Friday Reacharound: Seeing the Light in Chasing Ice:
The Rude Pundit is an unabashed fan of the documentary Chasing Ice, in which acclaimed photographer and climate skeptic James Blalog sees with his own eyes and camera the disappearing ice on our planet and becomes a true climate change believer and activist.

Now, look what happened when a self-proclaimed Bill O'Reilly watcher saw the flick:

.

That could have been your mother right there. She honestly seems to have been shattered, realizing that she had been lied to for years. The guy who filmed this swears up and down that it's real.

This post could have been about the new reports about the melting of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica, which is happening at a rate far faster than nearly everyone had predicted. It could have been about how much faster the seas are rising. More than ever, the evidence is that we have reached the tipping point in the earth's climate, and we're just going to have to deal with the damage.

But it's Friday. So let us not end the week in despair. Let us rejoice for a moment that Bill O'Reilly seems to have lost a fan, a woman who had the rug pulled out from under her when the rhetorical scoffing of Fox "news" was beaten down by the stark reality of the images of the receding glaciers. Maybe she'll take others down that road of enlightenment with her.

Until, of course, inevitably, some right-winger comes up with the one little thing wrong with Chasing Ice and blows it up to discredit the entire film. Then your mom can merrily put her blinders back on.

(The Rude Pundit first saw this at Digby's joint.)

Family Research Council: Isn't Uganda Awesome?:
Sweet merciful Jesus dildo (no, really, that's a picture of a Jesus dildo, so, like, don't click on it at work, unless you work in a place that doesn't mind Jesus on a dildo or at a place that makes Jesus dildos, in which case, can the Rude Pundit get a discount?), the ultra-conservative, evangelical Family Research Council (motto: "We don't need a Jesus dildo 'cause his grace is up our asses already") has issued a new list o' targets for we members of the Super-Duper Prayer Team. Time to put on the knee pads and get ready to eat of his flesh. The Rude Pundit joined the Super-Duper Prayer Team some years ago under a nom de rude, and he receives his prayitus orders once a week through the magic of electronical mailings and intertubes.

And, oh, look, here's a generic prayer for more nutzoid Christianity in government: "Thank God for leaders who stand boldly for Jesus, understand the curse of sin, and know God and His blessing are a nation's greatest possession. May God raise up such leaders in America and every nation!" Who is this bold leader who boldly stand for bold Jesus? Would it be Barack Obama, who has talked about his Christianity and Christ's lessons for the nation? No, but you've got the skin color right.

The shining example of Christian blessingdom is the president of Uganda, motherfuckers. As the FRC's letter to the SDPT says, "Longtime President Yoweri Museveni observed Uganda's 50th anniversary of independence by publicly repenting of personal and national sin. 'I stand here on my own behalf and on behalf of my predecessors to repent...We ask for your forgiveness... We confess these sins, which have greatly hampered our national cohesion and delayed our political, social and economic transformation. We confess sins of idolatry and witchcraft...shedding innocent blood, sins of political hypocrisy, dishonesty, intrigue and betrayal...' After confessing many more sins, Museveni dedicated Uganda to the Lord." Yeah, suck on that, pussy liberals who think that Jesus is all about helping the poor and comforting the sick. In fact, suck on FRC President Tony Perkins' tweet about it. By the way, Museveni also said asked for forgiveness for "sins of sexual immorality, drunkenness and debauchery." One may wonder: what the fuck are you going to do in Uganda otherwise? Hunt for Joseph Kony?

Let us put aside for just one moment the bill that was introduced in the Ugandan parliament that would allow for gays and lesbians to be put to death. Museveni has said he doesn't support it. And the FRC has also stated that it is against it. Let us not forget, though, that the bill still exists and is going to be debated and voted on.

Instead, let's merely find it curious that we are supposed to pray for and admire a man who is a war criminal implicated in human trafficking, rules as a dictator (since 1986), is responsible for massacres in the Congo, created concentration camps for people in Northern Uganda who engaged in rebellion, and has anti-government protesters and his political opponents imprisoned and tortured. All of that is forgotten now because he gave a pretty speech?

The FRC says, "Bloodshed, violence and political unrest persisted for years after Idi Amin's demise. But Uganda began to recover after pastors began to unite in desperate prayer for their nation...Believers across Africa are praying for America, that God will send revival and awakening, our nation's only real hope."

You got that, right? America should be like Uganda, which is on its way to become paradise on earth thanks to prayer, not a bloodshed-ridden hellhole where you can be shot in the streets by government for the fuck of it. You may as well just get reamed by the Jesus dildo.

(Note: The Rude Pundit can't help but think about the musical The Book of Mormon when he hears about Uganda. We all need magic fuck frogs.)

The Real Benghazi Conspiracy: Why Did Conservatives Create a Scandal Where None Existed?:
So just to get this right:

1. In the wake of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's first televised appearance, on September 16, shortly after the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi where she said that it seemed, from the intelligence on hand, that it might have been, in part, a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video, conservatives, including the Siamese Senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, accused Rice of covering up the role of terrorists. The story went that she did so in order to avoid...something or other, who the fuck knows...in order to help the campaign of President Obama.

2. The attacks on Rice increased, all based on weak assertions of a cover-up, something that perhaps needed more investigation, if there was any evidence at all beyond some talking points that had some blacked-out information. Right-wing spoogebuckets jumped in, declaring it an impeachment-worthy debacle. GOP candidate Mitt Romney made the alleged cover-up of terrorist involvement an issue in the presidential campaign. America's angriest leprechaun, John McCain, was pretty much puffin' away on his wee pipe non-stop, calling into question Rice's intellect and her competence, vowing to block her if she was nominated to be Secretary of State when Hillary Clinton leaves.

3. When more information became available, especially after the election, that the CIA had, in fact, done the editing of the Benghazi talking points in order to protect U.S. interests and not tip off the people involved, conservatives then shifted their attention to whether or not the White House had conspired with the CIA to do so and Susan Rice now became less the evil minion of President Obama and more the willing dupe in the story. Always the barometer of outrage, John McCain kicked the dirt in dismay.

4. Now that Rice has spoken behind closed doors to senators, in a private meeting that everybody immediately knew every detail about, McCain, Graham, and Lieberman-with-smaller-tits Kelly Ayotte are all upset again, this time perhaps at the State Department, certainly still with Rice, although now for what was and wasn't done before and after the attacks than what Rice said on Sunday morning gab shows. Also, the President is a liar or something. Who the fuck knows?

So to summarize:
Based on the information they initially had, right-wingers, including elected officials, got angry at the U.N. ambassador. When they received more information, they changed their story. When they got more information, they changed their story again. Or perhaps it has just evolved as more facts are known.

Which, of course, would be just the fuck what happened in the Obama administration over the Benghazi situation. But if conservatives realize that, it would create a black hole-like void of dissonance. Heads would explode. Panic would reign in the streets. Megyn Kelly would assault Steve Doocy with a strap-on. Chaos, you know.

Or, really, they'd just act like they never said anything and move on to the next fake outrage.

Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Smoke Charas While Downing a Six-Pack of Crown:

Here's something you need to know about the fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh where over 110 workers died and more were injured: as you can see in the picture, it burned like hell on earth. Many of the bodies were burned so badly that they could not be identified. It is that Third World nation's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and, like that horrific event in American history, it was merely the worst of a string of fires at garment factories, places where Americans get their cheap clothing made cheaply (and where they get their expensive clothes made cheaply, too).

While the Bangladesh factories have attempted to eliminate child labor, young (mostly) women still end up toiling in the slave-like conditions. And those conditions can include locked doors, no fire exits or extinguishers or sprinklers, and strict rules on leaving one's station, all for 21 cents an hour, which is up from what it was in 2010, greedy bastards. An executive at the Tuba Group, which owns the factory, claimed, "We are the sufferers. We are the victims." And how could you not agree when the company grudgingly agreed to pay the families of victims $1230 each in compensation for their loss? After all, that's over $130,000 and Tazreen Fashions exports only $36 million in garments each year. Fun fact: the fire killed over 1/12th of Tazreen's workforce.

On Fox "news" show Some Goddamn Thing with Neil Cavuto yesterday, a Wall Street analyst, Charles "Fat Cunt" Payne, said that the workers were grateful they have jobs: "Don’t think that the people in Bangladesh who perished didn’t want or need those jobs, as well," which would qualify as the most callous thing said publicly about the fire if the execs at Tuba weren't such shit sacks. And one might want to hold off on presuming that the dead would have chosen their jobs over avoiding horrible fire or jumping doom.

Of course, Charles "Fat Cunt" Payne also said, "I know we like to victimize everyone in this country, particularly when it comes to for-profit motivation, which is being assaulted. But, you know, it is a tragedy but I think it is a stretch, an amazing stretch, to sort of try to pin this on Walmart but, of course, the unions in this country are desperate." Yes, we certainly wouldn't want to blame any companies that ordered from or used others to order from a deathtrap factory. We certainly wouldn't want to blame our own demand for cheap shit, no matter how it gets made. We certainly wouldn't want to blame the globe for the detriments of globalization.

"Fat Cunt" Payne brings up unions. Oh, about that. Yeah, seems that "One labor organizer, Aminul Islam, was brutally murdered in April, with Bangladesh’s security forces allegedly involved in the crime." Islam, who had been imprisoned and tortured for his labor activism, got Tommy Hilfiger's parent company to improve conditions in the factories it uses after the last factory fire, one that killed 29 workers.

As for this latest awful event, "Fat Cunt" Payne assures us, "It is tragic. I don’t think something like this will happen again." No, of course not. Only a union-loving, anti-capitalist tool who wants to hamstring the job creators would think that barely regulated factories would be owned by greedy motherfuckers who force poor people to work in unsafe conditions for pennies so they can squeeze out an extra couple of bucks. Only Marxists would call that "exploitation."

Grover Norquist Has Nothing to Fear from You Puny Republicans:
Stubble-faced dickwad of fiscal doom, Grover Norquist, a man who looks like he masturbates to videos of people putting firecrackers in the mouths of toads, should calm the fuck down. Every Republican talking smack about him now ain't gonna do jackshit about tax rates. Sure, Norquist has been stubbornly dogmatic that closing loopholes and capping deductions is akin to a black-helmeted IRS agent gutting Granny's cat and strangling her with its intestines. But if he'd slap that passive aggressive boner down, put away the semen encrusted list of potential primary opponents for Jeff Flake and Saxby Chambliss, and relax, he'd see that the seven (as of now) Republicans who have said they will violate Norquist's "We are never ever getting higher taxes" pledge are just playing games.

For instance, look at the brave and mighty stand that Tennessee's Bob Corker takes against what has been the raison d'etre for fiscal conservatives. In yesterday's Washington Post, Corker offers this profile in courage: "The [GOP's worthless smear of sputum] proposal includes pro-growth federal tax reform, which generates more static revenue — mostly from very high-income Americans — by capping federal deductions at $50,000 without raising tax rates." Remember when Mitt Romney couldn't name a definite number for where to limit deductions and he fumbled around with $17,000 or $25,000? That seems positively like wild and woolly bolshevik talk compared to this.

Oh, and Corker wants you to know that average Joes and Janes are gonna have to ante up their share, too, by dicking over federal workers: "It mandates common-sense reforms to the federal workforce, which will help bring its compensation in line with private-sector benefits, and implements a chained consumer price index across the government, a more accurate indicator of inflation." Or, you know, it cuts their benefits and future wages so that people who work for the federal government can be treated like dogshit just like the proles in the private sector.

Then Corker wants to kick Granny right in the twat: "It also includes comprehensive Medicare reform that keeps in place fee-for-service Medicare without capping growth, competing side by side with private options that seniors can choose instead if they wish." Add to that "gradual age increases within Medicare and Social Security; the introduction of means testing; [and] increasing premiums ever so slightly for those making more than $50,000 a year in retirement." Motherfucker's got $50,000 on the brain. It must have been how much Corker paid that mule owner in Chattanooga for not giving away how often and how vigorously the senator balls a hot little molly named Bessie. By the way, hiking rates on people making more than 50 grand seems like, you know, a tax on the working and middle class elderly. But, shhhh. Don't tell Grover. (Oh, wait, that's not a "tax hike." But cutting the deduction on private jets or something? Totally communist.)

The terms of the fiscal cliff debate for Republicans are that the only way they'll raise revenue is through the same magical deduction-cappin' and loophole-closin' that Romney/Ryan lost on. Every Republican supposedly standing up to Norquist has said so. The Senate's most pissed-off Munchkin, John McCain, said as much on one of the goddamn Sunday shows: "I would be very much opposed to raising tax rates, but I do believe we can close a lot of loopholes." And what are those loopholes? Why, "charitable giving" and "home loan mortgage" deductions. Or, you know, ones that'll make sure that plenty of middle class households pay, too.

And, since John McCain and Lindsey Graham are like a circular human centipede, eating the same shit in an endless loop, Graham, sounding like the prettiest boy in Scarlett O'Hara drag, opined, "I will not raise tax rates to do it. I will cap deductions." He took the slightly less obscene stand of putting the cap at the "$30,000, $40,000 range," thus demonstrating once again that Republicans only pretend they have a plan.

All of them, Tom Coburn, the vile Chambliss, the viler Peter King, are pretending they are willing to be brave; all of them are children, pissing themselves.

As for Norquist, that smug cockknob is doing what he always does: relishing the attention that he gets for holding the nation's finances hostage, laughing off the defections because he knows that, no matter what, he will have perpetrated one of the great ideological con jobs in modern history, a scam that was blessed back in the day by the great and terrible Reagan.

(Note: The Rude Pundit could have punched Norquist in his fat face a few years ago. They were standing together in a hotel lobby in Austin. The Rude Pundit restrained himself. Not enough liquor, not enough people to bail him out. Opportunities are fleeting in this life.)

Late Post Today:
Doctor Psycho has some convoluted goddamn plot that needs stopping. Something, something, absorbing superpowers, whatever. But WW needs the invisible jet gassed up.

Back later with more ephemeral rudeness.

A Brief Defense of Lindsey Stone, Facebook Idiot:
The Rude Pundit's not gonna post the picture of fucktard Lindsey Stone taking a stupid picture in front of the Tomb of the Unknowns. Actually, the photo itself, of the aforementioned fucktard acting like she was yelling and actually flipping the bird in front of a sign that reads, "Silence and Respect," is not that fucktarded; it's kind of mildly funny in an "I think I'm so clever and ironic when really I'm just an obnoxious asshole" sort of way, like an old Adam Sandler movie. Indeed, if that photo was done by Cartman in an episode of South Park, everyone would have been praising how daring those Parker and Stone fellas are. What's fucktarded is posting it on Facebook and being so much of a fucktard that you believe everyone will get your oh-so-rebellious challenge to authoritah joke. Hopefully, Stone has changed her privacy settings and booted a few "friends."

But getting fired over it because an internet mob thought you suck, even though you're good at your job, as Stone and a coworker were, even though they apologized (even though they shouldn't have had to because fuck you if you're offended)? That's bullshit, and if the ACLU isn't on this like stink on a rotting turkey carcass, then it's pretty much given up finding the "civil liberties" in one's online postings. If Stone had masturbated with the femur of the Unknown Corpse, then we'd've had something to talk about, something other, than, you know, freedom of expression. But this photo wasn't even meant to be made widely public, unlike others who have posted racist screeds on YouTube or anything Ann Coulter writes.

There's something miserable about a nation that will come together in virtual umbrage over a 30-year old acting like a fool until said fool's life is completely tossed in the shitter, but that same nation will allow certain Wall Street executives to go on with their cushy lives, thinking that the real and actual (not perceived) harm they did is not worth their time or Facebook clicking. Another current example? Whatever you think about David Petraeus's politics, the man should not have had to resign from the CIA just because he and an adult woman made the adult decision to have an affair.

You want a life-lesson on how vulnerable you are? Check out the stalkeriffic profile page someone set up to disparage Stone, which examines every public account Stone has/had. Read the right-wing attacks on her. Perhaps the problem is not actually the victimless stupidity that the stupid will do, but the scrambling of others trying to scream louder than the next person, hoping that someone will pay attention to them for pointing out the stupidity.

The presumption of privacy is gone, daddy, gone, unless you lock yourself away from every bit of technology that's out there. We need to figure out how the freedom that privacy once granted us can be translated to this new world so that we are able to dismiss the truly harmless acts of idiots and move on to the shit that's actually important.

A Thanksgiving Poem from the Conquered:
"Praise Song to Stone: For My Father" by Qwo-Li Driskill, who is Cherokee.

Praise sternum
cracked like mica after
truck's impact

Praise teeth in
lower jaw sheared clean as
marble rushing
down his throat

Praise ghosts watching from
behind granite graves across
the street at the Rosebud Cemetery

Praise body arched like
sandstone illuminated by
headlights as it flashes through air
before landing on the other side

Praise dust that surges
as he hits earth
scatters like crows and disappears
quick as the car's driver
into the pre-dawn
dark

Praise the crack of vertebrae as it slips
like a fault line
the schism of spine that cleaves
like feldspar
Flecks of shale that glint like witness
embedded in his side

Praise the cleavage of ribs
jagged as a saw
as they pierce through lung tissue

Praise the lungs

Praise the ghost who leans over his
body gentle as breeze through muslin curtain
shouts through gurgle of jugular Go away. This graveyard is full.
Praise the dead

Praise blood
slow as lava
beating from skull
onto the road's shoulder
Praise gravel
warm and full as
a mosquito

Praise the blood

Praise the quartz crystal
in the man's cell phone
who stopped his car
dialed 9-1-1
covered my father with a blanket

Praise the diamond
the size of a tear
on the wedding band of
the doctor who declared
He might live
even after the machines
confessed there was no brain activity

Praise mercy

Praise the heart of red jasper
that stopped beating
and beat again
that stopped beating
and beat again
inside the helicopter
as it buzzed over the valley

Praise diamond edge
of the scalpel as it
slices skin like silk
to fit bone back inside
right arm

Praise the bone
Praise the arm

Praise the ghosts of children
who played hopscotch
on the beige tiles of intensive care room
who laughed because of impossibility

And praise the living
Praise the living
Praise the living

This marvel of bone
revelation of marrow
awe of skin that knits
itself back together

Praise this miracle of the quick and the dead

 

Photos of Things That the Rude Pundit Is Thankful For (Romney Edition):

The Rude Pundit doesn't give a happy monkey fuck about who changed what talking points on Benghazi. Anyone who cares about Susan Rice and whether or not her appearance on a talk show was deceptive is a worthless cog in the GOP propaganda machine. Ditto the Petraeus-fucking "scandal."

But when he sees that picture up there of Mitt Romney, hair finally disheveled, looking for all the world like Ward Cleaver after taking an axe to his annoying goddman kids? That shit is like smoking opium while getting blown on a mountain top. The only way it could be better is if pumping gas was now Romney's job.

The Benghazi talking points memo is the poultice the right has made to cover the melted flesh where they got burned so badly. But it doesn't matter. The election has already left behind scar tissue.

Other Questions for Marco Rubio After His GQ Interview (Based on His Favorite Rap Songs):
Florida Senator Marco Rubio was interviewed by GQ magazine because, at this point in our pointless politics, why the fuck not? Much mock has already been made about Rubio's inability to state that the earth might be older than the bible says it is. "I'm not a scientist, man," Rubio squirms. Yeah, neither is the Rude Pundit, but he's read a goddamn science article or two. "It's one of the great mysteries"? No. It's 4.5 billion years old. But "billions" would have been acceptable in the Saganesque sense.

Of course, the interview was all about 2016, for fuck's sake, and there went Rubio, trying to assure the nutzoid evangelicals that, no, really, all that book learnin' Rubio got at the University of Florida didn't block the ol' time religion (Catholicism, in Rubio's case) from making him call "bullshit" on "science."

The interview itself goes from Rubio's discomfort with reality to his spouting of GOP talking points to defending those who don't think gays should be allowed to marry to calling Jim DeMint his "best friend" besides his wife. No, really. How pathetic do you have to be to say that?

It reaches a nadir, though, when Rubio starts talking about his love of hip-hop, something about which he throws down much knowledge about. That's all fine and dandy. But it left the Rude Pundit with a few questions for the Senator:

1. In one of your favorite rap songs, "Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A., Eazy-E says, "So what about the bitch who got shot? Fuck her!/ You think I give a damn about a bitch? I ain't a sucker!" Do you believe this is a succinct description of Republican policies towards women?

2. You cite Tupac Shakur's "Killuminati" as another favorite, a song rapped from 2Pac's Makaveli persona. 2Pac flows, "Visions of over-packed prisons, fiends and niggas thug livin/ Pressures and three strikes, I hope they don't test us." How do you square 2Pac's obvious displeasure with prison overcrowding and mandatory sentencing with your own ties to corporations who profit from those very things?

3. The last favorite you list is "Lose Yourself" by Eminem, one of the most popular rap songs ever recorded. Towards the end, Em lays down, "All the pain inside amplified by the/ Fact that I can't get by with my nine to/ Five and I can't provide the right type of/ Life for my family, cause man, these God damn/ Food stamps don't buy diapers." What kinds of programs would you propose so that young men with full-time jobs, like the song's narrator, can have the financial means to support their families?

4. Finally, Senator, you say in GQ, "People forget how dominant Public Enemy became in the mid 80s. No one talks about how transformative they were." Considering all the votes you've cast that directly contradict everything that Public Enemy ever rapped about, why hasn't Chuck D punched you in the balls?

Note to Progressives: Bobby Jindal Is Still a Skeevy Bastard:
Oh, how we dance a merry jig now that Republicans are feeding on themselves (see the rat speech in Skyfall for obligatory Maureen Dowd-esque pop culture reference). How we squeed in delight when engorged tick Chris Christie decided to praise President Obama and put the final nail in the pretty-much-sealed coffin of a 2012 GOP presidency. And now how we clap our hands like inmates at Bedlam awaiting gruel as we see Louisiana Governor Bobby "Holy Shit, That Adam's Apple Is Huge" Jindal spanking his own party for its enormous fucking up of the recent election.

Suddenly, after dissing Mitt Romney's "gifts" tirade, Jindal is still acting oh-so-reasonable, criticizing Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock: "We also don't need to be saying stupid things. Look, we had candidates in Indiana and Missouri that said offensive things that not only hurt themselves and lost us two Senate seats but also hurt the Republican Party across the board." It takes a brave man to stand up to a pair of Midwestern also-rans who said dickish things about rape.

Even on abortion, Jindal said, "We don't need to demonize those that disagree with us. We need to respect the fact that others have come to different conclusions based on their own sincerely held beliefs." And what could show that respect more than signing one of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in the nation, as he did in June, saying, "It is incumbent upon us to protect the weakest and most vulnerable among us, and these new laws will protect innocent human life"? No, you wouldn't want to demonize people by implying that they want to harm weak, vulnerable, innocent humans.

Remember: once you've fucked your mother, you are always a motherfucker. Bobby "Born 'Piyush'" Jindal is a motherfucker of monstrous appetites, a hunger to fuck mothers that extends all the way from Baton Rouge to 2016.

Jindal has been such a bag of cocks to lawmakers of both parties in Louisiana that they're pretty much ready to tell him to shove his agenda up his skinny ass. He had the House Speaker, who is a blind Jindal follower, remove to Republicans from the Appropriations Committee so he could get his way on which insurance company would get the contract to run the health insurance for most government employees. This is Jindal's way: "During the legislative session, Rep. Harold Ritchie, D-Bogalusa, was removed as vice-chairman of the House Insurance Committee after voting against a tax rebate for scholarships to private schools that had been backed by the administration. Jim Morris, R-Oil City, opposed the governor's budget and other proposals and was dropped as vice-chairman of the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee after the session." Legal? Sure. Motherfuckery? Beyond doubt.

And this is not to mention that he is fucking over the people of the state by not participating in the expansion of Medicaid or the establishment of the health insurance exchanges that are part of the Affordable Care Act. That's in a state with up to 20% of its population uninsured and "high rates of diabetes, obesity and some cancers." Obamacare would cut the number of uninsured in the state in half. The health commissioner of New Orleans said, "The federal government has committed to finance 93% of the expansion coverage for the first decade. We can either act, and pay pennies now or abstain and pay dollars later."

Well, no shit that Louisiana is gonna do it later. Yeah, Jindal's willing to go out and say when losers in his party say stupid shit. But action speaks louder, man. And Jindal's actions are those of another loyal apparatchik, placing party and party demands above nation and, most especially, his state.

Late Post Today:
Perry White is shouting something about deadlines. Goddamnit, where is Jimmy Olsen with the pictures?

Back later with more bizarro rudeness.

Friday Reacharound: Electing Obama Might Save Us From Asteroid Collision Doom:
So here's an issue that didn't get much play during the endless election cycle: Which candidate would save the earth from the dust and fire-filled doom of an asteroid collision? Science writer Ian O'Neill, a name that couldn't be more Irish if it whacked you in the nuts with a shilelagh, thinks that the United States chose the path of doom-aversion by re-electing Barack Obama.

See, one little-discussed project that President Obama supports is a manned flight to an asteroid. Yes, yes, just like in Armaggedon, but probably with significantly less Liv Tyler. O'Neill thinks that Republicans would have just concentrated on going to the moon again, like, you know, Newt Gingrich talked about. The asteroid mission won't happen until 2025, at least. But Obama is backing it because no one wants to get a face full of asteroid rock. Says O'Neill, "Not only would astronauts be able to carry out invaluable science, critical docking/landing techniques in the microgravity environment may help NASA develop a plan for confronting an asteroid on a collision course with Earth." NASA is all about getting all up in an asteroid's shit right now, manned and unmanned.

Oh, by the way, former conservative demigod, now regular ol' House member Paul Ryan voted against NASA's funding the last two times it came up. And his great and grand budget cut the agency even further, despite paying lip service to outrage over Obama's move away from doing a moon landing rerun and the end of the space shuttle program.

It turns out we didn't just dodge a bullet by sending the GOP tools back to the woodshed, but we might end up dodging an earth-destroying space rock.

Republicans Are Some Sour Grape-Sucking Sons of Bitches:
The Rude Pundit has done a little bit of research here as part of his massive duties as CEO and CFO and executive secretary of this here bit of bloggery. And he could not find a single example of a Democrat who lost an election saying that the problem was that too many white people voted. In fact, he could not find a single example of a Democrat blaming too much voting. Mostly, Democrats blame not enough voting because, rightly or wrongly, conventional political wisdom says high turnout favors Democrats.

So when former savior of conservatism, Paul Ryan, whined that "The surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas," it was a lament that way too many people made it to the polls, despite the best efforts of the GOP to get them to stay home. Another way of putting it: "Damn, we thought the Negroes were too busy playing with their Obamaphones to be bothered."

Of course, others are more blunt, like moustachioed spoogesack and Maine GOP Chair Charlie Webster, who suspects foul play because nearly a peck of blacks showed up to vote in Maine and "nobody in town knows anyone who’s black." Umm, the black population of Maine is about 1%, roughly 15,700 people, some of them too young to vote, no doubt. Obama won the state by over 100,000 votes. So the answer to this conundrum is that Charlie Webster can go fuck himself.

By the way, Maine? Not generally known as an "urban" state.

Yesterday was a banner day for Republican presidential losers in general. Finally free to let his dick flag fly, rich fuck Mitt Romney was on a call with his financial backers, aka "other rich fucks," when he said, ""The president's campaign, if you will, focused on giving targeted groups a big gift." What were these gifts? Were they a reduction of the capital gains tax? Were they a promise that taxes would not be raised on income over $250,000 a year? 'Cause those are some shiny, expensive presents.

No, the gifts were more mundane (and this is quoted in length so that you can get the full effect of the breathtaking, elitist assholery the nation rejected): "Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people...You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge. Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

You got that? Health care for poor people is a "gift." In most other countries, it's called a "right." Anything that smacks of compassion and support for the less fortunate, the little people without trust funds and massive pensions, is merely a giveaway, a treat, a shiny bauble, not a life-transforming program that a responsible government might provide. We didn't just dodge a bullet by denying the presidency to this preening ass, this mock Thurston Howell, we dodged a fucking missile.

Man, Thanksgiving is gonna suck at the Romney household this year.

But this look at angry, confused Republicans would be incomplete without mentioning that John McCain, who nurses a grudge like it's his demon baby sucking blood from his saggy tits, lashed out at the President and UN Ambassador Susan Rice over the right's latest conspiracy, Banghazigate or whatever the fuck they're calling it in the impeachment documents they're no doubt prepping. Yes, the angriest leprechaun ever stomped and whooped about "incompetence" and possible cover-up, bringing along the Senate's Blanche DuBois, Lindsey Graham. The President, for his part, said at his press conference yesterday, more or less, "Bring it, McFuckface and Bitch Boy Graham."

Goddamn, Republicans do not know how to lose. You are going to hear Petraeus and Benghazi endlessly now because they'll figure it's the only way to derail Obama again. At least until 2014.

(Note: It is suspected that Bob Dole grumpily asked for more pudding yesterday. He blamed Bill Clinton for it not having enough raisins.)

Quickie: Conservatives Who Haven't Lost Their Fucking Minds (Part 1):
The Rude Pundit has no love for globular God-fluffer, Red State blogger, and CNN contributor (no, really, still) Erick "Erick" Erickson. Indeed, on a spectrum between "asshat" and "motherfucker," Erickson would be nestled comfortably in the "dickwad" section. But you gotta give props where props should be given. There's serial killers who are probably awesome janitors. It doesn't make the crimes forgivable, but, goddamn, that's one clean floor.

Yesterday, Erickson declared, "Barack Obama won. He won by turning out the most people in a well run campaign. In other words, he won fair and square." And he called out right-wingers who have gone especially nutzoid: "Too many people have spent the past four years obsessed with birth certificates. Now they are obsessed with voter fraud conspiracies, talk of secession, and supposed election changing news stories if only we had known." Those are Erickson's italics. In other words, just shut the fuck up and get on with the work of fighting Obama on the political minefield.

Disagree with the man's politics (and his frighteningly bulbous chin), but at least he's not flailing at phantoms here.

(Note: The Rude Pundit may be back later with Obama press conference goodness.)

They've Lost Their Fucking Minds Again (Limbaugh Edition):
Think of radio host Rush Limbaugh at this point as an old, wounded walrus, lying half on the rocks of an Alaskan island, half in the water, bellowing sadly into the Arctic night, waiting to be finished off by either a polar bear or a killer whale, its blubber being enough to keep other beasts warm for the entire approaching winter.

While other Republicans and conservatives are doing some real soul-searching in the wake of the 2012 election, Limbaugh is reaching under his gut to touch his tiny prick to get it up one more time and jack off on the airwaves of America. Listen, children, oh, yes, listen to the harrowing yowls of anguish and denial, listen, please, once more, to the fading cries of the dying walrus:

"When Democrats lose elections, do they ever say, 'You know what? We may have to give up this gay marriage position of ours and sort of abandon that. We may need to stand up for traditional marriage.' Do the Democrats ever say that when they lose elections? No. After the Democrats lose elections, do they ever say, 'You know, I think we've got to abandon this effort to shut down Second Amendment. We're gonna have to understand it. We're really out of touch. We're alienating our voters who love guns. We're gonna have to become big advocates of the Second Amendment'? Do Democrats ever say that when they lose elections? Do the Democrats, after they lose elections, all run to the media and start agonizing over where they're going wrong?"

Limbaugh went on like that yesterday, asking if Democrats ever think they need to cut taxes when they lose, or if Democrats ever think about toning down their "rhetoric," or, horror of horrors, "Do Democrats, when they are losing elections, ever blame their media?"

The only way to unpack all that 300 pounds of bullshit shoved into a hundred pound bag is to say: "Umm, Rush? You were around in the 1980s. Sure, sure, there's been a whole lot of drugs and one or two too many marriages since then, but you are familiar with the Reagan Revolution, no?"

Ah, precious children, the Democratic Party did once believe in what we called "gun control," which included a ban on handguns. It did once believe in abortion with few restrictions. It did believe in higher taxes for all. It believed in all those liberal monsters that Limbaugh wants you to think it still believes in.

But, oh, you must listen: in the wake of the Reagan ass-kicking, Democrats did reassess everything. And it went right. It watered down gun control to merely be that people shouldn't be able to own a few high-powered, military-grade automatic weapons. It accepted that abortion rights would be highly regulated, sometimes even going along with ludicrous and onerous laws. And taxes? Democrats voted to cut taxes again and again. And then, in 1994, after the Gingrich ascendancy, Democrats went even further to the right. Look it up. Look up Bill Clinton's triangulation on issues like "welfare reform." It all pissed off we true-blue liberals, this endless moderation, this ludicrous amount of compromise of principle until the principles themselves changed. However, to say that, on any level, that Democrats never questioned their beliefs in the wake of an election loss is just another lie of the endless series of lies told about us. It's as big a lie to themselves as declaring that Romney would win.

This is going to be one strain of Republican reaction: don't abandon the program - it is good and right - just sell it better. That's like saying that you didn't get syphilis because you like to bang whores without a condom, but because you chose the wrong whorehouse. Oh, hey, let's try fucking across the street and see how that works out. Not only does it not occur to you to use protection, but you can't see that perhaps you shouldn't be banging whores at all.

Here is the message you need again and again: it is what you believe. And it is how you relate to the world. Democrats went right in the 1980s and 1990s. Republicans went further right to differentiate themselves, so far that they went out the door.

And now a few conservatives are saying, "Perhaps we've gone too far." And a fat, decrepit bastard whose ability to pay alimony depends on whipping up more and more hatred is demanding that the reflection end before it begins.

Enjoy the war, GOP. You've earned it.

In Brief: Note to Red State America: It Gets Better:
In an article so darkly hilarious that it seems like it belongs at The Onion, Eli Saslow at the Washington Post chronicles the fin de siecle thinking of the poor souls in "Red America" who are facing the crossroads between nihilistic despair and smiley Jesus love when it comes to the reelection of Barack Obama.

Beth Cox of the Hendersonville, Tennessee (motto: "Where the Racists from Nashville Sleep Peacefully White") Romney campaign headquarters headed to the office on Wednesday. Writes Saslow, "Her calendar read 'Victory Day!!' and she had planned to celebrate in the office by hosting a dance party and selling Romney souvenirs. But instead she was packing those souvenirs into boxes, which would be donated to a charity that sent clothes to South America. Instead a moving company was en route to close down the office in the next 48 hours, and her friends were calling every few minutes to see how she was doing." Let's not even talk about her campaign credit card.

Sounding like the orphan who missed dinner gruel, Cox is unsure of what is happening to America: "She had devoted her life to causes she believed were at the heart of her faith and at the core of her Republican Party. She counseled young married families at church, spoke about right to life in area schools and became a stay-at-home mom with two daughters.

"Now, in a single election night, parts of her country had legalized marijuana, approved gay marriage and resoundingly reelected a president who she worried would 'accelerate our decline.'"

To her credit, Cox doesn't have blinders to the problems the GOP has, with women and non-whites. But it cuts more deeply: "There was the America of increased secularism that legalized marijuana. And there was her America, where her two teenage daughters are not allowed to read Harry Potter or Twilight, and where one of them wrote in a school paper: 'God is the center and the main foundation of my family.'" And don't get them started on the gays.

Oh, sweet Ms. Cox with your sweet Cox-man husband and Cox-ette daughers, whatever will you and, indeed, all of Red America do if we do not become filthy Sodom and devilish Gomorrah over the next four years? What then? What if those states that passed gay marriage do not become AIDS-filled cesspools of degradation? What if they thrive, along with those that legalized marijuana use, which is a plant created, as you should believe, by God?

Yes, yes, what if uninsured men and women in Hendersonville are able to get covered under the Affordable Care Act? Will they tear the "Obamanation" bumper sticker off their pick-ups when they realize that they don't have to wait until the broken finger is gangrene to see a doctor? And what will you do, sensitive, intelligent Beth Cox, if things do get better, if the unemployment rate goes down, if freedom isn't taken away, if you and Mr. Cox get to keep your guns, if higher tax rates for the rich don't wreck your middle class life, if Muslims aren't allowed to force your daughters into veils, if a sane immigration policy doesn't fill the streets of your so very white town with dirty Mexican drug thugs? What if you're just wrong, Beth Cox and all of the Red State Americans staring into an abyss that you created with your own rhetoric, with your own hopes that the abyss would be there so you can say, as we plunge in, see? See? What if you're plain wrong?

Will you say it got better? Will you acknowledge it? Or will you merely come up with excuses and cling to your fading America, the red that is bleeding out now?

Late Post Today:
Certainly, Lex Luthor is at work attempting to manipulate the seasons here so that we cycle through all of them in few days. The Rude Pundit will investigate.

Back later with more corrosive rudeness.

Karl Rove's Former Leather Slave Comments on His Ex-Master:
"Weren't they supposed to be the smart guys?" the Rude Pundit asked the thin man across from him as they sat in a Chelsea bar, looking out as the melting snow dribbled down the piles of wood and drywall. Surely, Obama's margin of victory would have been larger here if the wreckage of Sandy hadn't replaced voting as a priority for many people. "All these rich fucks, aren't they supposed to always be right? Haven't we been told that they are wise and that we should implicitly trust them just because they are rich and successful? The 'job-creators' or some such bullshit." The Rude Pundit is not ashamed to say that he made air quotes with his fingers.

The thin man nodded, and the Rude Pundit continued, "So are they gonna get off easy? Are they just gonna go on, doing whatever they do, oil, media, whatever, and we're gonna buy their shit and they're gonna get richer and fuck it all 'cause it's just money? Is nobody going to pay for how wrong the smart guys were? For how much they wasted on this fuckery of an election?"

"Karl will pay," the thin man said, wincing, getting a tic for a moment in memory. "Yeah, he will." He was talking about President George W. Bush's former political guru, the savage id of the right who now runs a money-gobbling organization trying to get rid of all vestiges of liberalism in America. It had failed and failed mightily on Tuesday.

Half a dozen years ago, the thin man was Karl Rove's leather slave, held captive in the cluttered basement of the White House, chained to the radiator between the cabinet holding Martin Van Buren's bottles of Cherokee tears and Gerald Ford's trunk of Whip Inflation Now shirts and Khmer Rouge soldiers' fingers. Over the course of most of the Bush administration, Rove had roughly fucked the leather slave in every orifice and with every implement at his disposal - golf club, Kalashnikov rifle, John Kerry for President sign post. He had loaned out the leather slave to wealthy donors, an extra bonus beyond the "Pioneer" level. Other staffers had enjoyed debasing the leather slave, and he had learned to live smelling of shit and semen and urine and blood, some of it even his own, until, finally, in 2006, he escaped and had been hiding from Rove ever since. It's just been recently that he has felt free enough to appear in public, believing that, perhaps, Rove will never have him back.

The thin man ordered another drink. Straight whiskey, which the Rude Pundit joined him in downing. "You see Karl on Fox on election night?" he asked. The Rude Pundit nodded with a smirk on his face. "Can I be honest with you?"

"Me more than most," the Rude Pundit scoffed.

He leaned in. "I masturbated while Karl was losing his mind over Ohio," he said and then smiled. "I saw him on fire there, burning, burning, writhing and yelping, rolling on the ground, until he collapsed into ashes, and I just jacked it. It felt so good." He paused and got wistful, staring into the amber liquor. "You don't wanna know what he would have done to me Tuesday if he still had me. I don't know if I could have survived it. The razors..."

"You don't--"

"It's okay." He slugged back what was left and ordered another. We drank on, the Rude Pundit and the thin man, shooting whiskey and sharing glee over Rove's desperate attempts to justify his existence and his failures, over his absurd, pathetic spin that Obama "suppressed the vote" by saying mean things about Romney and his supporters, coming up with ways that Rove would have to pay back the hundreds of millions of donated dollars - the phrase "Sheldon Adelson's dick lamprey" was used by one of us, and laughing at how degraded Rove must have felt over being called out by Megyn Kelly on the air, repeatedly. "And Bill Hemmer!" the thin man said. "That guy's so dumb, you could put a dunce cap on him and he'd thank you for making his head bigger."

The drinks done, the night now the beginning of the new day, the Rude Pundit bid farewell to the thin man, who said he had to be going to his digs in Long Island City. After "Good night," after walking a step or two, the thin man turned back. "There's one thing I know," he said. "Karl's not going away. I feel him, always. He's with us until the dirty end. Be careful. Optimism dies quickly when it meets reality. It can be fucked out of you even faster."

And we parted.

Photos That Are Like the Purest Heroin Followed by the Sweetest Whiskey Chaser:

For a hit of pure, undiluted schadenfreude, you can do no better than that one up there. It's a page from the prepped-and-ready-to-go-but-now-iced Romney inauguration and transition website. Oh, man, that'll give you that warm feeling you get when you feel really good shit course through your veins or really fine whiskey go down your throat to make a fireplace in your belly. And then you read closely and you see:

Not "to serve our country" period. No, "to serve our country as a member of the Romney-Ryan administration." That's the "honor." That's the "privilege." Now, Mitt Romney gets to tell that to his Hispanic gardeners, who he can finally re-hire and who can then piss on Romney's azaleas to return the honor.

You know that feeling you get whenever you see a semi jackknife on an icy road ahead of you and you make that quick turn to avoid being smeared by the trailer? That sense of incredible relief and the intensity of being alive as you look in the rearview mirror to see the wreckage that could have been you? Yeah, that's how it feels looking at these images. (And, yeah, that was more or less the Rude Pundit's post-nor'easter commute this morning.)

Let's kick these fuckers while they're down. Let's degrade them and mock them for not understanding that voters actually give a damn about the nation, unlike the Republican Party. Let's make them feel every ache, every lump, because if we don't, they are going to attempt, again and again, to get up and gut us, like every cliched serial killer in every cheap straight-to-video bullshit flick. You don't walk away when the murderer just looks dead. You cut off his head so that you know he is.

Here's what the right is saying while sucking on its sour grapes in the wake of Barack Obama's reelection:

Bill O'Reilly: "It's a changing country, the demographics are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things and who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it and he ran on it.

"And whereby 20 years ago President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.

"You're going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming for President Obama and women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?"

Cal Thomas: "Politicians bid for votes, making promises they can't keep to voters who will believe anything, as long as it appeals to greed, envy and their sense of entitlement. This undermines our culture. This fuels our massive debt, weakening our economic power and America's standing in the world."

Rush Limbaugh, after declaring "We're outnumbered": "There is no rising to responsibility. There is no accepting responsibility. There's just a demand that the gravy train continue, and we have an administration that's promising an endless gravy train. All you have to do to stay on that gravy train is vote. But it doesn't matter.

Scared, scared white men all, blaming those demographically-different (or, you know, black and Hispanic) people who want stuff, the half of America that pours gravy from the train, gravy like Medicare and the GI Bill and Pell Grants, acting as if the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't the indulgent luxuries of a fading empire that chose frivolity and fantasy over the mundane work of actually taking care of the country and its citizens. But that would require self-reflection, and it's always easier just to blame the spics for stealing your hubcaps rather than realizing they're gone because you hit the curb a while ago because you're a shitty driver.

(Side note: It always struck the Rude Pundit as odd that people attacked Barack Obama for not having a "plan" for his second term. No, he always had a plan. What he didn't have was a worthless scheme, a grand and mighty doctrine that he could attempt to shove the country into. If there is such a thing, the Obama doctrine might best be called "If shit is broken, fix it.")

A Few Brief Notes to Republicans on the Day After Their Defeat by Barack Obama:
In four of the last five presidential elections, you lost the popular vote (we won't get into the fact that you really lost four of the last five elections completely). Is that telling you something? No, it's not. Because you're Republicans. And you don't care what reality is. You prefer to attempt to bend reality like a contortionist porn actor trying and failing to lick his own taint from behind.

You lost. It wasn't close. It wasn't a squeaker. It wasn't a nailbiter. All of your internal magical mathematicians were wrong. It was over the second the polls closed on the West Coast because it was over before the election even started. It was over because you nominated a fraud, a Tin Man who spent the entire campaign looking for a heart not because he really wanted one but because his advisors told him that he needed one. It was over because whatever else he tried to be, Mitt Romney was as close to a caricature of a rich dick as you could get without looking like he was merely plagiarizing The Simpsons or Dickens. It was over because, despite every effort to smear and lie about the President, Americans saw that Barack Obama was not your crude Bolshevik monster, but a cool, rational man who kept trying to get things done despite monumental opposition, despite monumental debt, despite a monumental storm. You won't see these things, though, because you're Republicans, and self-reflection is to you what a hot needle is to a cyst on your ass.

You are going to get advice from everywhere, all over, left, right, crazy. So the Rude Pundit's not going to attempt to say much here because you're not going to listen. It comes down to this: Stop being jerks, and, as Joe Biden said, get out of the way. Stop being jerks to women, to immigrants, to gays, to union members. Just...well, just fucking stop. If you don't understand how the GOP strategy of the last three and a half years affected you on a national basis, no matter what the gerrymandered House district yahoo votes told you, then you are damned to be party of nothing more than bodies in the road, slowing real progress, only to be crushed and run over one at a time, hoping that enough of your squashed and squeezed viscera gums up the engines of government enough to bring it to a halt. Or until the bodies are plowed out of the way, as they were in 2006 and 2008. If you think the lesson is that you weren't conservative enough, you know nothing about the United States.

Ultimately, you won't learn anything. Because you're Republicans. And there's something tragically touching and almost poetically ignorant about stubbornly clinging to the anchor of your principles even as the ship sinks and everyone around you is saying to let it go and take a life preserver.

Yeah, now we to look forward to the inevitable endless investigations of meaningless things before the push for impeachment. Because you're Republicans. And that's just easier to do than actually govern.

Voting: A Love Story:
The Rude Pundit was all primed and ready to pound out another post of existential despair masked as cynical hope. He was going to attack people who hypocritically vote for Romney despite benefiting from the policies of Barack Obama (like the friend without health insurance whose pregnant wife was treated like a queen because of the Affordable Care Act). He was going to go after writers on the left and right who said, essentially, "Don't worry. No matter who wins, nothing much will change" as a louche argument born of bourgeois privilege and a stable job.

But before writing it down and posting it here, the Rude Pundit decided to go to vote.

He had had some doubt that his polling place would even be available since there are still areas here in Sandyland that are without power. But it was up and running on a generator, with no heat. And everyone, from the black guy who told the Rude Pundit where his district's table was to the Hispanic woman who found his name in the Big Book o' Registered Voters to the elderly Indian dude who monitored the booth to make sure the vote went through, was kind and friendly; they were even patient with others who did not show up in the Big Book. It went as smoothly as it could have possibly gone, an idealized version of what participation in democracy should be, not the ludicrous, racist, oppressive, and childish version of things in states that went for Barack Obama that are run by Republicans. The Rude Pundit lives and votes in a working class neighborhood that is overwhelmingly non-white, and there are no problems at all because no officials from the state or county are causing them.

Something else happened, something unexpected but gratifying. See, the Rude Pundit has felt a profound disenchantment with the electoral process in these here United States, and it's something he has expressed regularly. And he felt it fully, a revulsion with the masochistic punishment we self-inflict for years leading to this day, until the moment he stepped through the half curtains and into the voting booth.

It was a moment of honest bliss. In there, with no one screaming in his ears or assaulting his eyes, no constant thrum of argument, no Nate Silver calculating the odds like a madman possessed by the porcine ghost of Jimmy the Greek. Just one person, alone, with his thoughts, in the cold public school auditorium lobby. Even though the Rude Pundit knew exactly how he was going to vote on every candidate and every issue, he looked over his choices. When he pushed the button next to Obama/Biden, he was taken by surprise when he smiled, a small smile, but a smile nonetheless, and a feeling, once again, like four years ago, that he was doing the right thing, not grudgingly, not out of anger or revenge or hatred of any kind, but just...the right thing.

What was weird, and maybe this is what happens when you're exhausted and passing through streets filled with torn out walls and floors and bags of ruined property, was that everyone seemed to have a similar look, as if thinking, "Oh, right, it really does come down to us."

(Note of existential despair: If Barack Obama wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote, Republicans will bring down hell and lawsuits and mob action and gridlock that will make 2000 look like a game of Candyland.)

In the End, Vote for Obama Because Fuck Romney:
Finally, at the end of four brutal years of the 2012 presidential campaign, the Rude Pundit is exhausted. He's exhausted and disgusted, and there's so many factors as to why, some of them Sandy-related bullshit, some of them political bullshit, that he'll just bring it down to one: that we as a nation put ourselves through a four year-long campaign because, truly, once Jeb Bush and Chris Christie decided they weren't going to run for president, the election was over. Why did they take the 2016 off ramp? Because they knew the inevitable outcome and they didn't want to dim whatever gleams they have reflecting off them. They knew, as the Rude Pundit knew (demonstrably), that Barack Obama was going to win reelection. If they thought he could lose, they would have run. So the smart narcissists got out of the game, leaving only the dumb narcissists.

And the dumbest, richest narcissist of them all bought the nomination for himself because that's the only fucking way such an illegitimate, empty vessel of a religious fanatic, this charlatan, this con man could have gotten this far in our nonsensical system of choosing a leader.

The Rude Pundit wants Mitt Romney disgraced. He wants Romney pelted with rotting vegetables because Romney is also "Romney," the avatar of the avaricious, of the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson, of the bounty of disinformation that flowed because of the democracy-killing Citizens United decision (which Obama Super PACs took advantage of, too), who has no actual plans to do anything other than assure that the greedy are allowed to wallow in their shit-filled cash pits like the pigs they are and laugh while the rest of us argue over the scraps of issues like "abortion" and "education" and "health care," avoiding the real damage of income disparity, the confronting of which would necessarily take care of the other issues.

He wants Romney pantsed and whipped through the streets until he disappears, yowling into the wilderness, never to be seen again, because the Rude Pundit wants to kill the myth of the businessman-as-leader. Let's be clear: Romney had only four years of experience as an elected official of any sort, far less than Obama when he ran in 2008. So Romney's left with his Bain Capital experience, and we're supposed to believe that because he knows how to contort the finances of failing companies in order to profit his investors, he should be allowed to decide whether or not we should go to war with Iran.

Romney needs to have election results shoved up his ass and down his throat because he has approached the presidency as something that is his by some kind of rich white man's birth right. And that's not even getting into the lies, the shifting positions. People like to call Romney a "robot." That's not even close. He's like the alien in John Carpenter's The Thing, a horrific, oozing miasma of a being, devouring those near him and mimicking what they are in order to be accepted by others, a creature with no discernible shape of its own, one that exists for the sole purpose of taking over the world just because it thinks it can do so.

Romney has nothing, offers nothing, is nothing, other than white and rich, which is, sadly, to our great disgrace, enough for nearly half the nation. He never had a chance.

But, still, we allowed ourselves to be put through the four-year campaign. The pathetic, craven, soul-sucking media forced a narrative that allowed this race to even have the illusion of a close race. The pathetic, craven, soul-sucking media refused to acknowledge the truth, that Obama failed personally less than he was cock-blocked by Republicans (and cowardly Blue Dog Democrats) at nearly every step of the way. Why didn't he close Gitmo? Because Congress specifically blocked any funding to do so. Why didn't he get a jobs bill through? Because Congress said it might be successful and mustn't be passed.

Fuck, let's just narrow this down. Why didn't the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy? Because Senate Republicans would have prevented jobless people from getting extensions on their unemployment checks. Why didn't over 400 bills from the Democratic House pass? Because Senate Republicans. Why are there still so many positions unfilled in the government? Because Senate Republicans. That's the fucking story of the last four years. That's the story of the Obama presidency. That's the story that has been ignored, even by the Obama campaign, presumably because it seemed whiny.

No, Barack Obama ain't poor and he ain't perfect. And this blog has pissed off more than a few readers by pointing that out, especially on civil liberties, and even more especially on drone attacks. He could have been even more aggressive with those who opposed him. He could have developed a way to communicate what the health care reform law does, what the stimulus has done, and more. We could list a shitload of his accomplishments, and that would be enough.

But it's also enough to say this: Fuck Mitt Romney. Fuck him and everything he represents. Vote to make him pay in a way he never has had to in his entire awful life.

(Note to fellow liberals: If you don't wanna vote for Obama or want to vote for Jill Stein, well, it's your vote, motherfuckers. Do with it what you will. Some people spend all their money on meth. It might fuck up their lives permanently, but they sure feel good while they're doing it.)

The Rude Pundit on Monday's Stephanie Miller Show:
Yeah, yeah, gotta be better at posting this.

Here's this week's adventure with radio and Current TV hostessita, Ms. Miller, wherein the Rude Pundit says some very mean things about Mormons because fuck them:

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Hey, subscribe to the free podcast. There might be more stuff to pod about in the next few days.

A Closing Argument Against Romney to Make Conservatives Stay Home on Election Day:
Here's a few fun quotes that you can use on your right-wing uncle this weekend. It never hurts to look backward in order to move forward.

On Romney's time as governor of Massachusetts:
"I heard Governor Romney describe his record. As I understand it, his record was that he raised taxes by $730 million. He called them 'fees.' I'm sure the people that had to pay it, whether they called them 'bananas,' they still had to pay $730 million extra.

"His job creation was the third worst in the country, [leaving the] people of Massachusetts with a $245 million debt because of the big government-mandated health care system.

"And while the rest of the country was losing 7 percent of the manufacturing jobs while he was governor, 14 percent of the manufacturing jobs left the state of Massachusetts."

On Romney the businessman:
"[H]e's a fine man. And I think he managed companies, and he bought, and he sold, and sometimes people lost their jobs...I can hire lots of managers, but leadership is a quality that people look for."

That was John McCain, of course, in a January 30, 2008 Republican debate at the Reagan Library. It was the final debate of the Republican primary season.

Oh, and while we're at it, here's Romney himself endorsing his health care plan's mandate and saying that it would work for the nation (not state by state, as he now says): "In this country, you have today about 47 million people that don't have health insurance. We went out and tried to find out why they don't. We found out that about half of them could afford to buy insurance if it were reasonably priced. They could afford to buy it, but they weren't buying it. it? 'If we get sick, we can go to the hospital and get care for free.'

"And we said: You know what? If somebody could afford insurance, they should either buy the insurance or pay their own way. They don't have to buy insurance if they don't want to, but pay their own way. But they shouldn't be allowed to just show up at the hospital and say, somebody else should pay for me.

"And so we said: No more free riders. It was like bringing 'workfare' to welfare. We said: If you can afford insurance, then either have the insurance or get a health savings account. Pay your own way, but no more free ride.

"And that was what the mandate did. It said, you have got to come with either the insurance or a health savings account or the like."

As Romney said in a debate just a few days earlier, "I do support an effort to get everybody some form of catastrophic coverage. And it may be a public-private partnership between private insurance industries and the federal government. It may be done with the states." Or, you know, Obamacare.

Let's leave you with McCain, the bitterest elf ever to run for president, who said of Romney in 2008, "Ronald Reagan would not approve of someone who changes their positions depending on what the year is."

Romney's Other Campaign Strategy: Remembering When He Wasn't a Total Dickhole:
In the waning days of his exhausting campaign - the Rude Pundit couldn't hate his internet connections or his TV more if they were possessed by barb-dicked face-raping demons - one of the strategies the Romney campaign has tossed into onto the bonfire to see if it catches is "Mitt is human, just like you and me." It's pathetic, in a "Wow, that cat should just kill that bleeding mouse already 'cause I'm not gonna rescue it" sort of way.

Here's his blow-up doll wife, Ann, in a speech tying her illnesses - breast cancer, multiple sclerosis - to her husband's political ambitions: "Following my diagnosis, my husband, Mitt, stood by my side without reservation. He has been my steady champion. I believe this speaks volumes about his character—and about why he’s running for president." So, just to get this straight, when his wife, the woman he has been with since they both reached the age where the Kolobian genital-joining ritual was performed upon them, was gravely ill, Mitt Romney didn't abandon her, which pretty much seems like the bare minimum one can do. They certainly had 24-hour nursing care and others to do the nasty shit of dealing with a sick person. But, hey, mighty Mitt wasn't a total selfish cock about it, so, apparently, that makes him able to "ensure that women have the economic opportunities they deserve."

You see this trope, that the micro-Mitt tells you what you need to know about the macro-Mitt, repeated in the Parable of Romney and the Dying Teen. David Oparowski was 14 and diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and, according to the boy's parents, "Over a period of seven months, he was in and out of Children’s Hospital in Boston for treatment. Throughout that agonizing period, Mitt took time from his busy schedule to visit David. They developed a loving friendship." Romney even wrote a will for the boy. Truly, it was a horrible time for the family. Truly, Romney was kind.

However, at the time, 1979-80, Romney was a high-ranking member of the Mormon Church in Boston (attaining "President" status - no, really, he was "President Romney" as far as Mormons were concerned). The Oparowskis are a Mormon family who attended Romney's church. While Romney did comfort and aid the family, this wasn't something outside the realm of what his position in the church obligated him to do. He did it well, but, again, he'd have been a worthless church leader if he hadn't gone to David's bedside.

But none of that is the point. What is the point is that Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS has an ad out with the Oparowskis talking about how much Mitt cares. What is the point is that Ann Romney is also bringing up the story in campaign events.

So, in as much as we can read tea leaves about what the Romney campaign is doing, other than completely fucking lying about everything to do with the President, other than promising plans that Romney and Ryan simply don't have, they decided that Americans still don't seem to believe that Mitt Romney gives a flying fuck about the lives of ordinary people.

This late in the game, if you haven't convinced voters that you have the minimum of what we might call "compassion," your sins of dickishness are overwhelming.