time. But Carroll has created a path to some kind of reckoning where evil men pay a price. We can cynically say that Trump won't change, that his voters won't give a shit, but sometimes things move forward quickly and sometimes slowly. And no matter how many troglodytes try to drag us backwards, no matter how many assholes on TikTok or Twitter try to say the old ways need to stay, they can go to hell. The movement is always forward. 

Human Life Is Cheap in the USA

I've been thinking about all the times that an obviously mentally-disturbed homeless man directly threatened me. There was the Black guy in Chicago who told me that he was tired, just out of prison, and ready to kill any white people who didn't listen to him. There was the tall white guy in Hoboken who yelled in my face that he was going to rape me and followed me along a crowded street for a while repeating the rape threat. I've also been thinking about all the generally upset mentally-disturbed homeless men I've been around. There was the man in an emergency room waiting room who starting yelling that he had mob friends, threw his coat on the ground, and shoved and broke the plastic partition that had been put up in front of the receptionist (this was in deepest Covid times), breaking it. The guard walked up to him and told him to calm down, asking him if he wanted something to eat. He seemed to relax and walked away with the guard. And on the subway in New York City? Man, I've lost count of the freaked out, freaking out, and desperate people who have screamed at, near, or just down from me on a train or on a platform. It never once even occurred to me to get violent with any of them. I don't think I even felt vaguely threatened, even when the dude was following me, although that one was a little weird. Mostly, I just hoped they got the help they needed.

Just a day or two ago, someone rang my doorbell. I opened the door, and it was a man looking for someone at my address who I had never heard of. The man said he had an appointment to discuss some woodwork or something. I told him he had the wrong place. He apologized and left. Twice I have had people get in my car and realize they were completely wrong, including someone who thought I was their Uber ("Not an Uber, man" was my response and we laughed before he got out). I don't know how many cars have pulled into my driveway and turned around. It never occurred to me that any of those people might be threats. You can argue that my guard was down and that's how bad shit happens. But maybe because I don't own a gun, my response isn't to think about using it. Maybe I'm just not a goddamn coward.

As we get the news of the latest horrific gun massacre in this country, as we fail to understand how anyone can think the murder of Jordan Neely on the subway was anything but a murder, as we pathetically move on from the murders of Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis, one thing has become perfectly clear in this idiot country during this sad, stupid age we're damned to live through is that human life has become cheap here. It has lost its value to too many of us. Sure, something like the strangling to death of Neely for daring to have a meltdown in public, as that's the only place an unhoused person can meltdown, that can inspire protests. But the numbers of people who truly believe that Neely's murderer, Daniel Penny, had a legitimate reason to murder him is depressing as hell. That comes form a longstanding hatred of the unhoused, with more than a little racism involved. Neely, who I'd seen dance in Washington Square Park, attracting a crowd with his Michael Jackson imitation, was dehumanized by our reaction to his circumstance, to his very existence, and once that happens, it's easier to allow for his murder to appear justified. 

We absorb horror after horror. I saw a photo from the Allen, Texas, massacre of victims of the shooter's AR-15, including a little girl with her brain splattered out. I cannot begin to fathom the depth of sociopathic depravity you have to possess in order to look at a picture like that and think, "Yeah, everything's fine with how things are going. More guns, please." I mean, if one particular gun is responsible for massacre after massacre, it's pretty clear that you need to get rid of that gun, at the very least. I mean, isn't that the most obvious, logical extension of any discussion of "what can we do"? 

But we see all around us the devaluing of human life, of any sense that we should give a damn about anyone other than ourselves and those closest to us. This is what it means to live in a nation where one in three people owns a gun, where at least 20 million of those guns are the same kind that is used in massacre after massacre. This is what it means to live in that armed country where a large percentage of us believe that we are under constant assault from people known and unknown, from migrant gangs, from marauding non-whites, from woke teenagers, from the very elected government, from forces and conspiracies that only exist in the fevered minds of those who want to believe them. And then you think a good many of those threats are armed, so you have to kill them before they kill you. Human life in general doesn't matter to you anymore. Humanity doesn't matter. You and yours, that's all that does. And your guns. 

When other countries look at the United States, they see this as madness. And it is. We have been driven mad by right-wing media and politicians who make coin and careers on exploiting the fears that right-wing media presents. I have friends in New Jersey who refuse to go into New York City because they fully believe that one of the safest places in the country is a deadly hellhole of murder. When I convince them to hang out, they are hyperalert, not thinking that everyone around them is just living their lives. No, they believe that one of them is going to rob them or take them out. And anything out of the ordinary, say, a homeless man ranting about needing food, confirms their belief that we're in a cesspool of people they should hate for existing. And then you don't have to care and think they deserve it when someone, say, chokes them to death because they think they might have a gun or might be a threat. 

If you see hurting people and you don't want to help them, if you don't want to increase funding for services or ban weapons of war, if you don't want to deal with housing the unhoused or showing compassion for migrants, if you don't want to do anything to stop the hurting, if you, in fact, want them to hurt, if you think everyday things people do, like ringing a doorbell, are threats that need deadly force, then they aren't the ones who have lost their humanity. You are. And if we keep allowing our leaders to make the country deadlier, then we aren't that far behind.

Of Course We're Fucking Gleeful Over Tucker Carlson Being Fired. Do You Blame Us?

All over Left Commentaria last week, an orgasmic yawp of glee was released, along with a good many actual orgasms, when Fox "news" announced that it had fired its biggest star, Tucker Carlson. The thrillingly ecstatic schadenfreude only grew exponentially as more details came out: Carlson and everyone outside the executive suite were caught off-guard by the firing, it was effective immediately, and his last show was on Friday, April 21, when he had promised he'd be back on Monday, with promos for whatever fuckery he was gonna do running earlier on the day he was fired. In the corporate world, this is an execution. The only reason he wasn't escorted out by security is that he wasn't in the building. But Carlson's email was cut off, and he wasn't even told why he was fired, which means he had all the job protections of a McDonald's worker, which, c'mon, that's just fuckin' funny. (Yeah, I know that a fired McDonald's worker doesn't get a huge payout, but I'm talking the actual firing.)

This reaction goes beyond just feeling great because someone awful lost their job and lost their megaphone. Generally, when we get to feel this way, it's fairly late in the career of the receiver of the boot, whether it's Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck fading into online isolation in their TV twilight (they do have big audiences, but no reach beyond the audience whatsoever) or Rush Limbaugh dying about 20 years after it would have made a difference or Megyn Kelly trying to go legit and flopping. Gratifying as all that was, it pales in comparison to Carlson's firing because none of the others had the political cache' he had at the time of the end of his current career. They may once have, but Carlson's savage ejection from the Fox "news" compound happened while he was poised to have a huge impact on the 2024 election. 

Tucker Carlson had become a uniquely powerful threat to the nation, and that was by design. His whole career since joining Fox has been centered on vengeance against those who he saw as harming and betraying him, all while gathering an audience of violent racists who saw him as their Goebbels. He mainstreamed white supremacism and Christian nationalism, all with a fraternity president's arrogance and misogyny. He gave hatemongers legitimacy and a microphone, all while coating it in a secret sauce of fake inquisitiveness ("I'm just asking questions" was his version of saying, "I'm just joking" after you've said something really shitty that you totally meant but didn't want to be seen as an obvious asshole for saying). 

Lemme put this another way: He isn't just a motherfucker. He's a motherfucker who loves fucking mothers. He gets his rocks off hurting people. He's got a bully's belief in his own power, and if there was anything Rupert Murdoch wasn't going to stand for, it was someone trying to out-bully or out-motherfucker him. 

If you don't understand what I'm saying, check out his speech at the 50th anniversary gala for the Heritage Foundation (motto: "Providing faux-intellectual cover for your cruelest impulses for a half-century"). He compares abortion to Aztec "human sacrifice." He declares Episcopalianism is "not even a Christian religion at this point." He attacks pronouns and trans people because of course he does.

And then there's this: "You look with disdain and sadness as you see people you know become quislings, you see them revealed as cowards, you see them going along with a new, new thing, which is clearly a poisonous thing, a silly thing, saying things they don’t believe because they want to keep their jobs. If there’s a single person in this room who hasn’t seen that through George Floyd and COVID and the Ukraine War, raise your hand."

You got that? The actions over the obvious execution of a Black man by a white cop, a very real pandemic that killed over a million Americans, and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia are merely things you end up agreeing with because you want to stay employed. It's impossible for him to conceive of these things as the actual beliefs of "people you know." He is propagating a fantasy that involves, necessarily, calling reality a fantasy. And a lot of assholes buy into that shit wholeheartedly because it tells them that they don't have to give a shit. Giving a shit is hard; it means personal sacrifice and the effort to actually fucking solve problems. Much easier to deny they exist. 

This is why he was such a dangerous bacterial infection in the pisshole of the American soul. He told you that it was not only okay to lack any fucks to give about your fellow humans, but that you were a stronger, better person if you didn't give a fuck about them. In fact, the only humans you were supposed to give a fuck about were the ones that Carlson told you to give a fuck about, the ones like him, and, of course, himself. We on the left do throw around the Nazi comparisons a little loosely, and I'm not simply calling Tucker Carlson a Nazi. I'm going farther. I'm saying that the original Nazis would find a lot to love in Tucker Carlson's show. In fact, our current version of the Nazis sure do love him. And why not? He talks about people in terms of weak and strong, filthy and clean, them and us. We're getting really close to "May as well round them up and put them in camps" followed by that squeaky clown eunuch laugh of his.

Carlson's ejection from the biggest audience he could get is an objective good for the country. He's a sexist, racist attack poodle who put on working-class drag to hide his patrician airs, and he was not only willing to wallow in the foulest shit pools of American fuckery, but he discovered that he liked to swim in shit, that swimming in shit was his truest self, a hateful troll with a god complex.  And it showed too clearly, getting more intense as time went by. To use the epithet he apparently was a little too free with around too many people and in too many emails, Tucker Carlson was fired because he's a cunt. I mean, when you're too much of a cunt for Rupert Murdoch, you're an absolute cunt to your cuntish core.

So, yeah, we're thrilled to see him disappear for a while, even if he's promising to come back. It will take time for him to build the kind of influence he had, where he could make demands of political leaders and give airtime to candidates he supported, boosting their election chances. The bonus? Tucker Carlson's a vindictive little prick, and he'll be trying to settle scores with Fox "news." Until then, enjoy the Tucker-free era, however long it lasts.

The Pleasure of Watching Ron DeSantis Implode

There was never a chance in heaven or hell that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who looks like a 1980s shop teacher who gets off on breaking the birdhouses the kids make to prove "you can't build shit, you little pussy," was going to win the Republican nomination for president. I mean, put aside that Donald Trump owns the GOP no matter how much a few feckless fucks fail to pry it away from his tiny hands. DeSantis has all the personality of an angry Starbucks manager and all the charm of the least charming dung beetle. If you bottled DeSantis's vibe as a scent, it would be "old scrotum and expired Axe body spray." I mean, in Vegas terms, DeSantis is pissed off that the drunks at the buffet at the Tropicana aren't enjoying his terrible magic show while Trump is Siegfried and Roy rolled into one sparkly orange suit.

Beyond personality, though, DeSantis has been repeatedly stepping on his dick, misreading this moment in American history. The retro right in this country think that it's time to turn back the clock on everything, on abortion rights, on multiculturalism, on gender identity, on our understanding of history. With a complicit legislature, DeSantis has embraced this as his agenda, and he preens and prances around the country, pretending that he's some great warrior when, really, he's just "that prick, you know, that prick from Florida."

You can't go around saying stupid shit like "We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die" like DeSantis did in South Carolina this week, a variation on shit he's been saying for months. It's one thing to use the garbage word "woke" to describe everything you don't like. It's something completely different to stand there and pretend that you are some mighty warrior against...who exactly? School teachers? Writers? Cultural theorists? It's one thing to be a simpering little bitch about racism or drag queens. It's another thing altogether when you steal the language that Winston Churchill used in rallying people to fight the Nazis, you know, the ones who actually threatened to bomb and kill their way to conquering England, and use it to show that you are so tough that you'll pass a law that bans books about same sex penguins from classrooms. It's not remotely comparable and you just look like a pussy-ass tool for implying it.

In everything that DeSantis does, he has paths laid out for him: the rational, walk away, sweep it under the rug, everyone will forget about it path or the biggest fucking asshole in the world path. DeSantis has never seen an issue where he doesn't walk that asshole path. He could have just let it go when the Disney corporation criticized the "Don't Say Gay" bill that prevented any discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity from K-3 classrooms. Nope. Motherfucker decided it was time to take a stand and attack Disney, one of the biggest employers in the state and, you know, fucking Disney. When Disney outmaneuvered DeSantis on the board that oversees the district Disney World is in, when DeSantis got pimp-slapped by a fucking cartoon mouse (with billions of dollars and the best legal team those billions can buy behind it), he didn't say, "Fuck it" and take the L. Nope again. He expanded "Don't Say 'Gay'" through 12th grade and threatened to do desperate shit like open a prison next to Disney. It's the kind of thing that can get other Republicans to say, "What the fuck are you doing?" to the governor, who got fucking married at Disney.

On abortion, on book bans, on concealed weapons, on academic free speech, and more, DeSantis is, yes, doing what he campaigned on, but it's fucking exhausting the Republicans in the state. The nation, especially young voters, look at Florida as if all you'll retch from the stink of sargassum, the seaweed that's smells like rotten eggs when it bakes in the sun, as it will when a giant patch of it lands on Florida's beaches soon. This is not to mention that Donald Trump is smacking around DeSantis with the sadistic glee of an abusive father whose son isn't wearing a suit to a baseball game. Jesus, that must be harsh, considering that DeSantis used his kids in a 2018 ad talking about how vigorously he sucked Trump's dick. And we oddly don't talk anymore about DeSantis kidnapping a bunch of migrants in Texas and flying them to Martha's Vineyard at taxpayer expense. He's just a fucking repulsive pit of pig shit. 

Meanwhile, Florida is fucked. It's fucked in so many ways beyond the seaweed swamp headed its way. Because the state is somewhere between "totally underwater" and "on the way to being totally underwater"on the climate change timeline, every big storm is going to be a fucktastrophe of flooding and fear. That fear, fed by shortages of gasoline and panic buying, which led to more shortages, is only going to get worse and shootier in a state with, you know, all those fucking concealed guns. And this has led to a property insurance crisis that oddly can't be solved by forcing teachers to subject their 1st-grade classroom libraries to an approval committee. It's true. You can't mitigate a 40% hike in your homeowners insurance by not telling kids about Rosa Parks.

Florida is one of a dozen states that haven't taken advantage of expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and the crisis that's going to cause is coming soon, along with the nursing shortage that is especially going to hit a state with a large elderly population. DeSantis likes to brag about Florida's supposed great reaction to Covid, but that relies on the short-term memory loss of Floridians. Shit got bad there, really bad, and it's not prepared if it gets bad again.

And yet he could have gotten past all of this if he wasn't such a proud cunt about everything. He's a void of charisma, so lacking in personality that he could say, "Florida is where charm goes to die" and you couldn't argue with him. So, no, he's not getting elected to anything outside of his increasingly dumb and deranged and dirty state. 

One of the great pleasures of this filthy, fucked age we're damned to exist in is watching the implosion of political figures who the posh pundits praise. We've gotten to see the collapse of Rudy Giuliani, the deflation of Chris Christie, and now the utter humiliation of Ron DeSantis. The best part is he's such a smug bastard that he'll stay on this damned path, snarling into oblivion. We can all eat our pudding cups with a spoon as we enjoy the crash.

A Note to Breathless Conservatives: Bill Clinton Was Almost Indicted in 2001, But He Cut a Deal

Lemme lay some history on you conservative motherfuckers now that you're losing your shit over Donald Trump's indictment on a shit-ton of felonies for financial chicanery. I mean, beyond the furious masturbatory screams of "election interference" and "unprecedented" and "partisan politics" and other things that simply aren't assertions of Trump's innocence, just about the stupidest fucking thing you're saying is that "If they can do it to Trump, what will you do when they try to indict a Democratic president?" 

I mean, you've got the whine squad turned up to full air raid horn. Smarmy cockmite Jesse Watters urged future prosecutions of Democratic former presidents when (if, really) a Republican is in the White House again. Rep. James "Abortions for Women I Impregnate, But None for You" Comer claimed that prosecutors in Tennessee and Kentucky want to go after Joe Biden and that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg "opened up a can of worms; they’ve set precedents now we can’t go back on." The Wall Street Journal (motto: "Hard news shell around a soft toxic waste dump of commentary") declared, "If there was ever a case that opens Pandora’s box, the first indictment of a former President in U.S. history is it," a hyperbolic response that was echoed by other screechy dicks. Of course, Tucker Carlson tuckered carlsonly, saying that Trump wouldn't be indicted if he wasn't running for president. Dumbest of all, Charlie "Forehead of doom" Kirk tweeted, "I bet Bill Clinton is a little nervous he's now fair game." 

First, fuck yeah, indict presidents. Presidents should be scared of committing crimes. As just about everyone sane has said, if we had prosecuted Nixon, if we had prosecuted Reagan, if we had prosecuted W. Bush, this shit might not be happening. We pretend to be this grand and glorious nation of laws but we want to act like a president is a fucking king except for the inconvenience of elections. Absolutely indict criminals. And people who committed crimes that they're hiding shouldn't run for president because that's just dumb. Or Trump. It's hard to separate those two words.

You'll notice I left Bill Clinton out of that list of prosecution-worthy presidents. It's not because I think he shouldn't have been indicted for perjury. He obviously committed it. It's because everyone has fucking forgotten one fact:

They were about to indict Clinton in 2001 when he cut a deal to avoid it. 

You got that? When Bill Clinton was at the very end of his presidency, as a result of the Whitewater investigation, the independent counsel, who was then Robert Ray after Kenneth Starr finally got the fuck out, was looking to indict Clinton for perjury about that blow job from Monica Lewinsky. If it had gone forward, Bill Clinton would have been an ex-president when he was indicted. If he had raged and blustered about it being untrue and told everyone to go fuck themselves with their perjury, he would have been indicted. As an ex-president. Trump could have cut a deal a long time ago, but he didn't go the Clinton route because he refuses to ever say he's wrong because he's a tiny-pricked ego monster.

See, Clinton gave up his law license in Arkansas for five years and paid a $25,000 fine, and he admitted he made false statements about the blow job. And then the whole investigation was closed with a report that pissed off a lot Clinton haters, but that pointed out how much Clinton was actually punished, including an $850k settlement with Paula Jones (google her - I don't feel like going into all that) and a $90,000 fine for contempt of court. 

It's also worth noting that the entire Whitewater matter started over a failed real estate deal prior to Clinton's presidency. Google that, too, if you want to sit there and think, "What the fuck?" and "Really?" for a few hours. The fellatio perjury was just something that got folded into it because reasons (mostly that there actually was a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get the Clintons, but, again, google is your friend here, not me).

So, yeah, hysterical right-wingers and Fox "news" liars, maybe shut the fuck up about the "damage" that Trump's indictment will do to democracy. Democracy needs this shit to happen to be stronger. As one editorial board noted, our leaders "should be indicted, upholding the principle that even Presidents and ex-Presidents are not above the law." Strong words. You know who said that? The fucking Wall Street Journal back in January 2001. 

Pandora's box, my ass.