Haiku Review of 2018, Part 3: Haiku and Change

Away we go. Another batch of fresh and tasty haiku to kiss this motherfucker of a year farewell. Thanks to everyone who submitted, from near and far, from sea to polluted sea. Over 100 haiku were submitted, filled with righteous rage and orgasmic catharsis. Here are ones that touched me in all the bad places:

From Sammy in Minnesota:

God, I want to punch
Republicans in the balls
Just right in the balls

From Rabbitearz:

Climate change is here.
The world is in a slow boil.
Don't buy a jacket.

From JD in Florida:

Not quite Nazis yet
Concentration camps for kids
A stylish touch though

From Gary G. in Phoenix, Arizona:

In these last few years
A black guy was elected
Twice, you fuckers, twice

From Sarah in Seattle:

We
shit microplastics
as coasts drown, choke, and smolder.
Twelve years left on clock.

From BB in LA:

Mnuchin looks like
He swallowed twenty lemons
And crapped out Bitcoins.

From Carlos in NYC:

Without John McCain
As Graham’s "Jiminy Cricket,"
Lindsey lost his mind.

From Steve in San Diego:

government shut down
a child dies in custody
all this for a wall

From Pool House Doctor in Texas:

“Poor me," tweeted Trump
All alone in the White House
Should be a jail cell

From Emily in Idaho:

The president is
Unqualified to manage
A lemonade stand.

From Don the Canadian:

Drooling idiots,
Those MAGA-capped crackers make
Me hate your country.

And one from me:

Lumbering Forward
Adios and bye,
2018, you fucking
prick hole of a year

Haiku Review of 2018 (Part 2): Make America Haiku Again

Once again, a call went out for haiku to try to exorcise this demonic year, and you delivered with dozens of the little fuckers. Unlike last year, when everyone was laser focused on Trump, Trump, Trump, this year the subjects were more diverse (although they all still swirled around the Trump toilet, as we must do in this shit era we're damned to live through).

Here are some of your best, from all over this big ol' land of ours and from overseas:

From Scott P. in Denver:

Mexico won't pay.
Neither will Congress. Trump pouts.
"I want my wall! Waaah!"

From L.B. in NYC:

Big Cheese(burger) Meltdown
Stop and think, Donald.
No good fast food in prison.
Treason ain't worth it.

From Doug in Denver:

Impeachment unwise?
Future presidents will know.
If not this time, when?

From Dave in Nashville:

Twilight's last gleaming:
Boy, 8, in our custody,
No longer breathing.

From Mike in Albuquerque:

Trump bans the bump-stocks.
The NRA is bankrupt.
Parkland kids kick ass.

From Jack H. in Central Illinois:

Dems win House control
Count on subpoenaed tax forms
A mushroom shrivels

From Melissa in Florida:

Blue tsunami hit
Old white men are in turmoil
Long may women rule

From Radical Russ in Oregon:

Marijuana, as usual
Fucking *Utah* passed
Medical marijuana
This debate is won

From Schnoidl in Berlin:

build the gallows now
gather up the treason gang
plant trees in their piss

And from me:

California's Only Hope
Maybe one day soon
Rising seas will extinguish
Massive forest fires.

Encomium
George Bush, Senior died.
The line to blow his corpse dick
Stretched for miles and miles.

Keep 'em coming. You can send all haiku (legit ones, 5-7-5) to "rudepundit(at)yahoo(dot)com."

The Haiku Review of 2018: Wow, That All Really Happened

Oh, good people of Left Blogsylvania and the Prog Twitterverse and all the liberal socials, at the end of every long December, this here little corner of the internets looks back on the fucked up year not through longform, naval-gazing hot takes and not through endless lists of infobits. No, around these parts, we write haiku. Over the last decade plus, a thousand or so of you have submitted and had them either summarily rejected by me or forever ennobled in these filthy pages.

So that time is upon us once again. Submit your haiku about events in goddamned 2018 to "rudepundit(at)yahoo(dot)com." I am the sole arbiter of all things haiku here, and my judgment is susceptible to various impairments both legal and not.

I'm a stickler for the form: one line of 5 syllables, one line of 7 syllables, and one line of 5 syllables, in that order. They can be as filthy, funny, or fucked-up as you like. You can be serious, silly, or sanctimonious. Titled or untitled. The best ones get published on here over the next few days, so lemme know what name you want on it (in case your boss or mate or Mom sees it) and where you're from. Like "Cockknocker from Shitheel, AK" or "Linda from San Francisco" or something.

Here are few to get your brain juices a-flowing:

Brett Kavanaugh whined
That women dare judge the judge.
Squee toasted with beer.

An orange monster
Lashing out at brain phantoms
Is our president

Prison will be tough
For a supple little boy
Like Jared Kushner.

That was so simple. Join in the fun. Send 'em on in, and I'll post a bunch, along with more of my own. Let's all kick the darkness of 2018 until it bleeds daylight.

Things That Eased the Pain in 2018

Goddamn, this year felt like a decade. Between the unending chaotic fuckery of Donald Trump and the polluted stream of information that is constantly flowing through our brains via our various screens, we are reaching a point of saturation where the sweet kiss of an asteroid would be a relief. Barring something that quick and cataclysmic (as opposed to the creeping cataclysm of climate change), we have needed our fixes of peace, things that can jack right into the pleasure center and tell us, "Spend some time in this other world for a little while."

So, in 2018, here are some of the things that made it all just a bit more tolerable:

1. Live comedy was a motherfuckin' salve. When I saw Marc Maron at the Beacon Theatre last month, his full-blown return to political comedy led to one of the funniest riffs on the hypocrisy of the Christian right that I've ever heard. It was so savage and crude and cathartic that I thought I'd pass out from laughing. Yes, John Mulaney's "horse in a hospital" bit was amazing, but Maron's starts with Mike Pence contemplating sucking cock and then it gets absurdly filthy.

For a sheer, bludgeoning rush of stand-up power, the tight ten that Robert Kelly did one night at the Comedy Cellar in April couldn't be beat, and Lynne Koplitz (who, full disclosure, is an old friend), on the same bill, unleashed a torrent of hilarious self-deprecation that ultimately was about how the culture around her judges middle-aged women. Some sublime shit there.

2. Continuing with the live stuff, big and small, Beck's big, visually impressive show at Madison Square Garden in July was a total grown-up dance party. On a smaller scale, Mitski's impassioned, artsy performance at Brooklyn Steel earlier this month was a powerful reminder of how you can feel music in your bones. Courtney Barnett's rain-soaked summer concert at Prospect Park was a raw display of guitar god shredding. And I finally got to see Foo Fighters, who have embraced all the cheesy rock cliches and come out with an awesome blast of a show, powered by Dave Grohl's obvious delight in being there, playing for us. For bliss upon bliss, listening to a group of Cajun musicians jam together while drinking beer and eating boudin at the Bayou Teche Brewery in Arnaudville, Louisiana, was about as fine a way to laze away an afternoon as I could conceive.

3. The albums that I've listened to endlessly this year are Historian by Lucy Dacus, which is a journey into heartache that moves from gorgeous hushes to gut-punching wails; and Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae, a friggin' masterclass in the history of modern black music, like most every Prince record was. Speaking of journeys, Alejandro Escovedo's The Crossing took the immigrant experience and the American experience and merged them into a gorgeous and brutal concept album. I could go on and on with all the great music released this year, like Father John Misty's God's Favorite Customer, his best album since his first; Kacey Musgraves's Golden Hour, her best album since her first; not to mention the new ones by Parquet Courts, Let's Eat Grandma, Noname, and the Decemberists, as well as the aforementioned Mitski, Beck, and Courtney Barnett.

4. I'm a theatre geek for plays (not much of a musical guy), and this year I got to fulfill a bit of a dream in seeing a live production of Amadeus, which was done with an onstage orchestra that moved in and out of scenes in an epic, huge, marvelous performance at the National Theatre in London. Also in London, the Bridge Theatre put on a vital, energized modern-dress Julius Caesar with David Morrissey as Mark Antony and Michelle Fairley as Cassius, where the we in the audience were the raging crowd in Rome, shoved and manipulated by Caesar's soldiers, forced into hiding during war.

In New York, the bracing and expansive production of Jez Butterworth's The Ferryman (which came from London) brought together the violence of myths and the violence of history and its effects on one Irish family. Two productions at the tiny Soho Rep were hypertheatrical examinations of race in a United States that can't get past its past: Is God Is by Aleshea Harris, about two scarred sisters on a journey to kill their father, and Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury, about a middle-class black family that literally turned the audience into the show. I also loved Yerma, in a massive staging at the Park Armory, and Hurricane Party, a balls-to-the-wall old fashioned theatre throwdown with sex, drugs, and violence.

5. TV? Fuck, where to start? The Americans had one of the best last seasons and finales of any show ever. Homecoming was a great mystery inside a mind fuck, with a performance by Julia Roberts that made you say, "Whoa, I forgot that she's this fucking good." If you're not watching The Good Place, you're just an idiot. Same with Bojack Horseman and Better Call Saul. Atlanta was so great that it essentially created its own genre. The Terror was a genuinely frightening, genuinely moving historical horror show. GLOW, Maniac, and Barry all took their plots and characters in exciting, novel directions. And my favorite new show this year was Killing Eve, with its two immediately indelible leading characters and more great plot twists than Agatha Christie on a bender.

6. And, hell, just go see or download or on-demand or stream: Sorry to Bother You, Eighth Grade, Mission Impossible: Fallout, BlacKkKlansman, Revenge, A Quiet Place, and Isle of Dogs. And if you haven't seen Black Panther, the fuck is wrong with you? (I'd put Hereditary and First Reformed in here, but they are both just traumatizing, so they don't exactly ease any pain.)

7. Finally, a couple of podcasts (other than Serial and In the Dark, which this season are just essential listening): One of the funniest damn things I've heard this year is Done Disappeared, a satire of true-crime podcasts that had its second season. Its host, John David Booter, is blissfully unaware of his ego running amok, and his ridiculous cases (like solving a crime that had already been solved) are immensely entertaining. And, finally, the second season of Limetown dropped. The first season is still one of the best fictional podcasts I've heard, and the second takes a couple of episodes to get back to the character studies of people tortured by the ability to read minds that made it so great, but when it does, it becomes as dark and compelling as a great mystery novel.

You know what I didn't do much of this year? Read books. It's like the relentless need to stay on top of the news overwhelmed my instinct to read for pleasure. A fuckin' shame I hope to rectify in the new year. (Although The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay was a great, discomfiting novel about a family that must decide if the world really is about to end.)

I want to be able to take in all this shit without the lingering anxiety that pervades everything now. I want us all to be feel free to get our rocks off without wondering if it's all in vain. But, at the very least, this bread, these circuses allowed me to put myself in other spaces in my own very cluttered head.

Christmas Nativities 2018: Horror Mice Will Steal Your Soul

Like movies about suicidal snowmen and tortured ghosts and pole-frozen tongues, some things are a tradition around the rude house. Beloved reruns are good for the soul. My favorites to trot out this week are the Invader Zim Christmas episode and Olive the Other Reindeer. Even here, in Left Blogsylvania, we can indulge in revisiting old posts.

Before Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and many other places you can get your fix of weird shit, I posted this Christmas blast back in 2004, updated yearly with new bits of freakishness (some links might not work anymore, but they were or are all real and are not meant to be ironic):

Xmas - And, lo, a small teddy bear will lead them:
In the days before Christmas, the Rude Pundit roamed his neighborhood, looking at the displays in the charming stores and corner markets. There he saw the agony of so many dichotomous feelings about this holiday. One window had a kneeling, praying Santa next to a baby Jesus in the manger. Santa's hat was off. He was balding. Another display had the jolly old fat man landing his sleigh and reindeer on the roof of the manger. Surprisingly, neither Mary nor Joseph seemed rattled by the noise, although a camel was looking upward, as if asking, "What the fuck?" The Rude Pundit loved that camel.

Ah, sweet camel, what the fuck, indeed. Christ and commerce, Alleluia. The Savior has been born and he thanks you for your presents. Santa showing that he'll even honor the king of the Jews in the land of Islam. There's no telling what it means (and don't get all up in the Rude Pundit's face about St. Nicholas). Except this: we want to embrace both things, good deconstructionists that we are: Santa, who soothes our greed, and Jesus, who promises us peace. Either way, we want them both to tell us we're good people, nice people. And, of course, guilt-ridden Christians want to make sure that Santa toes the party line, you know.

For the holiday, here's a few of the Rude Pundit's favorite nativity sets, none of which are intended to be mocking of the event:

That right there is the Veggie Tales Nativity. In case you don't know, Veggie Tales are cute vegetables who love Christ and salad tossing. The newborn savior up there is a carrot. Get it? A baby carrot? What a delight.


Holy shit, that bear nativity is one of the creepiest fucking things the Rude Pundit's ever seen. Staring straight ahead with their dead eyes, it looks like a satanic cult sacrifice to some horrible bear-demon. Although, the three wise bears have provided snacks for the blood rite: salmon, honey, and berries. All go well with cub entrails.

Every year, I think, "I wonder if there's an even weirder nativity set that I can find" and every year I come across something where I think, "Yeah, that's friggin' crazy shit, man." Here, it's the snow people nativity, with a snow angel, a snow Joseph, a snow Mary, and horrible half-snow, half-flesh sheep chimera. Did Snow Mary give birth to Snow Baby Jesus? Or did they all just make Snow Baby Jesus out of snow?

You know how gnomes used to be just those creepy little bitches you put out on your lawn and forgot about? Well, now they can apparently give birth to the Gnome God's child, who will, no doubt, be crucified on a cute little cross one day for the sins of all gnomes. Oh, so many sins.

What I love about the cardinal nativity is that they're morbidly obese birds, every one of them. In fact, Baby Jesus cardinal looks like he's a tubby little bastard who's stuck in his nest/cradle. Also, all of them look kind of pissed off about the whole event.

That goddamn nightmare fuel isn't a lab experiment gone horrible awry. It's a bunch of white mice with eyes so wide they look like someone laced some cheese with meth and let the little bastards go crazy. It's gonna be horrible when baby Jesus mouse gets crucified in trap.

This is not to mention the Chickentivity, the Moosetivity, the Barntivity, the Native American Nativity, and the various Beartivities, all available unironically for your Christmas consumption.

And, finally, the baby nativity:

You might think, "Oh, that's adorable. What's so wrong with it?" To which I can only inform you that the implication of it is that a baby Mary shoved a baby Jesus out of her baby vagina.

And to all a good night.

Oh, wait. What's that you say? You think that last one was kind of a weak one to end on? Well, then, fuck you. Here's the Day of the Dead nativity:

Yeah, they're all screaming in horror and pain. Essentially, that's Christmas in the time of Trump.

Oh, wait. What's that? Those aren't that bad after all we've suffered? Then how about these terrifying motherfuckers:

Or maybe that's just how we'll all look after climate change has its way with us. Merry Christmas, baby.

(Note: Previous editions of the nativity post have included the Dogtivity, the Boyd's Bears Nativity, and the Rubber Duck...oh, fuck, you get the idea.)

Mattis's "Go Fuck Yourself, Donald" Resignation Letter

Soon-to-be-ex-Secretary of Defense James Mattis finally decided that the spontaneous withdrawal of troops from Syria was a turd too far and that he had finally reached his limit of the shit he would eat working for Donald Trump. Mattis had been gobbling Trump's shit for over two years and vomiting up something closer to a sane foreign policy. If nothing else, despite being Trump's loyal janitor, cleaning up the messes that Trump made with each idiotic tweet, each trashy treachery, each foolish twist in the world order, Mattis kept U.S. soldiers from being sent in large numbers to another stupid war fought by stupid leaders. For that reason alone, we should understand why he stayed on as long as he did.

I'm not gonna delve into Mattis's problematic legacy. There are many reasons to say, "Fuck that guy." But we do need to pause and take in his delicious resignation letter, as clear a "Go fuck yourself, Donald Trump" as you're gonna get from a cabinet member on their way out. Mattis knows where the United States stands in the world, where it oughta stand, and where the fuck Trump is leading both this country and its allies. He's fucking pissed.

First off, Mattis was never one to participate in the circle jerk of praise for Trump whenever other cabinet members were forced to awkwardly declare loyalty to the idiot king. So it's not surprising that he doesn't fluff or even thank Trump beyond saying, "I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform." Otherwise, you know, Trump can shove it up his orange asshole.

The focus of the letter is how very fucking wrong Trump is about, well, everything. "While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world," Mattis writes, "we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies." You'd think not shitting on your allies would be sort of the basic thing that any leader would do, but not our president, who is too busy shoving toy soldiers into his nose to care.

Mattis praises NATO (which he had no small role in keeping the U.S. part of), and he calls out China and Russia for trying to piss in the peace punch. They "want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model." His advice is simple: "That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense." And he means our fuckin' allies.

Then comes the shiv: "My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues."

"Yeah, motherfucker," he's saying, "I've walked the motherfucking walk. What the fuck have you done besides steal from suckers, fuck around on your wives, kiss Putin's ass, and lust after your daughter?" Goddamn, how Mattis must have punched himself in the balls every time Trump said he knew better than the generals, that no one understands NATO or North Korea or, fuck, anything better than him.

In the letter, Mattis continues, "We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances." You're either with your allies or you're with their (and our) enemies. Trump's a fucking traitor, and Mattis knows it. It's really that simple.

Look, you know that the only reason Trump wanted Mattis is because someone, probably Jared, told him that Mattis's nickname was "Mad Dog." Trump probably thought he was getting some savage murder-monster who would sit around with Trump and giggle as they bombed shitholes out of existence, jacking each other off to video feeds of starving Yemenis getting turned into a red mist by drone missiles, eating Big Macs while hearing about the torture of detainees.

Instead, he got the opposite: a thoughtful soldier who acutally gave a fuck about the future. In the context of Trump's cabinet of thieves, whores, ghouls, and Ben Carson, Mattis was a shining damn beacon of sanity. If we were heading towards the cliff before, we just hit the gas.

Of course, another way we're going to judge Mattis is by what he does once he's free next year. If he goes silent and refuses to step up to stop the mad president, then he is complicit in whatever happens next.

(Note: I was gonna write about Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's pussy fart of a farewell address, but fuck that guy forever.)

Why We Are Monsters If We Don't Give Them Asylum

A gut-wrenching report in the Wall Street Journal today details the horrific violence, including torture and murder, suffered by women at the hands of men in Central America, particularly in the countries from which come the migrants trying to get asylum in the United States. That we have an administration that wants to punish these legitimate refugees facing death in their home lands is simply monstrous. You cannot call yourself the "richest" or "greatest" anything if you can turn away people fleeing from rape and murder.

In El Salvador, for instance, the death rate for women "is more than six times that of the U.S., with Honduras and Guatemala close behind." And while the murder rate is even higher for men who are involved in gang wars involving, yes, MS-13 (which is far, far, far more dangerous in other countries than here), women, especially young women and adolescent girls, are victimized by domestic partners and husbands (sadly, an enormous issue in the United States) and by male gang members, which essentially treat them as property.

This is going to get dark as hell.

"'When you have a woman, she becomes property for you, and only for you, no one else,' said Wilfredo Cabrera, who is 24 and recently left a gang. The safe houses the gangs use to store weaponry, cash, and contraband are also used to imprison girls, some as young as 12 and 13. Gang rape is not uncommon." One woman was kept in the basement of a safe house and regularly raped.

Women who refuse the advances of a gang member have their entire families threatened with death. And it gets worse: "Whereas men are often shot to death, women are killed with particular viciousness, according to a 2015 Salvadoran government study on femicides that noted how some victims had been tortured, had fingers cut off, been raped, tied up or burned."

One case detailed in the article by Juan Forero is that of Andrea Guzman, a 17 year-old in El Salvador who rebuffed the advances of a gang leader. He ended up sending seven gang members to tie up her family and kidnap Andrea. She was then shot in the head. Her family has a photo of her corpse, lying in a field, on a phone. It's at the top of the article. It's heartbreaking.

Andrea's father said, "It is better not to have a daughter here...I should have left the country with my children."

And who could deny that that would have been a wise choice? What parent wouldn't think that for the safety of their kids? Who would not have made a journey on foot, if necessary, to save the life of their daughter? Would you listen if you were told you needed to stay in your country in hopes things will get better there? Yes, there has been some progress in getting the justice system to arrest and convict the killers in their countries, but it is slow, and, certainly, it would be a long time before reforms reached the small farming village where Andrea Guzman lived.

Today, in the U.S., Judge Emmet Sullivan struck down the Trump administration's savage, hateful policy of limiting asylum claims, including those for women and families trying to escape domestic or gang violence. It guts disgraced gnome Jeff Sessions' policy that "generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum." Those families, those women do not have a "credible fear" of violence that would allow them to try to escape to the United States. How terrible a human being do you have to be to believe that? Sadly, we have a government filled with those terrible humans.

Sullivan, who was also busy this week kicking Michael Flynn's ass, wrote that Sessions (and, by extension, Trump) "unlawfully and arbitrarily imposed a heightened standard to their credible fear determinations" and that the policies "are arbitrary, capricious, and in violation of the immigration laws."

"Plaintiffs credibly alleged at their credible fear determinations that they feared rape, pervasive domestic violence, beatings, shootings, and death in their countries of origin," Sullivan wrote. One of the plaintiffs in the case that challenged the policy had seen her brother killed and her son maimed by a "politically-connected family" who also threatened to kill her.  If that's not a credible enough fear for you to at least have a hearing, you're the monster.

And, because we are led by the worst people, of course, Sullivan's decision will be appealed.

New Episode of AGD Podcast: Eric Boehlert and Holiday Tips for Dealing with MAGA Family

It's up now and free, motherfuckers, totally free. A new episode of Another Goddamn Podcast (AGD Podcast for those who have tender ears or work filters).

First, based on something I wrote on this here blog, I give you some tips on talking to wayward MAGA family about climate change during the holiday season.

And then an interview with Eric Boehlert, author, media critic, and MSNBC contributor, where we talk about how fucked we are by the way the news media has handled the Trump administration and all its crimes, and we look back at this year in news failures. But Eric's got some encouraging words for the coming year, so...hope?

You can subscribe, listen, rate, review, download, drive to it, have sex to it, whatever, on iTunes or Stitcher.

(If you want to hear the extended interview with Eric Boehlert and all the guests on Another Goddamn Podcast, you can join up at Patreon for $5 a month. You'll also get weekly bonus blogs and other audio-visual treats.)

On the Need to Drop Stephen Miller Naked Into Guatemala

Put aside for a moment that White House senior adviser Stephen Miller looks like what happens when a Mr. Potato Head becomes human-sized and mean. Put aside that he has the facial expression of a man who knows the pleasure of using a disembodied head for fellatio. Put aside that, for his appearance on CBS's Face the Nation yesterday, he seemed to have pasted Sarah Sanders's shaved pubic stubble onto his forehead. Put aside all that shallow but hilarious stuff about Stephen Miller, whose head, it should be noted, looks like a scrotum stretched over a hard-boiled egg.

Instead, let's talk about why he should be stripped naked and dropped into the middle of Guatemala. Somewhere really fucking poor.  Just drop his pasty, bare white ass right there.

Because if we learned anything in his interview with Margaret Brennan on Sunday, it's that this vicious motherfucker won't rest until he has personally watched children from Mexico and Central America die horribly. Sure, Miller paid lip service to the objective tragedy that is the death of 7 year-old Jakelin Caal while in the custody of the Border Patrol. But then he made sure to blame everyone except the people running the goddamn federal government. "Hundreds die on the dangerous trek up. Smuggling organizations profit off death and misery. They are vicious, vile organizations," he said, which is true, but he could at least have fucking said that the death was being investigated, which you do, if you care.

When Brennan brought up that the Border Patrol itself said it wasn't adequately prepared for the number of immigrants that arrived and asked why, Miller went to the pass-the-buck well again: "One of the great tragedies that is going on in our country today is the loopholes in our immigration laws and the deficiencies in our immigration laws. And left wing, activist judicial rulings that incentivize the most vulnerable populations to come to our country."

Asked about Democratic opposition to funding the bullshit wall, Miller went full apeshit and said, "If the Democrat Party wants to go down the road of continuing to preserve a model that enriches smuggling organizations, that spreads misery on both sides of the border, that kills 300 Americans a week through heroin overdoses alone." Yeah, most heroin comes from Mexico and not Central America, where many of the refugees are traveling from.

And you know what would fucking help Americans with heroin addiction? A goddamn national health insurance, but earlier in the segment, Miller celebrated the worthless decision by that asshole judge in Texas that declared the whole Affordable Care Act unconstitutional (funny how that judge isn't an "activist," but I guess that's in the short-eyes of the beholder). Then he made vague promises about how the mighty Donald Trump is going to come up with a better insurance program even though, you know, our president, who is 500 pounds of shit in a 300 pound bag, wouldn't understand health care if Ronald McDonald taught it to him.

But, of course, as every member of this administration has to do when they speak to anyone in the media, Miller licked Trump's orange asshole: "This president has taken historic action to stem the tide of illegal immigration and to fight for working people in this country." Except, of course, he hasn't done dick except make it possible for shitty people like him come up with a way to justify the death of a child in U.S. custody.

Let's say that Miller is dropped naked, with no passport, no i.d., no phone, no money, into a small town, like, hey, what about Raxruha, which is in the middle of fucking nowhere Guatemala. It's also the incredibly poor place where Jakelin Caal and her father left to head for the U.S.

There is a kind part of me that hopes that nude Miller would seek out help in one of the thatched roof huts with a dirt floor and a fire pit for cooking. And that the family there, where they earn $5 a day harvesting beans, would take him in and share their ragged clothes and meager food, caring for him the way that strangers often take care of those in strange lands who need help. And that kind part of me extends to a sort of redemption, that Miller would learn that the people that he thinks are so terrible, are so violent, are such burdens to this nation are none of those things, that they are simply humans who want a better life for their children. And in my most generous moments, I see Miller having a change of heart; I see him being taken to the American embassy in Guatemala City, of him coming back and giving up the white nationalism that has ruined his hairline and his soul; I see him transformed and demanding a transformation of the policies of the United States. Yes, that part of me exists.

Mostly, though, I hope they just put a collar on him and make him their pet.

Join the Patreon Party (and Here's How Much I've Hated on Orrin Hatch)

In the last week, another couple dozen of you joined up for the Rude Pundit page on Patreon, and that's so fuckin' awesome. I've got a simple goal of 500 patrons, but I'd love to hit 250 by the end of the year. The big money goal is enough to pay someone who is way more skilled at this shit than me to edit Another Goddamn Podcast so I can get it out to you at more than a once-a-month or so rate. (And let's be honest with each other: it's more like "Hmm, am I sober enough to finish it this week?")

There are multiple donor levels because why the fuck not. So even for $1 a month, you can get extra rudeness and audio tasty bits. The more you donate, the more you get, and every single one of you gets my arousing appreciation. In the last month, donors have heard me tell stories about people I've met traveling this big, weird world; they've gotten to see a video interview I did with a crazy-ass Trump humper; and they've gotten posts on everything from political art to horror movies to a script I wrote about climate change for a late-night show. Big fun: whenever you donate, you can see and listen to everything I've posted at that donor level.

It's a bounty of goodies, motherfuckers. So join on up. 

Meanwhile...

Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah inconveniently didn't die before it was time for him to finally retire from the Senate. In a bullshit pile of a speech, he bemoaned the loss of "comity, compromise, and mutual respect" in the body where he served for about 800 years. He refused to admit his own role in taking comity behind the barn, putting three bullets in the back of its skull, and fucking its corpse. But that would take a wise and reflective person. He might have once upon a time worked with Ted Kennedy and other Democrats on bills, but Hatch has always been a miserable shitheel. 

And I've said some truly wretched things about him over the years, none of which I regret.

For instance, I imagined him as a hermaphrodite prostitute who puts on "a show where he sits spread-eagled on a bed, takes his cock, and bends it into his pussy so he can fuck himself."

Continuing a theme, I said that, at a hearing with then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over warrantless domestic surveillance, Hatch "more or less took out a 9-inch dildo and told Gonzales to watch him fuck himself right there in the chamber as Hatch bent over and slid that bad boy home."

Before same-sex marriage was legalized, but after a decision that put it on that path, I fantasized about Hatch in a closet in the Senate, jacking off at the thought of finally being free to consummate his forbidden love with Patrick Leahy. (It's probably the kindest thing I've said about Hatch.)

I wrote that Hatch was "not above worm shit at the bottom of a grave." I wrote that Hatch's "picture is shown to Mormon teenagers whenever they are tempted to masturbate." And just last month I said that Hatch "would tongue fuck the eyeholes" of Roy Cohn's skull.

Yeah, I'm not sorry I won't have Hatch to kick around anymore. Fuck him. Fuck his poisoned legacy. The country is a small measure better with him gone.

Impeach the Motherfucker (Part 2: Because It's the Right Thing to Do)

In another one of his self-serving, self-justifying, self-indulgent public appearances, America's tallest dipshit, former FBI director James Comey, was at a New York City event where he was interviewed by MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace. Both Republicans (no, really, look it up), they discussed whether or not Democrats should pursue impeachment charges against President Donald Trump, also a Republican. 

Comey said, "I hope that Donald Trump is not removed from office by impeachment because it would let the country off the hook. And it would drive into the fabric of our nation a third of the people believing there was a coup. And we need a moment of inflection, where we all get off the couch and say, 'That is not who we are,' and in a landslide rid ourselves of this attack on our values." Of course, Comey seems to have a faith in the American people that is more than a little misplaced at this point in our sordid history.

Like so many others, Comey seems to think that there would be some kind of uprising by the racists, the rubes, the elderly, the shut-ins, the fucking morons, and the syphilitic lepers who make up Trump's base should Democrats take down Trump. Trump himself asserted as much. "I think that the people would revolt if that happened," he told Reuters yesterday about impeachment. 

This is part of a tactic that Republicans use on Democrats all the time. "If you do Thing X, then All These Dumbass Yahoos will be pissed" might as well be a motto for the GOP. Remember how Republicans swore that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to destroy the economy, steal your job, and shoot your dog? Yeah, no. Almost nobody's gonna fuckin' rise up to defend Donald cocksuckin' Trump, no matter how much Sean Hannity weeps and rends his garments. And the couple of people who do try something will crumble when faced with law enforcement. They'll be begging to give blow jobs to the cops arresting them to stay out of jail. It'll just be pathetic. And then hilarious. And then pathetic again. And then, finally, hilarious.

Democrats are also being told that voters will be upset if they just hold hearings and impeach and attack Trump and don't come up with an agenda of their own. Again, that is incredibly naive, like "anal sex means you're still a virgin" naive. First off, Democratic voters are jonesin' for a show of strength from Democrats, and part of that is punishing the bastards who have been shitting all over our nice country for the last two years. As I said before, the chance of 20 Republicans in the Senate joining all the Democrats to vote for Trump's removal from office after an impeachment in the House  is about the same as the chance that Saturday Night Live ever really does political satire instead of putting celebrities in funny wigs. But you gotta give red meat to the beast of the base. Impeachment does that very thing.

Besides, Trump is gonna still take up all the media oxygen. It won't matter if Democrats attempt to pass, say, Medicare for All because all our 300 pound sack of spoiled orange marmalade president has to do is tweet out, "I'll wipe my ass with China!" while he's on the shitter, and no one's gonna talk about a bill that also ain't passing the Senate anyways. What Democrats need to do is control the Trump narrative. Hearings leading to an impeachment vote, with, say, Robert Mueller answering questions from Adam Schiff, will go a long way to puncturing Trump's increasingly ineffective ego-thrusts. It will steal attention from him (which will drive him fuckin' nuts). 

Look, of course, we need to wait until the depth of Trump's criminality, venality, and immorality is revealed by the tide of investigations rushing in to drown him and his terrible family. Obviously, showing that Trump committed crimes that sold out the national interest for pure greed would strengthen any impeachment efforts. The Clinton impeachment shouldn't be a deterrent. In fact, it should be an encouragement, like "Wait, you mean they did this to Clinton for those bullshit reasons and now you don't want us to do anything for a goddamn mobster? Fuck you. Let's vote."

But, at the end of the day, Democrats should start the impeachment process as soon as practical because it's just the right goddamn thing to do. You can talk about what's "extraordinary" about it, you can say it's "overturning the will of the people," and you can complain that it's a distraction or whatever. Yet impeachment exists in the Constitution for a reason: it's precisely for situations like this where waiting for another election would damage the nation.  

It is the responsibility of members of Congress to take down a dangerous president. That is part of your sacred goddamned duty. We shouldn't be questioning starting down the impeachment road. Especially as we learn more and more about how filthy Trump is, we should question why the Republicans refuse to remove him from office. 

(Note: Of course, the more direct action is just to arrest the motherfuckers.)

Impeach the Motherfucker (Part 1: Don't Be Suckered by the Bill Clinton Comparison)

So much discussion is going on about whether or not Democrats should go forward with the impeachment of President Donald Trump, who is actually a bulging tower of rotting cantaloupes in a terrible-fitting suit. Many in the punditocracy are telling the incoming House majority to avoid impeachment and not even speak of it. Obviously, the chances of removing Trump from office in a trial after the House impeaches are slim to none, considering that the Senate will be made of 47 Democrats and 53 puking shit demons from GOP. We know that the puking shit demons aren't going to vote against their puking shit demon leader, and Democrats would need 20 of those vile fuckers to toss Trump into the toilet of history.

On WNYC this morning, Mara Liasson was making that point: why bother even talking about it when it's not gonna happen? She said that Democrats are worried that "if they go hellbent toward impeachment instead of passing legislation - even if that legislation goes nowhere in the Senate, it won't be signed by President Trump, at least they want to lay out an agenda for the voters - there will be a political backlash."

Then she used the well-worn point that the Bill Clinton impeachment led to Democratic gains in the 1998 midterms. Except we're not talking a massive tide here. Democrats gained 5 seats in the House and didn't lose any in the Senate. Yeah, that was a big deal compared to the 1994 ass-reaming the GOP gave to Democrats. But Republicans still ran Congress in 1999. And they still "won" the presidency in 2000 and kept control of Congress, at least until Senator Jim Jeffords left the GOP in May of 2001. The GOP won the Senate back in 2002. (Note: George W. Bush didn't really win in 2000, but we have been damned to pretend as if he did.)

So this idea that somehow Republicans suffered electorally is just a goddamn lie. Then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich suffered because he was forced out of the House for lots of hinky shit. Next in line for Speaker, Republican Bob Livingston, suffered because he resigned after he was caught fucking around on his wife. That's how we got child fucker Dennis Hastert for Speaker. Oh, the late 1990s were so charming. As far as elections go, though, Republicans lost a little bit, but not enough to drive them away. Not enough to make them stop being scandal-mongering, hypocritical ass-worms.

Besides, the reason the Clinton impeachment was such a fuckin' farce was that no one could point to anything that President Clinton got out of his lie, other than that his wife might have believed he wasn't fucking around this one time (despite the fact that we all knew he fucked around). There was no use of his office for financial or political gain, and Kenneth Starr desperately fucking tried to find something. Clearly, Trump is doing shit for financial and political gain, that bloated sleazeball.

Sure, Clinton lied under oath, which, yes, is a crime. But he lied under oath for purely personal reasons that had nothing to do with his ability to do his job defending the Constitution. (Yes, I get the irony of saying that a perjurer is defending the Constitution. You are very smart for thinking that. Pat yourself on the back and shut the fuck up.) People realized that this was bullshit and a rigged investigation after a series of bullshit investigations by lying Republicans, and they stood by Clinton.

See, the other big factor was that Bill Clinton's job approval was hovering around 60% throughout the sex scandal period, going up to 66% near the 1998 midterms. It was enough stop Republicans from getting the usual midterm gains for the party opposite the president. That's the "loss" you hear about. They fucked themselves even that much because they were obsessed with Clinton's penis and the American people were not.

But, again, that's not the whole story. Americans didn't start supporting Clinton because of impeachment. Indeed, after his 1996 inauguration, he never went below 50% for the rest of his presidency.  Now, I may not be a math whiz, but it seems like anything from 60-66% is a bigger number than 40%, which is where Donald Trump hovers in approval. And on disapproval? Clinton rarely went above 40% and mostly stayed in the low-to-mid 30s. Trump is high 50s to 60%. In other words, the majority of Americans were fucking fine with Bill Clinton. The majority of Americans are far from fucking okay with Donald Trump.

And they'll be fine with impeachment.

Next: Why it doesn't matter if Trump can be removed from office right now.

How to Convince MAGA Cretins to Fear Climate Change

Hey, you got friends or relatives who think Donald Trump is the greatest man in the history of forever (except, of course, for Jesus Christ because he's the Lord or some such shit)? You tired of their "climate change is fake news made up by Big Science for that sweet grant money" nonsense? You gotta learn to speak their language. You gotta learn to play on their fears. And you can do that pretty easily.

Let's do this shit quick and nasty.

1. Tell 'em that climate change is gonna make a whole lot more immigrants come to this country.

"Yeah, that's right, Cousin Skeeter. When there are droughts and hurricanes hitting El Salvador, the people aren't gonna just sit there and die. They're all gonna get the fuck outta el dodge-o and get somewhere that's safer. You think there are a lot of people caravanning now? You throw in some fires and floods and biblical shit, and you're gonna get a couple million people walking up north to escape it. So if you're mad about all them Messicans speaking Spanish down at the Piggly Wiggly, Skeeter, you better tell your congressman to get his ass out of Exxon's back pocket and start cleaning the air up or your little girl Liberty there is gonna have to learn to habla some espanol."

2. Tell 'em that climate change is bringing in tropical diseases.

"Hey, Aunt Jane-Bob, you better be careful when you're giggin' fer critters out there in the swamp to make your famous frog fritters for Christmas because climate change has made the mosquitoes and bitin' bugs able to make you even sicker. Yeah, there's gonna be more lyme disease and West Nile and all kinds of terrible illnesses. You tell Uncle Ricky-Bob to be care of the deer ticks when he's out huntin'. And because things have gotten so bad so fast, we're gettin' diseases from those shithole countries, things like malaria and Dengue fever and stuff that'll make you shit yourself for so long that you'll be praying for the Lord to take you."

3. Tell 'em that climate change is gonna get rid of their favorite places.

"You know how you like to take your family every year to Myrtle Beach, Lil' Brother Floyd? How you remember how our daddy took us and his daddy took him? Yeah, I miss those trips with the house right on the beach. And the best part is how you get to drive your truck up and down the shore. It don't get no better 'n that, right, Floyd? Well, if we don't turn things around, Myrtle Beach is gonna be fucked. Fucked bad. All those houses are gonna be washed away. Yeah, it ain't just liberals in California and New York and New Jersey gettin' ass-fucked by rising seas and wildfires. Daytona. Gulf Shores. They'll be underwater. The forest where you like to hunt wild boar in North Carolina? They're gettin' hit by fires. Some of your favorite spots ain't gonna be there anymore. Your son, Floydy-T, he won't be able to bring his family back to Myrtle Beach when he's all growed because there won't be a Myrtle Beach."

Now, you may ask how you get them to believe there is even such a thing as climate change. Well, after you lay out the immigrant-filled, disease-rampant, no Myrtle Beach future, you ask them, "If 98 people told you that if you just sit still and do nothing, a big ol' grizzly bear is gonna fuck you in the face, but 2 people said, 'Well, there is a grizzly bear, but we don't believe he's gonna fuck you in the face,' would you just sit still and wait to see if the grizzly bear fucks your face? Hell, no. You'd get the fuck out of there. Even if you wanna swallow grizzly bear jizz, it's not gonna go well because it's a grizzly bear. Fucking your face."

There you go, people. A handy guide to keep on your phones, in a message marked, "In case of moron, open."

It's My Birthday So Sign Up for the Rude Pundit Patreon Page

Yes, not only is Krampusnacht upon us, when that horned bastard sodomizes a snowman or something (I haven't really read up on it), but it's also my goddamn birthday. And the only present I want other than this Blanton's whiskey I'm downing is for you to sign up for the Rude Pundit Patreon page.

It's cheap as hell, starting at a buck a month and going up to whatever the fuck you wanna spend. You get special Patreon-only blog posts, audio storytimes (sometimes funny, sometimes sexy, sometimes weird, sometimes all three), and extended versions of the interviews on this here blogger's own Another Goddamn Podcast (which means more Molly Jong-Fast, more Eric Boehlert, and more Kaili Joy Gray, with more mores coming).

So sign up. We're at 213 or so donors. Let's try to get to 250 in the next couple days. It's a modest goal for immodest times.

The funds will go to equipment, more whiskey, an editor for the podcast so it gets out more often, and probably an illicit substance or two.

Let's do this. Or Krampus is gonna bugger your Frosty's face.

Update: We're up to 226. Let's keep it going, motherfuckers.

Silent Sam, George H.W. Bush, and Ross Douthat's WASPs: Nostalgia for a Time That Never Was

I'm so fucking weary of assholes talking about how great the past was.

I get the human instinct to make the past suit one's present. It's one of the amazing ways that we delude ourselves, and some are more deluded than others. For instance, if you're someone who fancies himself an amazing lover, you might be willing to admit, "Yeah, I was pretty goddamn rotten those first few years. Major apologies to all those who put up with me." Or you've just put on hazy goggles that allow you to willfully ignore the truth and you can say, "Oh, man, every dude I ever fucked practically hemorrhaged from cumming. And the chicks? Their heads almost popped off their necks when I gave them screaming orgasms." Sure, pal. Sure. Why don't we ask those dudes and chicks what they think?

The past was never The Past.

Last night, on her Fox "news" show The Ingrown Toenail, Laura Ingraham raged against the college students who are protesting the vote to restore a Confederate soldier statue at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It's nicknamed "Silent Sam," which sounds like Slenderman's sidekick, and it was knocked down by students in August of this year. The UNC board of trustees voted to spend $5 million for a new building that would house the statue, and, yes, students marched peacefully to protest.

Ingraham was having none of those fuckin' students acting all uppity: "There is a movement, particularly among the young, to hate the past and eradicate anything they find objectionable or troubling." She compared those who toppled Sam to the ISIS terrorists who destroyed ancient ruins at Palmyra. No shit. She really did that.

Then she continued, "No matter what one thinks of the Civil War or those who supported the Confederacy, it happened. And we owe it to the future to leave history undisturbed." She suggested that perhaps a statue commemorating slaves adjacent to Sam could be erected. And she concluded, "But to destroy, instead of engage, to defy the law instead of respect it, is no way to honor the past or the future."

A couple of things deserve comment in this. First, a statue is not history. Indeed, it's denying history to leave the statue of a Confederate soldier fucking standing. Yeah, 1000 UNC students fought for the Confederacy, but that means they were traitors to the United States and fought to keep other people as slaves. It'd be like erecting a statue to Thanos for his population control efforts. And this didn't spring out of the blue. There have been 50 years of protests against Silent Sam.

The movement isn't to "eradicate" what's "objectionable," despite the slavering lap dog words that Ingraham yips. The movement is to be honest about history and about not honoring the goddamn enemy. I've said it a million fuckin' times: If your family fought for the South in the Civil War, they were either suckers fighting for the rich plantation owners or true believers in the slavery-based economy, and that means your ancestors are assholes who don't deserve monuments. They deserve scorn and degradation. Any other way to see it is utter bullshit.

Over on the editorial page of the New York Times (motto: "Every shithole town of Trump voters is more important than the big cities that voted against him"), resident conservative Ross Hat of Douche, wallowing in the oil pool of panegyrics for dead President George Bush, explains, "Why We Miss the WASPs." For the young 'uns, those are "white Anglo-Saxon Protestants," or, you know, pasty-ass white people.

"Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well," Douthat tells us. Yes, we need to recognize that once our betters led us and, boy, howdy, they were just so much better: "[S]omehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship."

He goes on to talk about how now we've failed in replacing this ruling class because "almost all the discussion of our meritocracy’s vices assumes the system’s basic post-WASP premises, and hopes that either more inclusion (the pro-diversity left’s fixation) or a greater emphasis on academic merit (the anti-affirmative right’s hobbyhorse) will cure our establishment’s all-too-apparent ills." Good god, why can't we go back to those oh-so-noble leaders, the notion that they were great simply because they told us they were great.

Put aside the cowardly racism here. Forget asking, "Who the fuck is this 'we' you're jacking off about?" Instead, focus on the idea that Douthat actually believes this masturbatory fantasy of dominance is true. So then who fucked that up? Who fucked it all up? It was the Republican WASPs who did because after the election of Bill Clinton, that country bumpkin who smoked weed and fucked, they lost their goddamn narrow minds and set out to destroy him, destroy the presidency, and destroy the nation, if they had to, to demonstrate their superiority. They did it before with Jimmy Carter. And that's how you get the inbred Bush, Jr. in there next to fuck things even more royally in order to make the ruling class's dreams of wanton war and financial excess possible. And that's why Barack Obama had to be wrecked.

When they hell was the ruling class filled with "pious obligation" to anything but greed? And how the fuck is this ruling class out of power? They seem pretty much to still control almost everything. Is it because they have to acknowledge women and non-whites and LGBT people as being equal under the law? Inclusion is a problem only if you think exclusion is necessary to maintain power. But while you're mourning for the passing of a white male ruling class, I'm thinking about all those women and non-whites and LGBT people who were denied power for so very long and how much potential was lost because of it.

Right now, Bush 41 is being memorialized. He is being praised as being one of our greatest presidents, except he wasn't. A quick scan of his failures demonstrates that. By whitewashing our past (literally and figuratively), we aren't honoring anyone or anything. We are lying about the past. We are saying that we refuse to learn from our horrific mistakes.

(Note: By the way, the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill is filled with buildings named after slaveowners, white supremacists, and Confederate soldiers. One is named for a slave, and that was dedicated in 2002. You never escape the Confederacy on campus. Removing a statue won't change that.)

(Note 2: Yes, I know the law says they can't remove the statue. Laws can be challenged.)

Dead Poppy

Goddamn, we've become such a pathetic nation living under the bovine shadow of Donald Trump that the orgy of corpse worship of dead George H.W. Bush, our 41st president, makes the nostalgia-gasm over dead Ronald Reagan back in 2004 look like a rushed hand job in the back of the historical convertible. Of course, Bush was a better human than Trump. But there are parasitic worms that are better humans than Trump. The bar is not that high.

So, yeah, sure, you can thank Bush for some things he did that genuinely made the nation kinder and gentler, like the Americans with Disabilities Act or his environmental record (putting aside, for obvious reasons, his years as a Texas oil man). But that's the way it's always been: no matter how shitty you think a president might be, he does a few things that you think aren't bad. It's like if you're fucking a porcupine's asshole, and, once every ten thrusts or so, you don't get a quill in your dick. At the end of the day, you're still fucking a porcupine's asshole. (Sure, it's consensual. The porcupine wanted it.)

Besides, one thing that's been left out in this rush to praise Bush as the Greatest Single-Term President in History or whatever other superlatives you wanna toss out there in the encomiums of doom is that he had no fuckin' choice when it came to legislative goals except to do some rational shit. He had a Democratic House and Senate for his entire term.  Everyone wants to talk about the bipartisanship, the "reaching across the aisle" that Bush did, but the fuckin' Democrats did it, too. They didn't just shut the whole fuckin' joint down unless Bush did what they wanted, like the Republicans did with Obama. So spare a thought or two for Tom Foley in the House and George Mitchell in the Senate. Most of what Bush is being praised for are Democratic initiatives he went along with.

So, sorry, tender-hearted liberals and weeping conservatives, I'm not going to spend any more time fluffing this cock. This is gonna be more of a shit-on-his-dead-face type of thing. See, I was there. I remember. I marched against him, against the Persian Gulf "war," which ended with the United States rebuilding the palaces of the oil billionaires in Kuwait; and against his savage anti-choice policies, which empowered the lunatics of Operation Rescue and the Christian terrorist assassins in their war on women.

You wanna understand who Bush was? Look at the shit he vetoed or pocket vetoed. The very first one was for a hike in the minimum wage, which hadn't budged in 8 years from $3.35, because he wanted it at $4.35 and Congress, in a bipartisan vote, wanted it $4.55. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 because he claimed it would force hiring quotas on businesses (it wouldn't) and because it didn't cap punitive damages on discrimination lawsuits. He vetoed the National Voter Registration Act because of, no shit, false allegations of possible "fraud." He vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act because he was a prick.

And when it came to abortion, he vetoed like a motherfucker. He vetoed the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Amendments of 1992 because it allowed fetal tissue research using material from aborted fetuses. He vetoed appropriations bills for Washington, DC, because they allowed some funding to be used indirectly for abortions in cases of rape and incest (he only wanted it used if the mother's life was in danger). He vetoed the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 1990 because it included funding for a United Nations family planning program that he said might be used for abortion. He vetoed the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act because it didn't prohibit funds to be used for abortion counseling. He was rabidly anti-choice, ranting about it at every press conference and threatening any legislation that didn't adhere to his strict line.

Indeed, because he was perceived as a moderate, Bush was too fuckin' cowardly to stand up to the nutzoid right-wing of the Republican Party (back when it had wings and not just a single broken one as it does now). And if Reagan opened the doors of the White House to the Falwells and Robertsons, Bush pretty much gave them a key and told them to come and go as they pleased. As vice president and then as president, Bush kissed so much fundamentalist ass that he permanently tasted Moral Majority farts on his thin, patrician lips. He blithely cut the hearts out of gay and lesbian Americans to appease the corrupt religious right.

Bush started embracing all the utterly worthless symbolic shit along the way, the kind of issues that het up the blood of the yokels but have nothing to do with actually leading. For instance, when the Supreme Court held that it was legal to burn the American flag (I mean, fuckin' c'mon. You bought it, so you can burn it), Bush went apeshit. He demanded a constitutional amendment to outlaw flag-burning, declaring, "I do feel viscerally about burning the American flag." You could look at him and think, "He's lying. He doesn't give a shit about this."

It was all such a show to make it seem like he was down in the muck with the shit-covered yahoos. So, really, fuck him.

Where else do you want to go? You want to talk about the racism? The Willie Horton ad and Bush's refusal to not only condemn it, but to fully embrace it? The fake, racist war on drugs, which caused a surge in the prison population, wrecking African American families, as well as the ludicrous stunt of having the Secret Service buy crack near the White House? His bullshit response to the Los Angeles riots after the verdict in the Rodney King beating, the building fires his real thousand points of light?

You want to talk about the poison that he injected into the American political system by having his campaign run by Lee Atwater, as vile a creature who ever raped the country with a scabby dick and who didn't die in enough pain and regret? This is not to mention how Bush's campaign message was crafted by Roger Ailes, the gig a few years before the creation of Fox "news," and, goddamn, how Ailes played those rubes like a fuckin' fiddle and they loved having those racist, homophobic, xenophobic strings plucked, even by a rich Yalie who only got by because of his daddy's millions. This is the fuckin' template that Trump used.

You want to talk about the pardons for the half-dozen Reagan administration officials in the scandal of selling arms to Iran in order to fund the terrorist Contras in Nicaragua, obsructing justice and immunizing him from prosecution? Or his lies that got us into the worthless war in Iraq and set us up for our next worthless war with Iraq, all because of Saddam Hussein, who Bush had had no small role in putting into power? Or his role in getting arms and funds to the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight a proxy war with the Soviet Union, which, of course, led to al-Qaeda's formation?

Or his terrible family, who continued to damage the nation in ways from which we will never recover? Or his failures in the wake of Hurricane Andrew (like father, like son, eh?)? Or his propping up of the heinous Reagan? Or his role as director of the CIA? Or Clarence fuckin' Thomas? Or his dragging the economy into a recession because he was willing to pass tax hikes but not enough to turn things around?

What was so goddamn delicious about Bill Clinton beating him was that it was one of the unwashed telling the prissy socialite to fuck off back to his family compound.

But, sure, yeah, Bush was a bomber pilot in World War II. And if he had become an insurance salesman when he got back, we'd honor him as a hero.

He didn't, though. He decided to fail and flail and flop his way through the political system, falling upward because of his wealth and connections, feeling free to insult people who were less privileged than he was. And because of that, we're free to tear his corpse to pieces and feed it to rabid curs.

Nah, I'm not gonna join in the celebration. I didn't forget everything that happened back then. Whatever he did post-presdiency pales in comparison to the long-term damage he did while in office. He doesn't get forgiven for all the families he destroyed just because he held some fundraisers for Katrina relief (which wouldn't have been so desperately needed if his dimwit son hadn't been such a colossal fuck-up).

I don't give a fuck if he was a good person. That's nice for his family and friends. Who fucking cares though? We have been working and working to claw ourselves out of the national grave dug for us by Reagan and Bush. We haven't been able to escape the molesting grip that they held us in for 12 long years.

Whether we wanted to or not, we all dove out of a plane tied to ol' Poppy, who was fondling our asses and laughing, a big fuckin' joke, and when the chute wouldn't open, he told us that was his plan all along, a kinder, gentler national death pact that we are still trying to untie ourselves from.

Note to News Networks: Stop Having Climate Change Denialists on the Air

Let me quote something from the fuckin' epic climate change report put out last week by the (checks notes) federal goddamn government. It comes from Chapter 16, under Key Message 3: "Climate change is already affecting U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) assets by, among other impacts, damaging roads, runways, and waterfront infrastructure. DoD is working to both fully understand these threats and incorporate projected climate changes into long-term planning to reduce risks and minimize impacts. There are many examples of DoD’s planning and action for risks to its assets from climate change. DoD has performed a comprehensive scenario-driven examination of climate risks from sea level rise to all of its coastal military sites, including atolls in the Pacific Ocean. In the Arctic, the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy are pursuing strategies to respond to the changing geopolitical significance resulting from the projected absence of summer sea ice in the next few decades."

You got that? The Department of Defense is preparing for climate change not because it's a fantasy, but because it's real and it's happening now. By the way, the paragraph before this one says, in essence, when shit is all fucked up, people freak the fuck out and that's gonna require some military action. You think that if climate refugees or even terrorists inspired by water scarcity and searing heat in some regions, not to mention wars over shrinking access to food and water, were a possibility, we might want the Department of Defense to be ready to deal with it.

The Key Message should be "Stop being such arrogant pricks and fuckin' do something already before we're all up to our tits in ocean water while our faces burn off." Repeat after ever section.

At this point, to deny climate change is to demonstrate either ignorance or greed or both. You may wanna argue about how to solve it, but saying that this is all part of some natural cycle or "what about when they said there was gonna be an Ice Age" or assorted other bullshit should simply exclude you from the conversation. Denying climate change and denying that human activity has caused it is akin to denying there is a sun or paper or that dog you're looking at right now.

I'm reminded of a moment in my political philosophy class where a smartass douchefuck thought he was gonna get one over on the prof. She was making a point about how we need to agree on basic reality to move forward in the world and had just said, "If we all see a frog, we agree that it is a frog."

Douchefuck responded, "Well, you may say it's a frog, But I may say it's a banana."

Her response was elegant and final. She said, "You'd be wrong or ill, and either way, we shouldn't trust you." That shut Douchefuck up for a few days. And it's what we should say to so many insane, anti-science beliefs.

Still, though, the news networks insist on bringing on some godforsaken gooch scratcher to provide an illusion of balance on climate issues. For instance, on CNN, Erin Burnett had on Robert Reich and creepy-ass Stephen Moore, who said, no shit, "Can the two of you tell me one apocalyptic claim made by the environmental movement that has been true?" This is an article of faith on the right, that because no one is Nostra-fuckin'-damus and pinpointing exactly when some terrible shit will happen, climate change is a big joke.

The correct response to this is "Get the fuck off my show and get the fuck away from anywhere rational humans gather." 'Cause, see, among the shit that's been predicted that's happened is severe heat waves (talk to people in India, Canada, Egypt, Australia, and Portugal, for a start), stronger hurricanes (ya think?), and rising seas (it fucking floods during high tide regularly in a bunch of places now). Anyone denying that this is happening, that people did this, and that people need to solve that shit now needs to be whipped into the hinterlands. And if you say that we need to put jobs ahead of saving the entire planet, you should be locked in a madhouse.

This pariah status needs to extend to Republicans elected officials, too. Here's noted pig ball fondler, Senator Joni Ernst, on CNN this past Sunday: "Well, we know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes. And we see those ebb and flows through time." Let's not even get into Donald Trump's pathetic response where he declared himself intelligent and then mouth-farted something utterly dumb, saying that his own employees are full of shit on this and he knows better because his big fuckin' gut or whatever.

Alluding to another talking point on the right, that climate scientists are making coin on the crisis, Stephen Moore gurgled something about "The climate change industrial complex." Fuck you, man. Scientists are often faculty members at universities or staff members at labs. They get a decent salary, maybe even a hundred grand, perhaps two, if they're really important. They might get a book published that makes a few bucks. The grants they get aren't for themselves. They're for studying and experimenting and traveling and paying for staff. No one's getting rich on the NSF's dime.

On the other side, though? In 2013, Charif Souki, then the CEO of Cheniere Energy, an oil and gas company made $142 million. Who's in it for the money?

Essentially, what Stephen Moore and all the climate denialists are doing is jacking off the dick of the fossil fuel industry until it spooges cash into their faces that they voraciously lap up.

It's a goddamn embarrassment that they are still treated as anything more than the lying shills or deranged morons that they are.

There Are Always Migrants; They've Always Been Treated Like Garbage in the U.S.

I was looking up some things about how, during the Great Depression, in towns that were being destroyed by starvation and labor war, parents would send their children out on the road to find a better life than the one they could supply them. It reminded me of this passage from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma and elsewhere heading to California, where they hope to start a better life. But, of course, they are met with anger and hatred and hindrance every step of the way, crushing their American dreams.

Here ya go:

"The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the hostility changed them, welded them, united them—hostility that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.

"In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights. They said, These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They're degenerate, sexual maniacs. Those goddamned Okies are thieves. They'll steal anything. They've got no sense of property rights.

"And the latter was true, for how can a man without property know the ache of ownership? And the defending people said, They bring disease, they're filthy. We can't have them in the schools. They're strangers. How'd you like to have your sister go out with one of 'em?

"The local people whipped themselves into a mold of cruelty. Then they formed units, squads, and armed them—armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns. We own the country. We can't let these Okies get out of hand. And the men who were armed did not own the land, but they thought they did. And the clerks who drilled at night owned nothing, and the little storekeepers possessed only a drawerful of debts. But even a debt is something, even a job is something. The clerk thought, I get fifteen dollars a week. S'pose a goddamn Okie would work for twelve? And the little storekeeper thought, How could I compete with a debtless man?

"And the migrants streamed in on the highways and their hunger was in their eyes, and their need was in their eyes. They had no argument, no system, nothing but their numbers and their needs."

Along the way, they are beaten and thrown out of towns, and their camps are set on fire, hurting old people, kids. All because of fear and irrational hate of the other. Yes, this time, now, there is the added layer of horrific racism, but, even back then, Trump would have had the Okies tear-gassed.

"They reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad."

Same as it ever was.

Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith Is a Shit Human

Look, I have no doubt that Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi believed she was joking when she praised a supporter by saying that "if he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row." (She had started her remarks with the bizarrely bloody compliment "I would fight a circle saw for him.") I have no doubt that she never thought twice about the history of lynching of black people in her state. I have no doubt that she saw nothing wrong with what she was saying, that it was one of those things that she's heard and perhaps repeated a few times. We have a lot of phrases and sayings that are based on appalling shit. You wanna know the history of "Eeny, meeny, miny, mo"? The word "gyp"?

Of course, Hyde-Smith, being Southern and white and a Republican, refused to acknowledge there was something fucked up with what she said, aside from the anodyne bullshit of "Sorry if I offended you." She could have quickly come out and made a statement like, "I understand that some of the things we say come from a time when we did terrible things to people. I apologize for saying it, and we all need to learn to do better." But, you know, she didn't. She couldn't. She dug in her heels and said that anyone who thought she was racist was a damn liar.

It was a signal to those Southern, white Republicans who will vote for her that she has their racist, Confederacy-humping backs. "You don't have to move beyond your barbaric prejudices, you dumb fucks," she's telling them. "Your bigotry and ignorance is safe with me."

And thus, their economic anxiety soothed, the white working class went about its business of telling everyone how the Civil War wasn't about slavery.

We have learned since that moment that Cindy Hyde-Smith is not only a racist piece of shit (even if we pretty much knew that prior to the lynching remark) but that she's a shit human all around. For instance, the rest of that little talk in Tupelo on November 2 is filled with stuff that shit humans say.

There's one Planned Parenthood in all of Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, and it doesn't do abortions, but Hyde-Smith still whined, "Planned Parenthood is one of the worst things that has ever happened to us." She praised "distant relative" Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois (now quite gratifyingly dead) for the budget amendment that prevents any federal funds from being used for abortion, except the way she described him: "Many of you may have heard of Sen. Henry Hyde from Oklahoma."

And she's totally willing to use a closer relative for a political prop: "My daughter, on her second birthday, got a lifetime membership to the NRA." Yes, that's what every toddler wants. Fuck Tickle-Me-Elmo with the barrel of a shotgun. Baby loves 2A, motherfuckers.

You throw in the other things we've learned about and heard about Hyde-Smith - like dressing up like a Confederate soldier while visiting Jefferson Davis's house and declaring it "Mississippi history at its best" or "joking" again that there are "liberal folks" at historically black colleges and universities "who maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult" to the revelation that she attended an all-white school that was created to get around integration laws (the fucking school mascot was a Confederate officer and that fucking flag of the defeated traitors flew there) to the fact that she sent the aforementioned NRA member daughter there - and she's just fucking awful, with a fucked up, constantly degrading and violent sense of humor, like every heinous stereotype of the dumbass, racist, hateful Southerner wrapped into one cynical package of the polite Southern belle who sounds kind and moral but is secretly poisoning the sweet tea she serves to her husband so she can get the life insurance.

How cynical? As pointed out by a whole bunch of Republicans who wanted her to lose in the primary, she was a Democrat until 2010. Yeah, she won election twice as a Democrat in the state senate in a once-Democratic district. When she decided to run for statewide office, Commissioner of Agriculture, she switched to the GOP.  Republicans are so fucking terrible in Mississippi that they accused Hyde-Smith of voting for Hillary Clinton in 2008, a scarlet H that she denied.

But the worst Republican is often a born-again Republican, and Hyde-Smith has embraced the most virulent, hurtful side of the party. Wait...that's the whole party. Anyways, she has essentially become another one of Donald Trump's ass remoras, suctioned on to his corpulent buttocks and hanging on no matter how erratically he moves. Want us to vote against pre-existing condition coverage? Sure, suck, suck, suck. Want me to degrade women by voting for Brett Kavanaugh? You bet, suck, suck, suck. She's just devouring away on Trump's ass, downing dead skin scraps and parasites that she hopes will get her a few more votes.

Jesus fuckballs Christ, tonight's rally with Trump is gonna be a sight, with Hyde-Smith just stuck on Trump's pants as he bitches and preens and yells and does the rest of his tiresome shtick.

C'mon, Mississippi. You don't have to be this anymore. You can step into the goddamn light of the present with Mike Espy. You can follow Alabama, which, at least for one brief election, demonstrated that the past can fucking die. You don't have to vote for a shit human like Cindy Hyde-Smith. You can evolve.

(Note: Don't hold your breath.)

Hell, Guess I Better Get in on This Cyber Monday Thing: Give Me Money and I'll Send You Something

"Well, shit," I said to myself.

"It's Cyber Monday, and apparently that's a thing where websites sell something or ask for money, and, well, shit," I said again.

"I've got a got-damn website. And I can give people something for money," I concluded.

So here's the deal:

There are two ways you can support his here act of bloggery and all the other audio and video accoutrements that go along with it.

You can just stab that PayPal button over there (or right here) and outright donate. Tell you what: you donate $50 or more and I'll just send you all this year's written bonus posts from Patreon. Maybe I'll even put send along a rude e-card that says, "Merry Christmas, Motherfucker" or "Happy Holidays...We're All Fucked" or something. Credit cards accepted because America, man.

If you send less, you're still a good person. I'll send you some music or whiskey recommendations.

There, that's good ol' capitalistic commerce, right?

Or, if you're inclined, you can just up and subscribe to the Rude Pundit Patreon page. For as little as a single dollar ($1, if you're number-oriented), you can get bonus posts, bonus audio, bonus video, and more. Wait, not more. That's pretty much everything. 

It's a fun little community we got going there. I'd say the best bargain is the $3 level and the extravagant one is just $5, where you get bonuser audio.

Now, when you do that, you gotta go through Patreon. PayPal is for donations. Patreon is for subscribing. We clear?

Also, all donations and subscriptions go to support my slowly developing (but strangely fun) Another Goddamn Podcast. The goal is to get enough raised to pay someone to do the editing because there are a fuckton of people better and faster at that part than me. Besides, if I employ someone, then I can be a small business and, look out, Small Business Saturday, here I come.

Back tomorrow with more sweet and luscious rudeness. And more Rude Storytime over at Patreon. 

(Note: Yeah, I know it ain't Cyber Monday in the U.S. yet. But it is in the UK and elsewhere. Don't be so goddamned America-centric.)