Just-Released Gitmo Detainee Shaker Aamer: Over 13 Years a Political Prisoner

Here are a few things from the Shaker Aamer's Wikileaked 2007 file as a detainee at the Guantanamo Naval Base facility, where the United States houses people we believe were trying to harm us over a dozen years ago.

Aamer, father of four, was willing "to become a martyr" and was a "sub-commander of al-Qaida forces in Tora-Bora" who is a high risk and threat and has a "high intelligence value."

After a review of all the things he agreed to say after being beaten by his initial captors, kidnappers in Afghanistan who turned him over to Americans at Bagram Air Base, where he was mistreated, the rear admiral writing this assessment of Aamer concluded, "Detainee is uncooperative and continues to withhold information of intelligence value about his extremist activities and associations. Detainee has failed to fully account for his travels and high level associates which have been reported by other JTF-GTMO detainees. Detainee is extremely egotistical, has manipulated debriefers and guard staff, and will continue to attempt to do so to support his political agenda. Detainee refuses to participate in direct questioning, often citing imaginary, or assumed mistreatment of himself, or others, as justification of this refusal in a classic example of al-Qaida counter interrogation techniques."

Aamer imagined his mistreatment. He had more intelligence to give. He was engaged in "classic" terrorist techniques when dealing with interrogators.

"Detainee is a member of al-Qaida, with significant ties to senior level extremists, to include UBL (bin-Laden)," the assessment continues. "Detainee held a senior level position among the UK based al-Qaida cell, is a reported facilitator, recruiter and financier and is associated with al-Qaida cells inside the US. Detainee was an assessed combatant sub-commander in Tora Bora where he participated in hostilities against US and Coalition forces. Detainee has lengthy ties to militant jihad and has received basic and advanced training, to include explosives training. Detainee has shown a willingness to become a martyr for his cause."

The conclusion was that Aamer should continue to be held at Gitmo because he might have other information, including, yes, about 9/11:

The assessment on November 1, 2007, was that Aamer was still of high value. He was an enemy combatant, the document says. Except that by then, in June 2007, President Bush had already agreed that he could be released, along with other British detainees, which means that we knew anything about him being connected to everything evil was bullshit.

But we held Aamer for another 8 years after he was cleared. For part of that time, he was still interrogated and mistreated, held without charge, trial, bail, or anything more than the occasional administrative oversight. He even went on a hunger strike during that period.

He is free now. And the Rude Pundit wonders that if he had been held like that, away from his children and wife for so long, with one child born a month after his detention had started, how hard a time he would have not wanting revenge on that monsters that did that to me.  Chances are, though, that Aamer, like other released detainees, will try to piece together some semblance of a life.

You gotta wonder, though: the number of terrorists we've recruited with our worthless attempts to stop terrorism must thrill ISIS.

Random Impressions of Last Night's GOP Media Murderfest

Just a few thoughts on the Republican debate from Boulder, Colorado (the major league one, not the farm team):

1. You can pinpoint the moment that Jeb Bush swallowed his own balls. The former governor of Florida had decided to lob his obviously scripted attack at Sen. Marco Rubio, saying that Rubio's missed votes in the Senate disappointed him as a constituent. Rubio was ready with a comeback about all the past presidential candidates who had missed votes, including John McCain. You could see that Bush realized he had brought a lace doily to a razor fight when he said about McCain, weakly, as if he wanted to vomit, "Well, he wasn't my senator." Then Rubio cut off Bush's balls and you could watch Bush swallow them when he attempted to interrupt the grandstanding Rubio with "Well, I've been--." The problem, at the end of the day, is that Jeb Bush isn't the vicious motherfucker his brother was. George W. would have come back with some remark about Rubio being new on the job...just like Barack Obama. But you got the sense, as his balls were descending his throat and into his stomach, that Jeb just wanted to say, "Fuck this." And no one would have blamed him. At this point, Jeb is a hilariously pitiable figure, a vaudeville clown, a sad sack. It's time for someone to walk him into a field and tell him to look at the rabbits.

2. Whoever advised Chris Christie to look directly at the camera and "answer questions" was a fucking idiot who should be fired immediately. Each time he decided to address the TV audience, it looked like a giant pumpkin head was angry at us. It was disconcerting and just goddamn rude. Motherfucker, someone asked you a question. You could at least look like you give a shit that you're in the same room as the questioner. And "answer questions" is in quotation marks because, more often than not, Christie just decided, "Hey, Chico, Blondie, and Pinhead, fuck what you're asking. I got shit I practiced saying directly to myself in the mirror." So he'd go off about Hillary Clinton or how the country sucks beyond sucking under the Negro president who wants cops killed. And, by the way, of all the lies spit out by the candidates, Christie saying that FBI Director James Comey "has said this week that because of a lack of support from politicians like the president of the United States" cops fear for their lives was the closest to actual slander. Comey never mentioned Obama. Christie came across like a desperate buffoon, the faded high school football star who has become a sad, bloated vestige of the time when he was beautiful.

3. None of the candidates give a fuck about your facts. Rubio got pissed when John Harwood quoted a conservative group, the Tax Foundation, on the math behind the senator's tax plan. Ben Carson waved off the illogical math of his tax plan when it was presented to him. And Donald Trump? Your piddling truth matters not next to his undulating neck flap of fiction. Did he call Rubio "Mark Zuckerberg's personal senator"? Of course he did, but who the hell cares? Who remembers things that are your own campaign website? He loves Mark Zuckerberg. And bankruptcy? Your stupid laws let Trump businesses declare bankruptcy and get out of paying debts. Is it his fault that he dicked over so many people? Get outta here. And guns? Trump might be carrying one right now. He might have to kill someone on the wild streets of Boulder. And, sure, sure, it's a great idea to let his employees carry guns into, let's see, yeah. casinos. That's all just incredible. Amazing. Best there is. Somebody should be there to shit on Trump's face every day of his worthless life.

4. John Kasich looked like he had a case of coke jaw. Not only was he as jittery of someone who is jonesing for something, crank, liquor, smack, something, but he kept clenching and unclenching his jaw and grinding his teeth. It really took something away from his whole "I'm the rational one" persona he was attempting. More upsetting was Kasich's belief in the need for universities to privatize their assets: "[T]hey shouldn't be in the parking lot business. They shouldn't be in the dining business, they shouldn't be in the dorm business." A college shouldn't be in the dorm business? So you want to toss 18 year-olds to the dogs of whatever corrupt bunch of slumlords bid on dorm rights. Well, Kasich isn't exactly known for giving two shits about education unless there's a profit incentive for the people providing it.

5. Creepy Ted Cruz, who looks like every peeping Tom, said the creepiest thing of the night: "If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy. But if you want someone to drive you home, I will get the job done and I will get you home." He might have continued, "I might take a detour to my backwoods sodomy pit with you, but your corpse will be dropped off at your home."

6. Presumptive debate victor Marco Rubio actually tried to plead poverty after getting a million dollar book advance. If he had a million dollars in student loans that needed paying off, he must have borrowed the money from the Cuban mafia.

7. Carly Fiorina's most disgraceful moment in a generally disgraceful evening when she said of Hillary Clinton, "Every single policy she espouses, and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstrably bad for women." What would that be? The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act? Keeping funding for Planned Parenthood? Appointing two women to the Supreme Court? Working for women's rights around the world? The one number she offered, that 92% of job losses in Obama's first term were women, was utterly, embarassingly wrong, so she'll probably repeat it endlessly.

8. The Rude Pundit's been told that Rand Paul was there, but there is scant evidence.

9. Mike Huckabee must have jacked off in glee when he realized he could make a blimp reference. He's so in the moment.

10. And, yeah, the moderators sucked early in the debate. Harwood's "Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?" to Donald Trump really was a bullshit blogger question. But at other times, they asked direct questions about shit like tax policies, with citations of studies that absolutely have a place in a debate. But someone needs to punch Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli in the nuts before their hysterical ranting is allowed on air. (By the way, fuck you, CNBC, for not freely streaming the event online.)

11. And, yeah, the candidates were total twat crumbs about the media. If the trio of moderators had been the ones at the Democratic debate, then, sure, you can accuse them of having gone easy on the Democrats. But most of the time, they were bitching because they hated being challenged. Whining about media unfairness is great for applause from the slavering hordes of cretins in the audience. Maybe that's all that matters to this slate of losers and human hemorrhoids. But Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sander or, hell, even Martin O'Malley would beat them stupider.

In Brief: Black Sheriff Calls Black Lives Matter Protesters "Subversives" and Terrorists

So Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke, newest black darling of the right, went on Twitter, the social media of the damned, to say, "Before long, Black Lies Matter will join forces with ISIS to being down our legal constituted republic. You heard it first here." Now while "being" probably means "bring," you can be sure that "Lies" instead of "Lives" was an intentional, oh-so-un-PC pun.

Clarke responded to his own tweet with this: "I have been right on every call I have made about these subversives. I will be right again.".

The Rude Pundit thought, "Huh. This sounds familiar." So he did two minutes of googling and found this:.

.

That's a video of Martin Luther King, Jr., when he spoke in Milwaukee in 1965. His previous visit had been in 1956. Both times, he talked about the need for equality and racial justice in the city. One could argue, with very little opposition, that the only reason Milwaukee has a black sheriff is because of the protests and marches during the civil rights movements. This includes the NAACP Youth Council's nightly marches for fair housing, the riots in 1967, and the visits by King in Milwaukee. Where, as mentioned, a black man is now the sheriff..

Now, here's a flyer from an anti-civil rights organization during the 1960s. A version of it was around Milwaukee during that 1965 speech:.

.

It accuses King of leading riots and of being a Communist which, children, in the 1960s was considered pretty much the same as being in ISIS.

The Rude Pundit won't connect all the dots here. It should be obvious and sad, so very sad. And what should also be obvious is why conservatives and Fox "news" have embraced David Clarke.

You Want the Rude Pundit Licking Your Ears During the Republican Debate? Sure, You Do

Tonight, the Rude Pundit and loyal compatriot Jeff Kreisler will be doing the Rabble.tv thing during the Republican debate, aka "The Trump/Carson Follies."

We'll be live and sarcastic, commenting as the debate occurs on CNBC.  You just listen to us in one ear and watch the debate on the TV or online. It's like Lee and Jeff are pleasuring you while you wonder how Chris Christie's pants stay up.

Also, the Rude Pundit can promise that his acid-dropping Ben Carson will be appearing. And all the sound hitches last debate? That'll be gone.

You can listen for free with no problem at all on Rabble's easy-to-use site. And, if you want to be able to comment to us during the debate, just sign up for a free account. Free, motherfuckers, all of it.  We'll read some of your comments on the air.

Join us. It's the only way to stay sane during an orgy of insanity.

Cops in the Classroom: How Pathetic Are We?

There is a simple reason that police officers walk the halls of nearly half of all the schools in this country: ignorant fear. In the post-Columbine world, the abject terror of something so heinous occurring caused legislators to shit themselves around the country and demand a tough law enforcement presence to deal with any serious incident.

We didn't do a goddamn thing about the guns. But we sure as shit want the kids to know that they don't have control. So we turned schools into another place where the power of the state is enacted on the bodies of teens, disproportionately non-white, in even the most minor of cases.

Anyone who went to school before the hysteria about "safety" can tell you stories about fights or kids being assholes. Hell, let the Rude Pundit tell you one. In middle school in south Louisiana, in a school that was probably a third African American and the rest were white, with a few stray other non-whites, he had a teacher, Ms. Musgrave, and a black kid in the class, Darren, wasn't listening to her when she told him to stop talking. She confronted him and told him to be quiet. He looked her dead in the eyes and said, "You ugly." Ms. Musgrave, whose son had recently died, burst into tears and ran out of the room. No one laughed. No one was able to take out their goddamn, motherfucking phones and film it.  The Rude Pundit told Darren that he was a jerk, and they got into a fight in the classroom that was broken up by a couple of the other kids.

Now here's the end of the story that blows the Rude Pundit's mind every time he thinks about it. He and Darren were sitting outside after the fight, waiting for the principal. Darren told him, "I'm gonna take this. It's my fault. I'm gonna tell them you didn't do nothing." The Rude Pundit asked why he'd do that. Darren said, "Because I get in trouble all the time. You don't. You're gonna do something with your life. I'm gonna take this." And he did. He took blame for it all when, really, the fight was something we shared. He was in and out of trouble after that, but he did graduate from high school a few years down the road.

If this had been today, Darren would have been confronted by a School Resource Officer, who is a cop who sometimes gets off smacking around kids, and probably arrested if he didn't listen. After the fight, both he and the Rude Pundit might have been taken to jail. And for what? For the usual teenage bullshit that every school everywhere has.

Shit, let's not even talk about the fact that pretty much every guy in school carried a pocket knife. It was Louisiana. We might need our knives to skin a squirrel.

The actions of Deputy Ben Field, who slammed around a teenage girl in a classroom in South Carolina before cuffing and arresting her, have no basis in anything we might rationally discuss as belonging in a school. It doesn't matter that, as the sheriff of Richland County said, the girl hit the officer as he was tipping her chair backwards. Who the fuck cares?

The point is that the officer shouldn't have been there in the first place. He shouldn't have been in the school. How many incidents does it take to prove this? Shit, earlier this month, in Texas, a boy was choked by a cop in his school for being "non-compliant" with the demands of the officer.  Fuck that officer. Fuck his demands. It's a school. If a teacher or administrator isn't telling the student what to do, then no one else should have any goddamn right to do so. That schools have abdicated their responsibility to teach kids how to behave through regular disciplinary actions is pathetic to the point of absurdity.

We can look at a myriad of things that have made schools into tightly-controlled zones of paranoia and overzealous punishment. We can blame zero tolerance policies that get kids suspended or expelled for having ibuprofen or a birth control pill on campus. We can blame asshole parents who will bitch and threaten to sue if their precious snowflake is in any way treated poorly by a teacher or another student. We can blame politicians who want their constituents to be catfuck crazy with fear about What Might Happen.  We can blame the bullshit racism that permeates so much of our policing of black kids.

Essentially, though, what we really are doing is Gitmo-izing the teenagers. We are telling them that they have no rights. They must obey or they can be taken out. They cannot act out like fucking teenagers do. Frankly, the saddest part of the video of the girl in South Carolina is that everyone in that room didn't get up and try to stop the cop (the one girl who protested was also arrested).

That means that they have internalized the oppression. That's their education in a nutshell.

Late Post Today (with Pumpkin)

Fuckin' Tuesdays, man. Feelin' like this emo jack o'lantern the Rude Pundit carved.

Back later with more brooding rudeness.

Taking Ben Carson Seriously

Well, fuck. Now that he's kicking Donald Trump's saggy ass all over Iowa (state motto: "You realize it's hilarious how much the rest of you give a shit about how we vote, right?"), it's time to take America's favorite narcoleptic neurosurgeon seriously as a presidential candidate. "What explains the rise of Carson?" the media punditariat wonder. And the answer is so obvious as to be practically tattooed on the poll takers' foreheads.

The Republicans are turning to Ben Carson because 1. He is bugfuck insane and criminally stupid about anything outside of head goo. 2. He is black and therefore voting for Ben Carson makes white racists who wanted Barack Obama crushed seem like they're not racist. 3. He's not Trump.

Make no mistake, though. Despite his demeanor that suggests someone who is shooting ketamine right into his jugular vein, Carson believes in some of the most savage policies that the conservative movement has to offer. Just because your executioner sounds like he's stoned doesn't mean he won't cut your head off.

Before getting to the reckless, vicious opinions that he gave to Chuckie Todd on Meet the Press yesterday, check out his shitty campaign website. There, under each section "On the Issues," we can read a sub-middle school book report version of a complex issue. It basically goes: "Something being done sucks. It should change. Here's a vague idea on how to change it without ever going into any more details than this."

You think that's not true? Here, in full, is everything the website has on the need to "Keep Faith in Our Society," one of Carson's supposedly important issues: "Our Founding Fathers were courageous men of principle and faith. We know this because the Declaration of Independence, our bedrock document, explicitly acknowledges the existence of our Creator. The United States of America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. We can and should be proud of that fact. It served us well for almost 200 years. However, we need to reverse the recent trend of secular progressives using activist, federal judges to drive faith out of our society. Anyone who wishes to practice their faith, for example by praying privately, can and should be able to do so. Equally, the rights of someone to abstain from private prayer should also be jealously protected. The First Amendment enshrines our freedom to practice whatever faith we choose from any government intrusion. Our Founding Fathers never meant for the First Amendment to be used to drive prayer out of the public square."

That's fuckin' it. Everything that Ben Carson wants you to know about what he believes on any particular issue can fit on a postcard. It's written so that it can be read aloud to the illiterate without tiring out the reader too much. From abortion to education to Russia, nothing is more complex than "We need to do different shit." Telling us what that shit is and how it will be accomplished? Those are meaningless details, man, to be worked out once the country elects a completely inexperienced evangelical doctor to fuck us so hard that we'll feel his dick tip on the back of our uvulas.

And Carson is weird, like in a "what the fuck?" way. One of the marquee things on his website is this:

Four fucking sentences on keeping the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, open. Look, we know that Republicans respect the Constitution so much that they don't give a fuck about indefinite imprisonment without trial. But to put this on an equal plane with health care and taxes? That shit's just really creepy, like it's some kind of personal obsession.

On yesterday's Meet the Press, Carson compared a child raped by her father who gets pregnant and doesn't want the kid to a slaveholder. No, really. He said he didn't want any abortion exceptions for rape and incest and, if a woman wants an abortion, Carson believes, "Think about this. During slavery — and I know that’s one of those words you’re not supposed to say, but I’m saying it. During slavery, a lot of the slaveowners thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave. Anything that they chose to do. And, you know, what if the abolitionists had said, 'I don’t believe in slavery, I think it’s wrong, but you guys do whatever you want to do.' Where would we be?"

This is the kind of nonsensical shit you say when you're sitting around someone's apartment after a 36-hour shift on your rotation at the hospital and you're all smoking great weed and making shit up that's so absurd it makes the rest of the interns giggle and get the munchies.

Seriously, when Ben Carson makes a metaphor, it sounds like a psychopath playing a game of Cards Against Humanity. To him, those cards are facts, not funny.

Carson is particular kind of psychopath, the kind who thinks he does no wrong. When Todd asked him about his dropping of Holocaust and Nazi references with alarming regularity, Dr. Ben said that some Jews have told him it's cool and "If I say something about something that we don't want to become and we never even want to get close to it, then I'm comparing it and I'm saying we're there. That's what they do. And, of course, for people who aren't really thinking deeply, you know, that resonates." You got that? You're not thinking "deeply," you dumb liberals with your rationality and your political correctness. Of course, he could say, "I don't want us to become like Chile in the 1970s" but, obviously, that's too shallow for Ben Carson. (And there are probably many conservatives who would love for the nation to become like Chile in the 1970s.)

We should always remember that Ben Carson converted to nutzoid fundamentalist Christianity after he nearly stabbed a guy. Like many teenagers who have done that, he locked himself in the bathroom. Except not with porn, but with the Bible. And something happened during that three hours that changed him. He claimed he was reading the Book of Proverbs. Let's take him at his word. Now, Proverbs contains more than a few passages like this: "I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves."

Yeah, a nice chunk of Proverbs has to do with fucking "strange" women. The Rude Pundit isn't saying that teenage Ben Carson jacked off to the Bible for three hours and found Jesus. But it would explain quite a bit.

And that's as seriously as we need to take Ben Carson.

A Few Thoughts (Not) on the Benghazi Hearings

As the Rude Pundit read the many reactions to Hillary Clinton's calm yet forceful, emotional yet controlled testimony before the House Special Committee on the 2012 Benghazi consulate attack, he kept thinking about how he would approach writing about the excruciatingly long day. He thought about wonderful metaphors involving how Clinton used various implements to anally assault the oily, sweaty, pre-lubed Trey Gowdy.  He thought about Clinton as Godzilla destroying the GOP Tokyo they had erected in the room. He contemplated playing it totally straight with analysis followed by a victory lap of sorts because of how completely the day made Clinton look like she was already president, a grown-up facing down fit-throwing children. All of these things and more stirred around in his head.

Then it struck him: Fuck these fuckers.

The Rude Pundit is sure he speaks for more than a few Americans who are sick and goddamn tired of Republicans trying to tell them that something is the most important thing in the history of ever when, in reality, it's virtually meaningless. Just because the advanced syphilitics of the GOP caucus and their media crotch-lickers say we need to care about something doesn't really mean we need to care about it.

Maybe this is a grudge held over from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, when we were supposed to care that Clinton lied under oath about getting some hot oral action in the Oval Office. You could walk the streets in those heady days in the late 1990s and look into people's eyes and recognize that we all knew the whole thing was utter and complete bullshit.  Only the scabbiest and most deranged among us fell for the con job that was being played by Republicans and the press, which, at the time, was so desperate to prove it wasn't liberal that it didn't feel free to call "bullshit" where bullshit had piled up. We knew it was nothing. And, in the end, it really was a worthless exercise.

But once again, here we are, indulging the right-wing delusion machine. Its candidates have no record to run on, no ideas that will actually help the country, and no connection with the reality of most people's lives right now, so all it can do is convince us that Hillary Clinton did Something Bad and we're supposed to respond with either "Yes, that is Something Bad" or "No, that isn't Something Bad at all," which just proves their idiotic point. The Rude Pundit wants to suggest another path: There is nothing to respond to.

No one needs to ever think about Benghazi again. No one except people in charge of making our foreign agents secure needed to think about it again starting pretty quickly after it happened.  It's almost hilarious that there are Americans who believe this is the greatest scandal since that time we elected a Muslim.  How sad. How boring. How predictable, that so many people will allow themselves to be so blatantly and openly manipulated into anger about an event that has no effect on their lives at all unless they are somehow connected to the dead and injured by more than shared citizenship.

So, no, there will be no poring over the transcript here to reveal exactly how big the assholes on the committee were to Clinton. There will be no reveling in how Clinton spanked the Republicans constantly. Because we don't need to. We know it was a useless exercise with only one conclusion: The GOP is a dishonorable party of America-hating scoundrels who don't care what they destroy in order to impose an anti-middle and -working class ideology on the nation. Everything they do exists only to achieve that. And the lies they want us to believe and the nonsense they want us to care about are merely the shiny objects to distract us.

To put it more simply, talk to us when you hold goddamned hearings on cops shooting black people or over-armed whites gunning down students. Those dead Americans matter far more to the everyday lives of everyday people than 100 Benghazis.

"We're so much better" than the hearing, Rep. Elijah Cummings said in one of his many honorable and inspiring moments. "That's not what America is all about." As much as we want to believe that, unfortunately, we are shown time and again, that this is exactly what America is about for too, too many Americans.

At Night, the Pig Fuckers Come Out to Play: The Conservative Alternate Universe Benghazi Hearing Reactions

The Rude Pundit will have lots to say tomorrow about Hillary Clinton's Benghazathon 2015. But before you go to bed tonight, you should know that the scabby pig fuckers of the right have some opinions, too. You can tell by the fronts of their websites of righteous douchery. You look at them and wonder, "Did we watch the same hearing? Because that's not what really happened."

For instance, here's Breitbart.com, which focuses in on the important details - whether or not Clinton improperly blamed the attack on a YouTube video in the immediate aftermath of the violence. You might think that security matters would be more important than figuring out if Susan Rice knowingly lied to some Sunday talking heads, but, fuck you, Libya lover:

Over at Glenn Beck's Internet Bedpan, The Blaze, sweaty backwoods inbred piglet Trey Gowdy was the star of the show:

The conservative latrine hole known as RedState apparently knows something that even Hillary Clinton doesn't seem to know except you know she totally knew it because some doughy right-wing compulsive masturbators said she does:

And, finally, over at The Daily Caller (motto: "Bros before prose"),  they're pretending like an innocuous talk is something evil because everything Hillary Clinton does is evil:

Let's not even begin to dig into the goat fucking being done by the barnyard rapists running for president on the Republican side.

The Rude Pundit has said it before and will say it again: Sometimes, he doesn't even think we exist in the same reality, like we're just dimensions, side-by-side, diametrically opposed, reality and bizarro world.

Stuck Inside of CNN with the Benghazi Blues Again

The Rude Pundit is enthralled by the spectacle of the Benghazi hearing by the Benghazi committee on Benghazi today. "Enthralled" means "drunk and bored and ready to stab someone," right?

Anyways, he might be back tonight, maybe tomorrow, with Benghazanalysis of the Benghazaganza, the hearing that raped the corpses of the dead.

For now, enjoy the insouciant cockknobbery of Mike Huckabee and his sub-Bruce Vilanch comedy tweets.

Back soon with more Benghazinsanity.

Shut the Fuck Up, Donald Trump, You Stumblefuck Buffoon

Let us say, and why not, that you're in another country that's not the United States and you're checking in on our presidential election. Let us say, and, indeed, why not, that you see who the leading candidates are. You see Hillary Clinton, a safe, pragmatic centrist who, yes, is beholden to corporations and is hawkish, which you may or may not agree with, and Bernie Sanders, a safe, pragmatic leftist who is not beholden to corporations and is not-as-hawkish, which you may or may not agree with. Hey, fine, whatever. You're a foreigner, probably in Europe, maybe Japan, and, at the end of the day, neither one of those is gonna fuck things up too badly for you.

And then you look at the opposition party and you see Donald motherfucking Trump is in the lead. Well in the lead. Has been in the lead and stayed in the lead almost since he announced he was running for president. You begin to wonder, "Wait a minute. You mean there is the barest chance that the country with the biggest goddamn military and a shit-ton of weapons of mass destruction might be put into the semen-stained hands of a deranged egomaniac who can barely say one of his incomprehensible sentences without mentioning how wonderful he thinks he is?" 

You look further and you realize that, even when Trump loses, it will still be true that a not-insignificant percentage of the people of the country upon whose economy the world depends and that has a nuclear arsenal capable of turning the earth into a glass globe will have seriously supported this disgusting capitalist whore who thinks a foreign policy consists of knowing how to talk to people when he's trying to bribe them to get a fucking temple to his name built.

You might think, if you didn't already during the Bush era, that the United States has gone mad. Like scary mad. Like really might blow shit up mad. Jesus, the good president in there now has declared the right to use drones to take out enemies without trial in an unending war. He just keeps it to the shitty countries. What is dumbfuck Trump gonna think he can do? Goddamn, you might think as you feel that fear of totalitarianism creep up from your anus to your throat, making you want to scream warnings that could be heard across oceans.

Every time Donald Trump opens his infected maw of a mouth, he spews out a stinking bile stream of gratuitous provocation, unfettered dickishness, and rank bigotry, covered in a saliva of stupidity. Just today, on some goddamn Fox show or other (does it really matter anymore?), Trump said that he'd consider shutting down mosques: "It depends on if the mosque is, you know, loaded for bear,  I don't know. You're going to have to certainly look at it." This was not followed up with a question about whether or not Catholic churches that covered up for child-raping priests should be shuttered. But maybe they're not bear-loaded.

Yesterday, on an extended phone interview with CNN, for Trump almost always appears by phone because that way he can have well-oiled Asian boys suckling at his testicles during the call, the candidate could barely string together a cogent thought. Here he is talking about whether or not President Obama is going to take away people's guns: "Now I've heard from numerous sources, and I've heard from the media. And I've seen in the media, I've seen in the papers, that -- and I think if you look back, a couple of -- maybe a week, you'll see it on your own network, people were saying he is thinking about doing it. I didn't say he's doing it. I said, how is he going to do that, given the Second Amendment? That's big league. But I -- He is -- Certainly, I think he is currently thinking about doing it."

The Rude Pundit has a theory of why Trump speaks this way. It's the language of someone who doesn't want to be fully committed to something and who doesn't want to be sued. So, like the bully who says, "You're a faggot" and then follows that with "I'm just joshin' ya," Trump can say the ludicrous lie and then hedge on it so no one can say that he ever said anything. Ultimately, that's what the words up there mean: nothing. "I think he is currently thinking about" it is such a pussy prevarication that one of the hosts of New Day should have said, "No. Sorry. We're hanging up. Go fuck yourself, you stumblefuck buffoon."

Or, perhaps, the follow-up question should have been "Oh, shut the fuck up already. Why won't you just shut the fuck up?" And then, when he tried to explain, Trump should have been interrupted with "You don't get it. The answer to 'Why don't you shut the fuck up?' is to shut the fuck up."

But that's not enough. Because, see, there is that 25-30% of Republican voters who support him. They will still be there, ready to engorge themselves on his bile stream.

Maybe we can all move in with that imaginary foreigner.

Ted Cruz Is Gonna Get the President Killed

This is from a fundraising letter from Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz, who looks and sounds like every fragged lieutenant in the Vietnam War (and who even George W. Bush dislikes). Cruz is fantasizing that President Barack Obama is a jackbooted soldier-cop who is beholden only to his own fanaticism (hence the "O" symbol instead of an American flag on the vest there) and who is going to take your guns, should you own some, and then, oh, what? Let's say skin your cat and burn your Bible.

Cruz goes from provocative to bugnuts pretty quickly. The email reads, "Friend, I own guns. I'm planning on keeping them. But there's a problem...Obama is coming for our guns." Then he promises that if Congress tries to stop the power mad leader from tekkin yer gunz, evil Obama will use executive orders to (and Cruz quotes Obama out of context here because full context is for pussies) "keep guns out of the hands of criminals and others who shouldn't have access to them." Helpfully, Cruz interprets Obama: "Friend, by 'others who shouldn't have...them,' Obama means you and me." Which would be totally true if it wasn't totally untrue. Obama meant people who are mentally ill or have protective orders against them. But, still, really, at this point aren't most of the gun owners who support Ted Cruz mentally ill and/or violent idiots who probably shouldn't be anywhere near a metal fork, let alone firearms?

In another fundraising letter (because nothing fills the coffers more than causing pants-shitting fear in your crazy-ass followers), Cruz informs us that the Second Amendment isn't just about being able to buy whatever massive, unnecessary weapon your tiny penis compels you to buy. Oh, no: "It is a Constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny — for the protection of liberty."

It ain't that big a leap to say that Cruz is telling everyone to prepare for armed revolution against "tyranny." And that the helmeted black Nazi up there is going to lead the forces of tyranny against the forces of gun-toting righteousness. And that he should be stopped before he gets a chance to tekk yer gunz away.

Ted Cruz's rhetoric is the kind of shitstream that gets people gunned down in a nation where people are gunned down for stupid reasons with depressing regularity. But now he's turning the President not just into the opposition, but the enemy, and then getting people to believe that they need their guns to stop an impending takeover by that enemy. It's a dangerous path Cruz is taking, but, you know, he doesn't give a damn.

He better hope that people don't mistake him for an intruder if he's going door-to-door to campaign. Those crazy fuckers are armed and stand their ground.

Republican Candidates Suck Christ Cock in Texas

Over the course of more than four punishing hours, 7000 parishioners at Plano, Texas, megachurch Prestonwood Baptist (motto: "Plano's as hot as Golgotha, but we've got air conditioning and a rec room"), six of the 95 or so Republicans running for president walked up to the pulpit to proclaim, "I will suck every Christ cock you put in front of me."

Carly Fiorina (campaign slogan: "My failure as a CEO in no way reflects on my leadership abilities") demonstrated her fellatio method by grabbing that Christ cock and just jacking it off into her mouth. "Each one of us can have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ," she said, working the veiny Christ cock and pumping it like she was using it to blow up a tire. “God knows what’s going on in our lives and that personal relationship saw me through many hard times." Fiorina also let the Jesus jizz spray all over her face as she proclaimed her deranged and false attacks on Planned Parenthood made her the Christianest Christian who ever sucked Christ cock. And she put the whole thing in the Big Guy's hands: "Pray that I finish the journey that God intends me to finish."

Then, Texas Senator Ted Cruz (campaign slogan: "I'll shit in a hat and giggle when you put it on, Mitch McConnell") showed that creepy, crazy fucknuts know their way around a Christ cock. Using lots of tongue to get that cock good and hard and lubed up, Cruz proclaimed, "“I believe that 2016 is going to be a religious-liberty election. As these threats grow darker and darker and darker, they are waking people up here in Texas and all across this country.” The crowd ate it up as enthusiastically as Cruz gobbled Jesus balls and said that faith is "under assault," raucous cheering making him whip out his own dick and jack off while he brought that Christ cock to explosive orgasm.

Of course, it being a Christ cock, it was more than ready for the Catholic in the house, Rick Santorum (campaign slogan: "Please don't make me spend time with my family"). Santorum used his teeth to get the Christ cock twitching in pleasure and pain, bringing up his belief that only he can fuck up Muslim's shit when he confronts foreign threats. "ISIS knows who I am. Iran knows who I am. And when I’m sworn in in January, they will know exactly what they have to deal with," Santorum said, spitting on the Christ cock as the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Mike Huckabee (campaign slogan: "Man, there's a lot of fried chicken on the campaign trail") took the Christ cock like a sausage and deep-throated it, his gag reflex so suppressed at this point that he didn't flinch. Flaunting his Jesus taint-licking abilities like a boss, Huckabee made sure everyone knew who stood by lunatic extremist lawbreaker Kim Davis first when she declared ain't no-way, no-how her name was a-goin' on the queer marriage licenses: "If you put a public official in jail for believing the Biblical view of marriage, you have criminalized Christianity. You know who's next? You are." Man, if there had been three or four Christ cocks, Huckabee would have shoved them all in his mouth at the same time.

After a delay, parishioners were treated to the somnambulant tones of the voice of Ben Carson (campaign slogan: "You want a quiet psycho for president") as he took a gentle approach to the Christ cock, using it to probe inside his mouth, almost as if the Christ cock was an instrument, something he might find useful. Oh, don't worry. He definitely worked it and, even if it was slowly, he went down on it like some kind of dick leech, letting the worshippers know that he's getting coded messages to run for president from God: "Lord, this is not on my bucket list, but if you want this to happen, you will have to open the doors, and if you open the doors, I will walk through them. And if you don’t, I’ll gladly sit down. He has opened the doors and continues to open the doors." It might be that Carson keeps walking through automatic doors and doesn't know the difference, but that doesn't stop him from bobbing on that Christ knob, eyes rolling back as he guzzles it down.

Jeb Bush (campaign slogan: "Why the hell not?") approached the Christ cock in his dry, lipless way, but even he was able to show how his prick prowess was different than the others. See, unlike all the so-called life-lovers, Jeb has actually put his ass on the line to keep a brain-dead woman alive for his amusement. Yeah, he got "a lot of grief" for the Terri Schiavo debacle, but "I am proud of what I did...You should always err on the side of life," even when actual living isn't involved. Ultimately, Bush was the greatest of the Christ cocksuckers because he was able to get it up for himself one last time. "I’ve learned to pray. I’ve learned to get down on my knees," he said, Christ cock so deep in his face that the balls were slapping his weak chin, "to pray about things before I make big decisions, and in public life today, it is so important to pray and to think about things clearly because the world has been torn asunder."

Perhaps the best way to sum up the event comes from Ben Carson. "It's time for us to bring God back to our country," he said. Yeah, you're just makin' shit up. The Rude Pundit can say, "Oh, wait, God's back," and how can you prove otherwise? But, then again, he doesn't take the Christ chowder.

The Filthy Prick Who Made the Planned Parenthood Videos Got a Love Letter from the Washington Post

In case you've forgotten, that self-righteous pisshole is David Daleiden. He's the dried cumrag who made the Planned Parenthood videos that are so filled with lies that no one can find anything wrong that the organization has done when it comes to sending fetal body parts to medical labs and clinics for research and, oh, let's say, fondue. You'd think that any coverage of him by any entity that refers to itself as a mainstream "newspaper" might spend most of the time telling you how he's a pathetic liar with a fetus fetish who tricked people and probably broke laws in order to discredit an organization that has helped millions of women and not a small number of men.

But then you haven't read the Washington Post profile of Daleiden, a slow blow job of an article that makes Daleiden sound like he's Seymour Hersh crossbred with Edward R. Murrow. See, Daleiden and his team didn't use selective editing to destroy Planned Parenthood because of a fervent anti-abortion agenda that couldn't give less of a shit about the truth. No, he "shed harsh new light on the venerable women’s health organization, capturing officials sipping wine while joking about abortion and appearing to haggle over the price of fetal tissue."

And you might think that the sentence "Planned Parenthood officials have long said that the organization follows all laws and that many women treasure the ability to donate tissue for life-giving research" would be followed with an acknowledgement that multiple state investigations, including in some very red states, have found zero violations of the law when it comes to PPFA. But the article does not do so. In fact, it does continue, "Whatever the outcome, Daleiden’s project has already exceeded the wildest expectations of antiabortion activists."

"Whatever the outcome"? There's been some fucking outcomes that prove Daleiden is a carnival barker trying to get you to look at the fake bearded lady.

The article ends with Daleiden speaking to Glenn Beck, which is some kind of summit of inane fuckery. Referring to one of the only doctors who performs third-trimester abortions - an exceedingly rare procedure - Daleiden says, "We were talking and kind of joking, laughing about something. And all of a sudden she looked straight in my eyes, and I saw almost a flash of light go from one eye to the other...and all of a sudden her eyes looked hard and mean and aggressive, and for the first time in this entire project, I felt actually afraid. On some level, we feel like that was the predator look or predator instinct that you see in someone who is accustomed to killing people."

Nothing else follows that. Really. We get the vision of the great white shark ob-gyn and not a single word about how Daleiden might just be insane and projecting his delusions onto the doctor.

Nice work there, Washington Post. A well-lubed vibrator couldn't have done a better job of servicing an asshole.

Clinton and Sanders Voters: Rules of Engagement

Here's a story the Rude Pundit might have told at some point - who knows after a dozen years of daily shit - but it bears telling here: Back in 2007 and 2008, the Rude Pundit was all about the Obama love. He went for Obama before it was cool because he saw that the man was gonna lead a movement that the country desperately needed. He went into it eyes open, aware that Obama was a slightly left-of-center Democrat, not the second coming of one Kennedy or another.

To that end, the Rude Pundit spilled much blog seed criticizing Hillary Clinton, especially for her attacks on Obama. At one point, the BBC contacted the Rude Pundit to ask him to represent people who didn't think Clinton should run for president (an appearance he declined because they completely got him wrong).  Yet even so, he praised Clinton for her primary victory in New Hampshire.

In January of 2008, at Eschacon, a gathering of liberals in Philadelphia sponsored by Atrios's Eschaton blog, the Rude Pundit was scheduled to perform. A blog friend came up to him in the hallway of the conference hotel the day before. She had tried to convince him that Obama couldn't possibly win, that Clinton was the way to go, and she had a warning. "Just wanna let you know," she said. "If you start going after Hillary tomorrow night, a couple of big butch lesbians said they are going to rush the stage and stop you." The Rude Pundit went back to his room later that night and furiously rewrote his script, revising his "42 Ways Not to Have Sex with Ann Coulter" to be an all-out, barnburning attack on Clinton. "Fuck them," he thought. "Come at me."

The next day, all throughout the events, the Rude Pundit realized that, whether or not we agreed on the Democratic candidate, we were in this together. He hadn't said or written anything to be shitty to Clinton supporters so far. Why start now? Why should we turn on each other? How useless that seemed, especially in the wake of the destruction wrought by George W. Bush. He stowed the Clinton stuff and degraded the shit out of Ann Coulter, and a splendid time was had by all.

The Rude Pundit thinks about that every single time someone gets viciously upset that he doesn't have the oh-so-expected high hard-on for Bernie Sanders. Yesterday, after writing that Hillary Clinton won the debate, he was inundated with people trying to prove him wrong. "Sanders won every online poll and focus group," they told him. Online polls have no scientific basis beyond who is moved to click on them. Relying on them to prove your point is like saying your Mom says you're a good singer.

"You're just saying what the corporate media says and they contribute to Hillary," said others, to which the Rude Pundit can only say, "Um, if corporations wanna pay me, call me. Otherwise, I'm goddamn unallied." This is not to mention that he's capable of keeping two thoughts in his head. He can say someone won a debate and is a great candidate yet not be committed. Hell, in 2012, he said that Mitt Romney beat Obama in their first debate. Oh, no.

Then this email arrived last night in the inbox with the confusing subject "So you're shilling for Shillary now." It reads, "Go fuck yourself, Lee. Might as well wear your confederate flag with pride. Shillary is a republican. You are a fucking asshole and I hope you die." The temptation is to respond with suggestions of various large farm animals that can fuck the writer in the ass, as well as a few variations on what he can fellate and the semen he can choke on.  But where does that get us, huh? 

We're on the same side, gang. We want one of the Democrats to win. The Rude Pundit, for his part, believes that Hillary Clinton will win the nomination and he really likes Bernie Sanders. Hell, Bernie did pretty damn good at the debate. Ain't that shit complicated, huh? Yeah, he's still working it out in his head, so, you know, calm the fuck down for a little while. We've got some time before we even get to most of the primaries. But maybe let's set down a rule or two so the left doesn't tear itself up between Hillary and Bernie supporters.

For instance, how about this: The candidates are fair game, but their supporters deserve the benefit of the doubt. You can tear in to Clinton as much as you want about her Iraq war vote or her crappy response to the question about Edward Snowden. Or you can point out everything you want about Sanders' stand on gun control. But maybe, just maybe, figure that their supporters are acting in good faith.

Maybe focus your ire on the people who deserve it, like racist maniac Donald Trump or scary ass Ted Cruz or creepily desperate Marco Rubio. Use your energy to take their followers apart.  Fuck those people.

Yeah, yeah, the Rude Pundit knows, Christ, he knows. In this age of the shithead comment thread, the hastily hocked-up blog post, and the "I'll kill your mother's corpse after I rape her" tweets, it's asking the impossible. But there are motherfuckers who really need ass-kicking. Kick them. 

Hillary Clinton Won Because of a Lack of Fucks to Give

Look, Hillary Clinton won last night's debate. You can come up with all the really terrific and insightful things that Bernie Sanders said. You can pretend that dull Martin O'Malley had some kind of breakthrough. And, if you're really delusional, you can act like Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee are anything but the Dastardly and Muttley of this wacky race. Clinton not only won; she made it impossible for anyone else (like Joe Biden) to even think about getting the Democratic nomination.

Honestly, as the almost immovable frontrunner, it was relatively easy for her: All she had to do was not seem defensive and hold her ground. She blew past that low bar and moved into looking genuine and, unlike the other four on stage and every Republican, genuinely presidential. Last night, she delivered her best debate performance by far, including when she ran for Senate and certainly better than the battered, beleaguered, embittered figure she cut against Barack Obama. The reasons for that ought to be making Republicans shit blood.

See, after nearly three decades in the public spotlight, a good chunk of that spent in the cross-hairs of every scandal gun Republicans could load, nothing you can throw at Hillary Clinton is gonna dent her. She ran out of fucks sometime in 2008, and now, with no fucks to give, Clinton has become a loose, agile candidate who gives as good as she gets. When Chafee chided her on the private email server and moderator Anderson Cooper asked if she wanted to respond, her curt "No" was a goddamn brilliantly simple way to deny credibility to a bullshit topic. Once upon a time, Clinton would have overexplained herself for the millionth time. It would have seemed paranoid, as if she was cornered. It would have been boring. Instead, Clinton defused it by, more or less, brushing her shoulder. Imagine if her accuser was some Republican fuckwit like Trump or Marco Rubio, left sputtering about honesty and integrity while Clinton declined to engage. Imagine how small that Republican will look. Well, watch Chafee shrink in that moment and you get the idea.

You could look at the entire debate as a model for what the nation needs when it comes its political discussions. While the Republican debate stage was given over to petty personality conflicts, dick size comparisons, and whatever the fuck Donald Trump or Ben Carson just mouth-farted, in Las Vegas, at this debate, the focus was almost entirely on issues. The disagreements between the candidates were substantive, not what someone thought of someone's face. It might not be as fun as Mike Huckabee drawling his backwoods anal rape threats or Chris Christie desperately barking about how he gets shit done or Carly Fiorina lying like lies are air. But you could listen to the Democrats and think, "Yes, that is a rational position. I might not agree with Clinton on her approach to dealing with large financial institutions, but I don't believe that what she wants to do will turn the United States into a scorched-earth hellscape of groveling masses and fattened billionaires." Honestly, debates shouldn't need to have a moment where a candidate could turn to the audience and roar, "Are you not entertained?"

Republicans are shitting blood today for lots of reasons. Clinton gave the barest preview of the arrows she has in her quiver for whichever sacrificial lamb the GOP finally clusterfucks into being the nominee. Right-wingers are all howling over Clinton declaring that Republicans are enemies that she's made. Well, no shit. It would have been insulting to the GOP if she hadn't said they were her enemies. The raison d'etre of Republicanism for a good chunk of the last 25 years has been to be one or the other Clinton's bitter rival. So go fuck yourself with your sudden fainting couch act.

More importantly, though, Clinton tore shit up when she finally got to bring in women's health issues. Asked about how she'd respond when Republicans attack her for wanting to spend money on family leave, Clinton wrecked the room: "Well, look, you know, when people say that -- it's always the Republicans or their sympathizers who say, 'You can't have paid leave, you can't provide health care.' They don't mind having big government to interfere with a woman's right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood. They're fine with big government when it comes to that. I'm sick of it." She continued on this passionate counteroffensive, "We should not be paralyzed -- we should not be paralyzed by the Republicans and their constant refrain, "big government this, big government that," that except for what they want to impose on the American people. I know we can afford it, because we're going to make the wealthy pay for it. That is the way to get it done." And not a single fuck was given.

Sure, Republicans are scared to death and trying to spin this all against the Democrats to make us believe one of their mental cripples or moral lepers is better. And there are fellow liberals out there who are whining about how quickly Clinton was declared the debate's victor. Give it the fuck up. She won on points in the old debate tournament sense. She won on speaking style. She won on approach. She just won. You can say you don't like that she won, but that doesn't change the fact that she won. She won because no one else stepped up. Sanders was great in that way that, if you like him, he'll always do great. But he didn't overcome Clinton.

The best thing about Sanders being in the race is that it has made Clinton have to do exactly what the Rude Pundit wanted from her: she is bringing progressives into the conversation. She is going back to the Hillary Clinton who didn't have to hide her liberal side for fear of offending right-wingers. She won because she has finally evolved into the perfect political animal, fearless, polished, prepared, relaxed, self-possessed. You might not like someone so obviously ready for the electoral games. But it's got its advantages.

Do you think that Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or any of the other Republicans would have a flea fart's chance in a hurricane against her? And what do you wanna bet that Trey Gowdy is trying to come up with a way to stop her testimony before his worthless Benghazi committee?

(Note: Praising the shit out of Clinton's debate performance is not an endorsement. It's just an acknowledgment of the reality of the event. The election is still over a year away, the Rude Pundit's state's primary months from now. Let's see who is still standing.)

Fuck Benghazi

At this point, the Rude Pundit thinks he's speaking for the vast majority of Americans when he says, "Who the fuck cares anymore about whatever the fuck happened in Benghazi?" For three fuckin' years, we've been subjected to the attempt by Republicans to fuck Benghazi into some meaningful analogy for the failures of Hillary Clinton and President Obama. Yet no matter how many times they stick their dicks into Benghazi, no matter how many times they fuck Benghazi in the mouth, in the ass, in the ears, in the eyes, it remains what it is: an unfortunate fuck-up in an unfortunate, fucked-up situation. At this point, inbred-eyed geek Trey Gowdy is just cutting new holes in Benghazi to fuck, saying that, yes, fuck, this time, this time, with the emails, the motherfucking emails, we'll finally get something, some little moan from Benghazi that'll show everyone we were right.

No, you won't. What Republicans have actually done is taken a tragedy and politicized it to such a ludicrous extent that any semblance of tragedy has been erased from it. Now it's just that abstract event where Hillary Clinton used a secret vagina gun to murder Ambassador Chris Stevens while allowing ululating hordes of Allah-worshippers to overrun the American compound before sending out Susan Rice to lie before she came back to the White House to eat her out while Barack Obama jacked off into a dead security agent's skull.

Anyone other than family members and friends who gets choked up or outraged about Benghazi anymore ought to be treated like just-released child molesters: shunned, labeled, driven away from places where decent people want to gather.

What's the reason for this welling of anger? Is it the now-politically-deceased Kevin McCarthy's admission that the Super Special Ultra We're-Really-Gonna-Find-Out-Now Committee on Making Hillary Smell Our Farts had the purpose of making Hillary smell their farts? Was it the SSUWRGFON Committee whistleblower saying, "These skeevy motherfuckers are too busy fucking their mothers to give a shit about anything else"?

No. The straw that chapped this camel's ass was a bullshit ad from the bullshit Stop Hillary PAC, a group that sounds like some pathetic group of bros who Hillary wouldn't hand job when they were in high school together. The ad is titled "I'd Like to Ask," and it's a conspiracy theory wet dream of actors doing voiceovers pretending to be the Americans killed at Benghazi and what they'd "like to ask" Hillary Clinton, which, surprisingly, is not "When are these jackals going to stop feeding on our corpses?" The ad ends with Chris Stevens' grave being shown because nothing says how much you respect a family's loss than shoving it in their faces and turning their loved ones into meat puppets.

The ad will be shown tonight during the Democratic debate where you can bet some faux journalist or play-mad citizen will ask Hillary Clinton about Benghazi. And, frankly, it wouldn't be surprising if Hillary just turned to whoever and said, "You know what? Fuck you. Kiss my ass. I'm taking my millions of dollars and getting the fuck out of here. Good luck with President Trump, America. I'm moving to a private island."

So, yeah, as a matter of fact, fuck Benghazi. Fuck it. Fuck. It. We should be sick and tired of pretending we give a shit anymore. And fuck everyone making bank off it. You can shove the femurs of the dead up your worthless asses and fuck yourselves with them.

Note: For more subtle jibes like this, join the Rude Pundit and Jeff Kreisler tonight on Rabble.tv for live commentary during the Democratic debate on CNN starting at 8:30 p.m ET. Watch on TV, listen on your computer. It's the future!

You can listen for free or sign up for free and write comments during the broadcast. Tell us if we're awesome or suck or awesomely suck.

The Rude Pundit Can Be All Up in Your Ears During Tonight's Debate

You're thinking, "Huh. I wanna watch the Democratic debate tonight because of some misguided sense of civic duty, but I need someone to cut to the chase and make lots of filthy jokes during it." Your prayers are answered.

Like he did with the Republican debate a couple of weeks ago, the Rude Pundit will be live-commenting with words you can hear during tonight's Debate of Hillary, Bernie, and others-who-we-don't-give-a-shit-about. Head over to Rabble.tv and you can have the overstimulation of a two-screen experience. Or two audio track experience.

Anyone can listen in, but if you wanna be able to send messages to the Rude Pundit during the big show, you need to sign up. That's free. It's all free, motherfuckers, so do it.

Last time, 4000 people tuned in to hear one man speak for three hours as he got drunker and drunker and imagined Ben Carson having sex with a unicorn made of butterflies (you kind of had to be there). Tonight, the Rude Pundit will be joined by his occasional partner in crime, Jeff Kreisler, the funny man who is one of the brains behind The Final Edition. Which one of us will be the first to get sick of democracy? Which one will pass out from the whiskey? Tune in to find out.

It all starts at 8:30 p.m. And this time around, we'll be watching TV, not doing the delayed internet feed like last time.  Sign up, comment, and we'll read some of your snarky remarks on the air, if they pleasure us.

So snuggle in between the Rude Pundit and Jeff Kreisler tonight.

Columbus Day for the Conquered: Obama Administration Is Making Amends for History

Last week, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced a settlement of a lawsuit with the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian nations to the tune of $186 million.  The tribes had sued back in 2005 over land claims that had gone unaddressed since the early 20th century. See, the government dicked over the Indians, in that charming way the government so often had, by removing them from their land in places like Mississippi, all the way to Oklahoma, a process that had begun in the 1830s Trail of Tears.

Then the government sold the ancestral home of the tribes to timber companies, money which would have gone to the Native Americans if they had not been forced out. Of course, the companies made billions of dollars and the government violated the law, but, hey, $186 million is what the Choctaw and Chickasaw accepted.  The Choctaw Chief himself called it "a great, historic day."

Since part of the job of the Obama administration has been to clean up the fuck-ups of the past, it has settled cases with 86 different tribes in similar cases since 2009. Another dozen or so are still being negotiated. This means that President Obama isn't just mopping up the blood after the Bush presidency. He's trying to right wrongs that go a long way back in our history.

Choctaw Chief Gary Barton also said, "We plan for the proceeds to be invested in our people – expanding education, creating jobs, promoting economic development and culture, as well as a portion to be invested in a sustainability fund for the future of our citizens." The governor of the Chickasaw nation said much the same. So far, the total paid out to all tribes is $2.8 billion, a paltry sum to regain a little of our national soul.

These actions have flown under the radar since they amount to unacknowledged reparations for the cruel actions of the white men against the indigenous peoples of America. But on this Columbus Day, as we distance ourselves more and more from the genocidal maniac who never landed here, it's good to know that an effort is being made to say that, while we didn't start the fire, someone's gotta put it out.

The House GOP: The Clusterfuck Quorum

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're gonna participate, you should probably be clear about what kind of blood orgy you're going to. Oh, sure, sure, you might think it's a run-of-the-mill, "here's some pig's blood to pour on our naked bodies" blood orgy. Or it could be a little more hardcore, the let's-sacrifice-this-goat-to-Baal thing where you end up balling in warm blood and viscera with more than a few people who are incredibly serious about this whole thing bringing one dark lord or another into being.

You wanna be clear about what the hosts are up to because you don't wanna find yourself in the middle of a human sacrifice because, let's face it, it's just awkward. As some poor virgin's throat is slit, you realize that you didn't sign up for this, but what the hell are you gonna do? Leave? You're surrounded by murderers. You gotta either risk your own life to flee or you gotta suck it up, rub your nipples with virgin blood, and start fucking.

So it was that the House Republicans gathered in conference yesterday to anoint a new Speaker. Most were expecting a basic goat killing before the blood orgy, but what they got was a full-on human sacrifice. And none of them knew what the hell to do once Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy decided to tell everyone to fuck off with their ungovernable caucus and drop out of running for Speaker.

There is a significant percentage of the Rude Pundit's brain that wants to think that this was John Boehner's strategy all along. In this scenario (which Josh Marshall also thinks is plausible) Boehner decided to ratfuck the conservatives in his party, especially the stupidly named "Freedom Caucus." It's no secret that Boehner fucking hates the crazies who are opposed to the act of governing, but they were causing him to lose control of the House. So he announced he was stepping down, a moment that led to no tears from the notoriously over-emotional Ohio congressman, but it was just a gambit. He knew that McCarthy had skeletons that would prevent him from being able to ascend to the Speaker's chair.  He knew that Paul Ryan had no interest in running. And he knew that far right conservatives like weasel-puss Jason Chaffetz could not put together enough votes.

So Boehner remains speaker for up to another 18 months, this time as the savior of a party that is imploding under the weight of its own bullshit. Now, who is gonna be able to rationally fuck with him?  Boehner could have a Corleone-like purge of ultra-conservatives in key committee positions.  He could make deals with Democrats to hike the debt ceiling and pass a transportation bill. Until the House Republicans can come up with a plausible new Speaker, Boehner has said he will stay. As Marshall says, "Boehner 2.0 would be basically the Man of Steel and indestructible for almost 18 months."

Of course, the other thing this debacle reveals is, once again, the true dysfunction in Congress belongs to Republicans. They are divided between the people who want to get shit done, even if it means compromising, and the nutzoids who love the chaos and just want to watch the world burn.  The dishonesty required to say that there are such problems in both parties is stunning, so, obviously, some idiot is going to say that "extremists" in both parties are to blame for the failures of governance.

Goddamn, the Rude Pundit hopes that Boehner was the host of the blood orgy who put the goat and the pig's blood away and said, "Let's make this one special." It'd be such an old school power play, the kind of thing that the deranged mutants of the Tea Party couldn't even begin to comprehend, like sending the Hills Have Eyes family to Yale.

By the way, it's always better to be a voyeur rather than a participant at a blood orgy. You stay cleaner, and you get to touch yourself while you watch the filthy, heaving supplicants attempt to fuck like their lives depend on it but mostly just slipping in the blood.

Koch Cashcapades: Dig in the Shit, Pigs

If you're ever in the mood for a dark 1960s British comedy that tries a little too hard to be veddy, veddy British, check out Peter Sellers as a mad billionaire in the 1969 flick The Magic Christian. Having determined that he can do whatever the fuck he wants because he's so rich, Sellers, with his adopted son, played, for some reason, by Ringo Starr, fills a vat with pig shit, piss, and blood and tosses wads of cash into it, announcing, "Free money." Well-dressed, proper British men (mostly) come rushing to the vat and hold their noses to get in and gather the bills.

The Rude Pundit thought about this scene when he read the headlines: "Carly Fiorina Added to Koch Brothers' Short List" or "Carly Fiorina Gains Blessing of the Koch Brothers' Dark Money Network" or even "Koch brothers eyeing Marco Rubio for nearly $1B campaign contribution." But he didn't think of it for the reason you might be thinking. Sure, sure, you can easily say that the candidates are the idiots leaping into the piss pool for befouled cash.

But what should bother all of us is the blithe, passive way this information has been given to us, the voting public. We should read something like "Carly Fiorina...has tacitly been acknowledged by multi-billionaires Charles and David Koch through their extended network of political organizations. This means that not only could the big bucks begin flowing from the Koch coffers into Carly’s lightly funded campaign, but it could also attract other heavyweight GOP donors who are still on the fence" and feel blind outrage. It is a flat-out, plain statement that rich fucks are trying to buy the election. It's not that we didn't know already that rich fucks try to buy elections - that's what rich fucks do. But the fact that it's said out in the open, reported, even, by media outlets, without an acknowledgment that something is really, truly, on a basic level fucked up about it says more about the slow death of our democracy than perhaps the act itself.

In other words, like gun massacres, we've become numb to what is truly dangerous in our brain damaged nation simply because it just happens all the goddamn time.

In the Rubio article, the New York Daily News notes, "The big prize — aside from the presidency itself — is still the nearly $1 billion contribution the kingmaking Koch brothers, Charles and David, will reportedly throw behind the conservative agenda next year." And it was not followed with "What a disgusting sham our electoral system has become when two assholes can toss a billion bucks into the pot and get senators and governors and whatever the fuck Fiorina is to lick the waxy folds of their balls clean."

Seriously, no one gives a shit. And that's where The Magic Christian comes back into play. "A bit literal," says Ringo Starr about the money in the feces and urine pool. But maybe not. Because, see, maybe the point here isn't that candidates will wallow around in wretched effluvia to scrape campaign funds together. That is quite on the nose. Maybe, instead, we voters are the ones in the pool because, ultimately, we're the people who are content to dip into the shit pond to choose our candidates. It's especially true of Republicans this time around, but Hillary ain't clean.

We should read those headlines and the many, many more like them and not just shrug. The oligarchy wins when the masses are taught not to care.

Late Post Today

Awaiting the call to become Speaker of the House because why the hell not. 

Back later with more chaotic rudeness. 

Your State Sucks: Alabama Sucks Because It Dishonors Its Own African American Heritage

So you might have heard that the fine state of Alabama (motto: "Our capitol has been Confederate flag-free for nearly four months") is saving money by getting rid of the driver's license service in a bunch of counties in the state. Yeah, of the 31, 8 are counties with large majority black registered voters in a state where you are required to have a government-issued photo i.d. to vote. Sure, you can renew your license online, but now license bureaus will be nearly 50 miles away for many people who need them, especially, you know, African Americans in poverty.

One of those offices is in Macon County, Alabama. Check it out on a map:

You see what town that is there? It's Tuskegee, Alabama, the place where Tuskegee University is. That would be the same Tuskegee University that was the Tuskegee Institute, led by Booker T. Washington from 1881 to 1915, a place where blacks in the South could get higher education post-Reconstruction. It's where George Washington Carver did some of his most important research. It's where the Tuskegee Airmen were trained to go fight in World War II. It's also the place where poor black sharecroppers were deliberately infected with syphilis to study its effects. And to this day, it remains one of the best universities in the south. In other words, important chapters in African American history are bound up with Tuskegee.

And that's one of the places where Alabama's state government decided to take steps that would end up disenfranchising African American voters. Classy.

Why We Barely Talk About the Terrible Policy Ideas of the GOP Candidates

It's funny, innit? Every time you see an attack on Hillary Clinton, it's about whether or not she's been honest about something related to her job as Secretary of State, whether or not she's given us the facts, or, most importantly, whether or not her proposals as a candidate are sensible. The same goes for Bernie Sanders: the media spends more time talking about his proposals for economic justice than the economic or any plans of the entire slate of all the Republican candidates combined. And, if you've paid attention to the coverage, Sanders doesn't get a hell of a lot of air.

One of the reasons for that is because who gives a slow turtle fuck what the Republicans stand for when they say such stupid shit constantly. Honestly, not a day goes by without one candidate or another putting out some appalling statement or speaking some idiotic blathering that is calculated to appeal to the simpletons.

In the last couple of days:

1. Ben Carson, a man who looks like he's injecting horse tranquilizers right into his jugular, did a quick Q&A on Facebook yesterday. The dude who isn't sure about how gravity works (it's Jesus semen sticking us to the Earth, Dr. Carson) was asked about his position on the 2nd Amendment, the one that says God wants you to be able to kill on a whim. Carson replied, really, "As a Doctor, I spent many a night pulling bullets out of bodies. There is no doubt that this senseless violence is breathtaking – but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away."

How the fuck do you respond to that? You wanna show him that 8 year-old girl who was shot dead in Tennessee and ask him? He won't care. One of the leading Republican candidates said that guns are more important than people. So what do you ask next? "Gee, and how about your tariff policy and South Asia?" There aren't enough dicks on enough donkeys to tell Ben Carson to get fucked with.

2. This afternoon, on the right-wing blog RedState, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (campaign slogan: "Stop laughing!") decided the best use of his time was to attack the father of the Oregon shooter because he dared to say that guns suck. About the man whose son killed himself after murdering nine other people, Jindal said (quoted extensively so you can get the full blast of motherfuckering going on here), "This killer’s father is now lecturing us on the need for gun control and he says he has no idea how or where his son got the guns. Of course he doesn’t know. You know why he doesn’t know? Because he is not, and has never been in his son’s life. He’s a complete failure as a father, he should be embarrassed to even show his face in public. He’s the problem here. He brags that he has never held a gun in his life and that he had no idea that his son had any guns. Why didn’t he know? Because he failed to raise his son. He should be ashamed of himself, and he owes us all an apology. When he was asked what his relationship was with his son, he said he hadn’t seen him in a while because he lived with his mother. Case Closed."

If you have anything like a moral compass, you read that and thought, "There must not be a God because a demon hand didn't burst out of the ground, reach into Jindal's anus, and pull him inside out before dragging him into the shit-filled sodomy pits of Hades." If you read that and thought, "Well, this is a reasonable person who should be treated with respect," then perhaps it is your anus that needs a hellclawing.

3. Away from the deranged gun fellating that seems to be one of the prime activities of the Republican Party, Carly Fiorina (campaign motto: "Failure has a name") said Sunday that she'd be able to handle the terrorist armies of ISIS because "my degree in medieval history and philosophy has come in handy because what ISIS wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally." Yes, and when ISIS wants to use trebuchets to launch anti-aircraft rockets, we can talk. Until then, let's keep the Crusades references to a minimum.

Who has time to discuss anything of substance with these drooling numbskulls and skeevy con artists  masturbating in public?

Post-Massacre, Conservative America Reacts Like It Got a Head Wound

Sure, Jeb Bush saying, "Stuff happens" as a response to last week's mass shooting in Oregon was pretty fucking dumb. Bush compounded the dumb by clarifying himself when pressed by a reporter, "Things happen all the time...Things. Is that better?" Dude, just say, "Shit happens." Stop with the polite debasement of a horror.

Then, proving once and for all that George W. might have been the smart one, Bush added, "A child drowned in a pool and the impulse is to pass a law that puts fencing around pools. Well it may not change it. Or you have a car accident and the impulse is to pass a law that deals with that unique event." Except that we have all kinds of laws because of car accidents. Except that one guy once failed at blowing up a plane with his shoes, so now, even 14 years later, we have to take off our damn shoes at the airport. Except, oh, right, Governor Jeb Bush once fucking signed a law that required people to do something to prevent children from drowning in their pools.

Yet this was not the lamest thing said by a GOP presidential candidate in the wake of the Umpqua Community College massacre. That would go to America's angriest red balloon, Chris Christie, who was on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulous's hair and was asked about the fact (notice the word there) that New Jersey, the state Christie occasionally is governor of, has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation and one of the lowest rates of gun deaths. Was there any correlation? Christie said, "I don’t — George, I don’t think there is" before doing the usual Republican bullshit dance of mental health needs

To say that there is no causal relationship between strictness of gun laws and numbers of gun deaths is to bizarrely ignore the overwhelming evidence that plainly shows that, in nearly every state, that is true. This is the madness of Republicanism in the 21st century. Virtually every scientist says climate change is caused by human activity, and the Republican says they're wrong and liars. Supply-side tax policy has failed every time it's been tried, and the Republican says that we need to keep trying. Nearly every state with tight gun laws has a smaller number of gun deaths by murder, suicide, and accident than states with little regulation, and the Republican says that gun control will only help criminals. Anyone who says any of these things should be whipped out of the public sphere like a rabid dog for fear that they will infect everyone.

But the quiescent media just raises its haunches and tells the flatly lying Republicans, "Take me." A report this morning on NPR, you know, that bastion of liberal elitism, was about Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight Committee who looks like a shaved rabbit with its ears pinned back. The reporter said, "Planned Parenthood criticized Chaffetz for using what they believed to be inaccurate data about the number of abortions they provide." It's not that Planned Parenthood "believed" the data was inaccurate. The chart that presented the data was inaccurate. Period. That's not an opinion. It's not something that needs to be attributed to anyone. If someone says, "One plus one equals twenty," you don't need to say that it's wrong according to someone. Things can just be wrong.

When people are wrong on the demonstrable facts, the media fails when it doesn't treat them like they are wrong. For instance, three candidates running for the GOP nomination, including two of the top, said that Umpqua is a gun-free zone, implying that only pussies without guns die like pigs in a slaughterhouse.

But Umpqua isn't a gun-free zone. If you have a conceal carry permit in Oregon, you can take your gun with you on campus. In fact, students with guns were talked out of going after the asshole shooter because they would have been in a shitload of danger and the cops on the scene wouldn't have known who not to shoot. One of the good guys with a gun, an Army vet, said, "If we would have run across the field, we would have been targets. We made a good choice at the time." You got that? They had guns and decided that trying to be a superhero was fucking dumb. That makes those gun owners smarter than every fucknut wannabe who thinks life is a game of Call of Duty.

And if gun owners aren't the X-Men, the NRA sure as fuck isn't Magneto. It's beyond time to take them on in a real, concerted way, like Hillary Clinton is proposing (and Martin O'Malley proposed before). Ideological purity needs to go out the window. Anti-gun liberals need to ally with the sane gun owners, the ones who believe that you need to, you know, well-regulate arms. That'd probably end up being the vast majority of the nation, which means that maybe Congress would listen.

Well, if Bloomberg's money is involved. Let's not be naive.