A Thanksgiving Poem from Indigenous America

"A History of Red"

by Linda Hogan, who is from the Chickasaw tribe

First

there was some other order of things

never spoken

but in dreams of darkest creation.

 

Then there was black earth,

lake, the face of light on water.

Then the thick forest all around

that light,

and then the human clay

whose blood we still carry

rose up in us

who remember caves with red bison

painted in their own blood,

after their kind.

 

A wildness

swam inside our mothers,

desire through closed eyes,

a new child

wearing the red, wet mask of birth,

delivered into this land

already wounded,

stolen and burned

beyond reckoning.

 

Red is this yielding land

turned inside out

by a country of hunters

with iron, flint and fire.

Red is the fear

that turns a knife back

against men, holds it at their throats,

and they cannot see the claw on the handle,

the animal hand

that haunts them

from some place inside their blood.

 

So that is hunting, birth,

and one kind of death.

Then there was medicine, the healing of wounds.

Red was the infinite fruit

of stolen bodies.

The doctors wanted to know

what invented disease

how wounds healed

from inside themselves

how life stands up in skin,

if not by magic.

 

They divined the red shadows of leeches

that swam in white bowls of water:

they believed stars

in the cup of sky.

They cut the wall of skin

to let

what was bad escape

but they were reading the story of fire

gone out

and that was a science.

 

As for the animal hand on death’s knife,

knives have as many sides

as the red father of war

who signs his name

in the blood of other men.

 

And red was the soldier

who crawled

through a ditch

of human blood in order to live.

It was the canal of his deliverance.

It is his son who lives near me.

Red is the thunder in our ears

when we meet.

Love, like creation,

is some other order of things.

Red is the share of fire

I have stolen

from root, hoof, fallen fruit.

And this was hunger.

 

Red is the human house

I come back to at night

swimming inside the cave of skin

that remembers bison.

In that round nation

of blood

we are all burning,

red, inseparable fires

the living have crawled

and climbed through

in order to live

so nothing will be left

for death at the end.

 

This life in the fire, I love it.

I want it,

this life.

  

Getting Through the Next Two Months of Hope and Dread

1. It is okay to feel hopeful in the wake of the ascertainment of the election of President-Elect Joe Biden, thus starting the transition from the catastrophic fuckstorm of Donald Trump's presidency. Everyone who was supposed to do their jobs decided to finally do their jobs, from the state canvassers in Michigan to the General Services Administrator. In one consequential day, we went from "Oh, Christ, this fucker might have a chance to steal this election" to "Thank Christ, this fucker is actually going to be gone." Between that fact and the vaccine light at the end of the COVID tunnel, for the first time in years, it's possible to envision a future. Not a perfect one, not an easy one, but one where there's a chance to move again towards "more perfect," where we take on the difficult tasks like climate change and poverty. No, I'm not blinded by hope to think any of this won't be a daily struggle against people who despise us and with people on our own side who want to do more or do less. But, goddamn, the air feels lighter, less weighted with the miasma of unending despair that has filled our noses and lungs. And it's just fine to enjoy breathing that cool breeze for a bit. 

2. It is okay to feel dread for the damage that Trump can and will do over the next two months that he's in office. Trump and the vindictive cuntfleas he has surrounded himself with will seek to undermine the Biden administration in ways trivial and in ways important. Right now, they're wrecking trust in our elections by insisting that this one was corrupt and stolen and that they've lost only because the complicit courts won't let them present their secret evidence or some fucking thing. It doesn't matter. What matters is destroying as much of that nation's faith in the federal government - hell, in all governments run by Democrats - that they can, as well as discrediting voters from people of color who live in those Democratic places. And this sabotage extends to fucking up the United States's place in the world by undermining treaties like Open Skies. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see Trump start a conflict with Iran or break diplomatic ties with an ally or NATO as a pissy middle finger to anyone who questions his idiotic "America First" policy. We can be pretty sure they're all destroying records as quickly as possible, as many as they can get away with, covering up what are likely voluminous numbers of crimes. And we've gotta survive the next two months of inaction on COVID, including underfunded preparation for the vaccine rollout. Yeah, there's a fuckton to dread.

2a. It's okay to feel dread about the future beyond Biden's inauguration because of how much goddamn work is going to need to be done. Start with the fact that the country has tens of millions of Americans who think that the election was rife with fraud, all led by a soon-to-be ex-president who refuses to back down on his bullshit grievances, backed by millions of dollars in donations and support from an unhinged right-wing media machine. There could be violence, although it won't come close to reaching the "civil war" that the most batshit Parler users believe will happen if Trump doesn't somehow defeat the Deep State to be president again. But they are going to be an enormous roadblock to progress because they will keep electing fucknuts and assholes, including the QAnon psychos and other right-wing extremists. Jesus fuckballs, how do we make progress if we're constantly having to deal with people who simply exist in a state of non-reality?  

2b. And those Georgia Senate races? Yeah, go ahead and have a bowl of anxiety stew over that shit.

3. It is okay to be okay with Biden's cabinet.  My first thought when I saw who Biden was choosing to fill his cabinet and other senior positions in his administration was "I have heard of very few of these people and, goddamn, that makes me happy." Seriously, beyond Janet Yellin and John Kerry, they have had long careers in public service (with some working in the private sector, sure), which means that they have experience and expertise and knowledge and some level of competence and they're not being hired because of some bullshit belief in the superiority of CEOs or generals with cool nicknames or Fox "news" regulars or fucking donors. I love the idea that I won't have to think about them every goddamn day. I won't have to think, "Why the fuck is Ben Carson running anything?" I want them to dig in and do their jobs and not sit around a conference table, praising the president for being awesomely awesome, an ass-kissing ritual that was so frequent and so overwrought that it left Trump with moist buttocks and a chapped anus. It's kind of hilarious that, right now, Republicans are criticizing Biden for choosing people who aren't fucking crazy.

3a. It's also okay to criticize Biden's cabinet picks. Look, I fully believe that it's just useless when the leftier-than-thou crowd is condemning Biden before he's even gotten into office. But I also think the left needs to work to make sure that Biden continues his more progressive tilt since becoming the nominee (and he has moved further left, more than he has in his entire career). So it's okay to say, "Fuck that" to a possible Rahm Emanuel appointment. And it's okay to look at the backgrounds of some of the picks and wonder why so many supporters of the Iraq War are in there. It's okay to look at Avril Haines and wonder how she could have supported torture-enabler Gina Haspel. It's okay to think that Cedric Richmond, whose environmental record is significantly less than decent, isn't right for a position that serves as a liaison on climate change issues. 

3b. But, damn, look at us: arguing about positions and ideology instead of "How much will this asshole steal?"

4. It's okay to want Trump and this administration brought to justice. I wrote about my fears that Biden won't do that back last December, and there's much more to say. However, I wouldn't expect any movement on that front until after the Georgia runoffs. You don't want to turn Trump into a MAGA martyr yet. Let's get them to depress the GOP vote so we can possibly get the Senate.

5. Mostly, keep telling yourself this: There will be a January 20th, 2021. There will be a vaccine. And then we gotta put on our work boots and step into the shit to clean it all up.

Rudy Giuliani Is Sweating His Hair Color Off for America

Goddamn, why can't we just be fucking done with Rudy Giuliani? At this point, his story should have ended in a fading Manhattan hotel room when the housekeeper finds his corpse hanging in a closet with a belt around his neck and no pants, his hand rigor-mortised around his dick. like he was choking a garden snake, before he realized he couldn't reach the foot stool he thought was close enough. Of course, the housekeeper would have to nudge him a few times because Giuliani already looks like a corpse that's been buried and dug up several times over. Prison rape porn would definitely be playing on his computer. An open, one-way plane ticket to Moscow would definitely be in his briefcase.

But because hideous humans seem to live longer than they have any right to, today we were treated to a press conference where Giuliani, along with the legal fucking Z-Team of Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, screeched like a cat that got his balls stuck on a fence he was hopping across about all the voter fraud and election fraud and fraudulent fraud, all in states where Donald Trump was ahead and then fell behind in the vote count. Most of us would say, "Yeah, that's what happens when you count the fuckin' votes, fucko," but for Trump, as well as for Giuliani and the other attorneys who are making bank off this, it's an insidious plot to deny him his destined second term. Or at least everyone is pretending that it is. Who the fuck knows at this point.

The whole event was odd not just because whatever spray or coloring Giuliani used on his hair leaked down both sides of his sweaty face like raw sewage was being slowly drizzled on his head. It was odd because, swear to fuck, Hugo Chavez was brought up 10 times and Venezuela 15 times. I'll get back to Runny Giuliani in a moment. But check out the blabbering nonsense that fellow counsel Powell said in the flattest, most banally sinister voice you've ever heard: 

"What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software, and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems herein as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out." Those are words that mean something to someone. It's the coded language of a bunch of Parler posts, a mishmash of places and terms that supposedly add up to the Constitution being set aflame while Lady Liberty weeps in Abe Lincoln's arms.

But Powell, who looks like the woman you see just before she hacks your feet off so you can't escape her cabin, went on, "Notably the Dominion executives are nowhere to be found now. They are moving their offices overnight to different places. Their office in Toronto was shared with one of the Soros entities, one of the leaders of the Dominion Project overall is Lord Malloch-Brown, Mr. Soros’ number two person in the U.K., and part of his organization. There are ties of the Dominion leadership to the Clinton Foundation and to other known politicians in this country." So now we've got a conspiracy involving dead Hugo Chavez, China, George Soros, and the Clinton Foundation. There's batshit insane and then there's "the very words you're saying have no meaning" batshit insane. We're talking shit fight in a monkey house crazy. We're talking crazier than a shithouse rat. All combined into a batshit fight in a shithouse. 

As for Giuliani, his tactics included telling Philadelphia that they're a bunch of criminals who can go fuck themselves: "Unless you're stupid, you knew that a lot of people were coming over from Camden to vote. They do every year. It happens all the time in Philly. It's about as frequent as getting beaten up at a Philadelphia Eagle football game. Happens all the time, all the time. And as it allowed to happen because it is a Democrat corrupt city and has been for years, many, many years." And then he told Detroit to go fuck itself: "The margin in Michigan is 146,121 and these ballots were all cast basically in Detroit that Biden won 80-20. So you see it changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County." Yeah, that's some motherfucking legal genius right there in demonstrating he understands how addition and subtraction work. 

Of course, Giuliani also had to attack judges who would dare to say that Trump's lawsuits are as worthless as the jizz rag that Giuliani used to wipe his brown sweat streaks. He spittled about the places where Democrats supposedly committed their nefarious crimes of extreme criminality, "When I say crooked city, go look at how many of their officials have gone to jail in the last 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 years, that they have dominated and destroyed those cities. They picked the places where they could get away with it. They pick the places where, whether or not Republicans testified to something, judges would just dismiss it. Because judges are appointed politically and too many of them are hacks." 

Asked about lawyers who dropped off Trump's case, Giuliani gave this explanation: they're all pussies. "The only lawyer that left a case left because he was threatened, his family was threatened, his children were threatened. And so was the other lawyer. Yeah, that’s true. We have a little difficulty getting lawyers because our lawyers get threatened with being killed," he said. "We have lawyers dropping out of the case because they’re being threatened with destruction of their careers, destruction of their livelihood, and in some cases, destruction of their lives." Imagine a lawyer being judged by the cases they take and having their decisions affect their careers. How unfair. (Note: Any unproven death threats aside, it's not unfair at all.)

It fell to Jenna Ellis, the Fox-ready attorney who knows how to Kayleigh McEnany-lie with the best of 'em, to demonstrate for everyone that she doesn't understand a goddamn thing about the way trials work. She used the occasion to attack the gathered reporters, who must have wondered why they were invited to watch a reenactment of an erotic freak show, where the Lobster Man gets his appendages fellated by the Two-Faced Woman. Ellis said, "We are not trying our case in the court of public opinion, because if we were, we would get unbiased jurors, I would strike 99% of you from the jury and I would be allowed to, because of the fake news coverage you provide." No attorney can strike 99% of the jury pool. That's basic shit.

When a reporter asked to see evidence of any of the allegations, evidence that wasn't just sworn affidavits by attention-seeking fucknuts, she lashed out, "Your question is fundamentally flawed when you’re asking, 'Where’s the evidence?' You clearly don’t understand the legal process." Because, yeah, discovery isn't a thing. It would be hilarious if there weren't tens of millions of fucking idiots who think all this is real and not just the freak show it is. Suck on those flapping appendages, Bearded Lady.

Giuliani sputtered and yelped and gesticulated and performed, like a coked-out old porn actor who can't get a hard-on no matter how much Viagra or dick injections he takes. He insisted, "We cannot allow these crooks, because that’s what they are, to steal an election from the American people. They elected Donald Trump. They didn’t elect Joe Biden. Joe Biden is in the lead because of the fraudulent ballots, the illegal ballots, that were produced and that were allowed to be used, after the election was over."

Powell insisted, "President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it, and we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom." That would be a conspiracy to commit election fraud so huge, involving so many people, that it would be easier just to organize a military coup.

And Ellis insisted, "We want to make sure to protect election integrity and your President, President Trump, we are so proud that he is in this fight, because he understands that when he swore his oath of office, he swore an oath to uphold and defend the United States Constitution."

That shit is laughable. The president who has wiped his sweaty nutsack with the Constitution isn't worth defending. But this isn't even about defending Trump. It's about ensuring that his hordes of morons stay inside the reality that Trump has constructed for them. To acknowledge Biden's victory, to legitimize the election in any way is to pierce through the orange viscous goo that surrounds Trump voters and all the lackeys and enablers around him. It would break the sucking hose that goes from the pockets and bank accounts of the rubes and right into the accounts of Trump's neverending campaign and his bullshit PAC, the same money that is funding these clownish charlatans, losing worthless case after worthless case, who are luxuriating in the pain of a nation.

And all these bastards, from Trump on down, need to be charged with sedition and tossed behind bars.

Holding Trump and the Right Accountable for Their Actions That Led to the Spread of Covid (Updated with Comments from a Real Lawyer)

I've been thinking about how to walk the line between free speech and, in some way, sanctioning or punishing people whose speech directly harms people. It's a tough one because it's a dangerous path when you start to say that those who watch Fox "news" or OAN or listen to Rush Limbaugh or read savagely right-wing websites like Breitbart or QAnon boards are being harmed because that asks for a judgment call on what is ultimately a right or wrong way to live. You can't stop speech just because you think someone's beliefs that come from that speech are reprehensible. You don't challenge that because of how easily that can be (and has been) used to attack the speech of the left. Just ask anyone who espoused openly Communist beliefs at any point in the last 100 years. If flag burners are protected, then Trump flag wavers are protected.

But I do think a strong case can be made that when speech is used in a way that is so egregious that it is the direct and demonstrable cause of physical harm to people, it has crossed a border from "protected" to "punishable." This isn't about you yelling, "Fire" in a crowded theatre. Instead, it's about you yelling, "There is no fire" to a crowd while you know the theatre is burning. On some level, you bear some responsibility for all the people who burned to death, even if you didn't light the flames and bar the exits.

So it is with President Donald Trump and almost the entirety of the right-wing political and media ecosphere. We have listened and read and watched since the beginning of the Covid pandemic as Trump has not only openly scorned scientists but has advised people to act in ways that are completely the opposite of every safety guideline being issued by his own government. And he has been backed up at every turn by lickspittle governors and anxious-to-please members of Congress, not to mention the nightly reports from outlets like One America "news." This is everything from denial of the severity of Covid to denial of the effectiveness of masks and social distancing to denial of the existence of Covid at all. 

We know that all of this has had an effect. The current surge in cases in the United States, all entirely predicted by doctors and medical scientists, and the forthcoming surge in deaths are the result of this outright lying and denial in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. We get reports constantly now of Covid patients who adamantly refuse to believe they have the very illness they're diagnosed as having or saying that it's not a big deal just before they end up being placed on ventilators or dying. It's madness, and for telling people that it's okay to stick their hands in the toaster, someone ought to be held accountable. 

I keep coming back to the case of Michelle Carter. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Massachusetts in 2017 because, in 2014, she sent a series of texts to her suicidal boyfriend encouraging him to kill himself and then listened on the phone while he died inhaling carbon monoxide in his truck parked in a garage. Carter never called anyone to help Conrad Roy. In fact, when he decided to get out of the truck, Carter badgered him into staying. She let him die, and she was sentenced to 15 months in prison. When she appealed the conviction, the panel of judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the conviction, saying, "She did absolutely nothing to help him: she did not call for help or tell him to get out of the truck as she listened to him choke and die." The U.S. Supreme Court did not take up an appeal, and Carter served her sentence, getting out early for good behavior this past January.

It's a problematic case, to be sure, with all kinds of implications, but with this case, along with cyberbullying laws that can get people arrested for encouraging suicide, it seems like a line is being drawn on what is permissible when it comes to speech. Sure, Roy might have killed himself without Carter's actions, but she sure as hell helped it along. This wasn't a thought crime, like writing cannibal fantasies. This had a direct, real world tragedy that could have been stopped but wasn't. 

So I can't help but think of parallels between Carter's case and the actions of Donald Trump and his band of merry Covid liars. You have a population that wants to act in a way that we know will harm them and a president, along with all of his minions, encouraging them to do the very things that will cause harm, even deriding those who would act more cautiously. Then, when that population starts getting sick and dying, instead of trying to change their behavior, the president, along with all of his minions, doubles down on his rallies and events that lead to more sickness, with perhaps 700 people dying as a result. You could even put down the lack of a national plan on Covid as another inaction in the face of actual harm occurring.

Shouldn't the people who cheered on the dangerous actions when they knew better and then did nothing to help face some kind of punitive action? Is it not justice for the dead and sick? This is not about free speech. It is not about ideology or an exchange of ideas. It is about how much lying about facts can be allowed. We allow a great deal under the banner of free speech. But the First Amendment is not a murder/suicide pact. Speech that encourages people to go mask free in a crowd during a pandemic is not the same as speech that is about even horrible things, like racist and sexist language. We have to be willing to see a difference. 

Maybe, though, this isn't the best legal analogy. Perhaps another way to look at it is through the cases against cigarette manufacturers. Trump is like the tobacco companies that hid how addictive nicotine was and how there is a link between smoking and cancer to protect their profits. Trump knew how harmful Covid was but lied to the public to protect his image and his reelection chances. Of course, no one went to jail and Big Tobacco paid its fines and went about its killing ways. So I'll stick with the analogy that ends in prison time.

Things didn't need to be like this in the nation when it comes to the coronavirus. Yes, of course, there would have been screw-ups and delays and other mistakes no matter who was in office. But Trump, most Republicans, and their media allies took it upon themselves to lie to those who they knew would obey their every word. They made a calculated decision to dismiss the danger, and as the nation reaps their whirlwind, they should be lawyering up. 

(Lemme add: I'm not a lawyer. I'm sure I'm missing a great deal here, and I'm sure I'll hear from you if there are cases that have dealt with this kind of thing already.)

Update: After posting this, Ian Smith, some lawyer guy who contacted me, wrote to say what he thinks works and doesn't here: "What you've actually done there is articulate what the law on this kind of reckless speech already is. Although most people know it as 'yelling fire in a crowded theater,' that's not the actual legal standard.  The actual legal standard is 'falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater,' which I think actually gets at the distinction you're searching for in your post.  So what you're searching for is already built in. 

"The problem, as always when talking about most kinds of criminal or legal liability, especially for speech, is that you generally need to show that (a) the person knows what they are saying is false, and (b) a sort of intent for using said knowledge recklessly.  How do you prove that Trump doesn't believe the dumb shit he says about the coronavirus?  How do you prove that he intended for his gormless minions to go out and murder themselves by acting on his false knowledge?  We have a system set up to determine these things: a court of law.  But you need to provide proof in a court of law---proof beyond, 'But it's obvious, just look!'  If you want to go beyond that, then you get into very shady territory."

Yeah, it would be a hard haul in court, but to take down Trump and the rest, it would be worth the effort, at least. And I'll be stealing "gormless minions" in the future.

Relax. It's Okay to Be Panicky About Trump's Attempt to Steal the Election

I know how it is. You're sitting there watching Trump refuse to concede, file lawsuits over nonexistent voting fraud, do weird shit with the military and intelligence leadership, and more, and you're thinking, "What the fuck is he up to?" And then you read things that tell you to shit yourself in terror and other things telling you to chill the fuck out. And then you're watching reports on how Bill Barr is telling the Justice Department to investigate even suspected "irregularities" in voting, not even those that are crimes, and you're thinking, "Okay, now what the fuck is up with this?" And then you read things telling you to shit yourself in terror and other things telling you to chill the fuck out. And then you're watching Republicans specifically refuse to say or outright deny that Joe Biden won the election. And then you read things that tell you to shit yourself in terror and other things telling you to chill the fuck out. 

It's like living inside a panic attack on meth. 

Well, let me put your mind at ease. It's okay. Relax. It's totally okay to shit yourself over what's going on. In fact, it's entirely logical. Embrace the shitting yourself. If the last five years have taught us anything, it's that those who don't shit themselves are the ones who are embarrassed. If you turn out to be Chicken Little, well, the worst that could happen is that the sky didn’t fall. 

Obviously, a huge part of Trump's intransigence on the election results is he can continue the grift he's been running since June 2015. He's raising money on this supposedly mighty effort to take down those demonic Democrats and complicit Republicans who didn't let poll watchers stand as close as they wanted to the ballot counters or whatever the fuck the nonsensical lawsuits are saying. Except, of course, we know that the money is mostly going to retire Trump's campaign debt and to fund a new PAC for all things in the Trumpish future. There are reports that Trump's going to announce that he's a candidate for the presidency in 2024, perhaps by the end of December, in time for a full four years of campaigning and rallies to look forward to. Why do that? Because then Trump gets to keep raising money and, more importantly, living off that money by having, say, a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser when he's there for the weekend. Hey, had to fly the private jet there. Expense that to the campaign. He gets to keep filtering funds to his shitty properties. End the election, end the campaign, and you close the spigot.

But, you might be thinking, Trump can be conning the rubes out of cash while tearing down democracy. And that's the rub, isn't it? Sure, we can look at his recent upheaval in the Defense Department and decide that he's settling scores or allowing some people to pump up their resumes. But then there's the idea that he's seeking to release information related to the Mueller probe because he thinks it will prove Russia didn't help him get elected in 2016, so he wants a declassifying spree, consequences be damned. And then there's the certainly not-impossible idea that he wants the military to help him stay in power, something that is so not-impossible that General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt compelled to say in a speech on Wednesday, "We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual. No, we do not take an oath to a country, a tribe or religion. We take an oath to the Constitution." Yeah, that had to be said out loud.

Of course, there are other reasons that Trump and too many in the GOP are willing to trash the election results besides overturning them. Beyond the cash grab, Trump is a vengeful twatmite, and he likely wants to damage Joe Biden as much as possible just to be a dick and, also, to set him up for that 2024 run. At the very least, this effort creates an air of illegitimacy for the Biden administration that Republicans can ride into the midterms and 2024. It has the bonus of giving Mitch McConnell even more power, if the GOP happens to keep the Senate, and, honestly, even if it doesn't. Shit, half the country will believe from the get-go that McConnell is the only non-corrupt leader in DC. That's enough to induce the vomit-shits.

Or maybe it's just a prelude to Trump starting his own right-wing nutzoid network. He's can do his idiot rallies and not be responsible for the lives and deaths of the people in this nation. Anything is fucking possible right now.

But this is as much an information war as it is anything else, and one of the purposes in pressing on with all of this shit, unlikely as it is to succeed, may just be to lay the groundwork for stealing the election. Again, that's nearly impossible. Yet...

Almost all the experts telling us to chill out now told us in 2016 that Trump couldn't possibly win. And he did. They told us that he wouldn't do his Muslim ban or enact or try to enact the cruel policies he campaigned on. And he did. I spoke face-to-face with one of the prominent Never-Trump members of the Lincoln Project in 2017, and he assured me that Trump wouldn't last through 2018 because his sources said the intelligence community would take him down. Everyone was fucking wrong. And he wasn't even destroyed enough to lose in a landslide in 2020. They all thought that Republicans would be somehow noble and stand up to Trump. They were blinded by their own bullshit. 

And I keep coming back to the idea that Trump really didn't want to win in 2016, that it was a big shock to him that he did. Yeah, he just bumblefucked into that. 

This is a way of saying that all these supposed impossibilities are overcome by a compliant GOP and courts filled with lackeys. And right now, 70% of Republicans say they don't believe the election was "free and fair," with 78% buying into the lie about fraud through mail-in voting. Often, the easiest way to understand Trump is that he's saying exactly what he means. He's not fucking around about the election being "rigged" and filled with "illegal votes." He believes it, and he's acting accordingly, and that, at the end of the day, the Republicans who say that this is just one of his toddler tantrums and let him get over it are as complicit as those who are actively supporting him. The longer that this goes on, the longer Biden's transition is postponed, the more that his armies of MAGA cretins intensify their belief that their orange master has been the victim of socialist traitors. That leads to chaos, and Trump just gets off on that shit.

So, yeah, it's fine to have a wave of anxiety wash over you when you hear about the General Services Administration's Emily Murphy refusing to recognize Biden's win so he can have funding and information access to get ready to be president. It's fine to think even if all this fuckery may not have a plan behind it, it sure as shit is giving off the air of a coup. And then it's fine to feel nauseous when you think about that term, "coup," as a real world, a real your world, occurrence. Don't let anyone take away your fear right now. Fuck that.

Be ready for the knife twist, which totally might not happen. But it totally could. And we need to recognize that it's fucked up that we're even at a point where we can contemplate that and not sound completely mad. That's how much damage has already been done.

One final note: It's beyond insane, beyond enraging that we have to worry about any of this shit when the country is being wrecked by the coronavirus. 

We Need to Accept That At Least 70 Million Americans Just Suck

 I have never disliked anyone because of their income. Poor, rich, it's fine. I've never condemned anyone for their race or their gender or any aspect of their identity. I don’t even hold people’s beliefs against them until they try to impose them on me or use them to harm me or others. Then, whether they're religious or political or social, fuck your beliefs and fuck you for having them.

So if you think that I’m just supposed to forgive a bunch of racists fucknuts who decided that I am not really American and who attacked others, directly or through people they elected, yeah, fuck that. If someone has a shitty ideology, they need to give that shitty ideology up before we’ll even talk about forgiveness. And right now, Trump voters aren't giving up on a thing, so, yeah, I'm gonna fucking continue with my condemnation, my ridicule, and my dismissal of them.

That's not just because they spent the last five years (including the campaign) allowing their hate-filled ids to run rampant. No, that wasn't enough. It's that they actively rejected science, favoring the gut instincts of an objectively failed businessman over people who had spent their whole lives studying things like diseases and the climate. It's that they rejected things that were occurring right before their eyes, preferring whatever algorithm fucked their faces with a continuous feed of lies on their Facebook pages.  And, more importantly, it's that they dragged the rest of us down with them and then thought we were the traitors for not agreeing with them. 

They dragged us backwards as we saw scenes out of the civil rights era take place before our eyes or to us, along with anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and anti-LGBTQ bias, putting so many people in real danger. They joined or cheered on terrorist groups they called "militias," who really believe they might have to start killing us. They bought into the most idiotic of conspiracy theories by the millions. They degraded and debased us as they cheered on the cruelty of the Trump administration and laughed at us for how upset their savagery made us, mocking us for normal human emotions, like sympathy for migrant families fleeing brutality and death only to be subject to the depraved actions of our government. Instead of trying to empathize, they sent us Pepe the Frog memes and accused of never getting over the 2016 election and said we only cared about the Russia hoax or the Ukraine hoax or the COVID hoax and drank our liberal tears.

And if some of them say they didn't believe any of this shit, they just liked the tax cuts, well, they fucking tolerated it and did nothing to stop it. So fuck 'em, too.

I want them to face consequences for their actions. If they committed crimes, of course they should be arrested. Jesus Christ, break up the goddamn militias. But even beyond that, the nation as a whole, the majority that doesn't believe this shit, needs to spurn them and not merely let them crawl back under their rocks until the next demagogic con man comes along to scratch that hateful itch. You apply for a job and someone googles you and finds you screaming insane shit about Tom Hanks drinking baby blood? Yeah, fuck you, Jesse, you can go shovel shit at your Nazi uncle's farm than work the cash register at the local Target. Chase these fuckers out of civil society. Let them walk in the wilderness for a while. You can't just fucking be a racist piece of shit without some fucking consequences. It shouldn't work like that. We shouldn't allow it to work like that.

And, goddamnit, we need to hold companies like Fox, like One America, like Sinclair, like fucking Facebook accountable for spreading lies, real lies, that do real harm to the country. That needs to be done in a legitimate way, not by braying, "Section 230." There has gotta be a fucking balance between censorship and treating the First Amendment like a suicide pact. 

And, goddamnit, we need to improve education in this country, with shit like media literacy and motherfucking civics. We need to take over school boards to ensure that real history and mind-expanding science and literature are being taught, not the whitewashed faux-patriotism and forced ignorance that the right imposes on too many. Jesus, none of this should be controversial. It's just fucking wrong that it is.

So many times in the last few days, since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared the winners of the presidential race, I've heard someone say that it's fine to be happy, but "we have to grapple with the fact that 70 million still voted for Donald Trump despite everything that we know about him. What are we going to do about that?" 

My response is simple: Maybe we just need to accept that at least 70 million Americans are just shitty people. And, frankly, it's on them to change. They're not fucking children. They're adults who made adult decisions. I'm so fucking sick of the infantilization of the Trump voter, the idea that they're these naifs who need to be nurtured into some kind of maturity, that they have fears of the progressive world (even as they benefit from it in many places with expanded Medicaid), that they are uneducated and inundated with bullshit from Fox "news" and its devolved progeny in the nutzoid right-wing media. 

Fuck that. They chose this ideology. They chose what to believe. They decided to be a bunch of scabby pricks. They gotta own that shit. Forgiveness is wasted on those who refuse to believe they need to be forgiven. The more charitable of you might be able to do it, but I'm not fuckin' charitable to these goons and freaks and worms. Donald Trump played 'em like a goddamn fiddle. Hell, he's still playin' them, squeezing them for more cash under the umbrella of his bullshit "voter fraud" lawsuits. Until they wake the fuck up or are woken the fuck up, they need to exist as a warning not to let them get more power than they have and to work like hell to take away their remaining power. 

It's time to tell Trump voters to spend a little time trying to understand Biden voters so they can see why we fucking kicked Trump's ass.

Trump to America Today: Democracy Is for Suckers and Losers

I gotta tell you: I watched Trump's appearance today in the White House press room with enough burning schadenfreude to power a small city. As much as I wanted to be appalled and saddened and enraged, mostly what I thought was "Suffer, motherfucker." If Biden ends up winning, as almost everyone seems to believe he will, this excruciating ballot count will have been worth it because Donald Fucking Trump was dragged down into the shit he created, watching it all fall apart. Sure, a swift ending would have been preferable, but this is so obviously tearing his tiny brain and his titanic ego to shreds that I'll take it. 

The whole thing was just a trip into the kind of madness that you find in people who have seen a naked Rudy Giuliani. In addition to declaring that there was voter fraud everywhere he is losing or might lose, Trump mocked Democrats for the amount of spending on losing Senate races and accused pollsters of being in on the fraud. "The pollsters got it knowingly wrong. They got it knowingly wrong," he slurred. "We had polls that were so ridiculous and everybody knew it at the time." This is the same guy who fucking loved to jack it to besting the poll numbers. Now, it's all a conspiracy against him. Motherfucker, we'd have been so much less tense right now if Nate Silver had said, "Oh, this is gonna be another fuckin' squeaker."

His statements on the vote counts were ludicrously dumb. He blurged, "We were up by nearly 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania. I won Pennsylvania by a lot." That was when just 52% of the votes were counted. You know this is the kind of dick who flips the checkers board when he thinks he might fall behind and then declares himself the winner.

And, after saying that "Republicans have become the party of the American worker," Trump shit all over the workers at the polls. "The officials overseeing the counting in Pennsylvania and other key states are all part of a corrupt Democrat machine that you’ve written about," he turded, as if the Republican governors of Georgia and Arizona are somehow negligible participants here. 

Then, in the weirdest act of self-fellatio, he asserted about Pennsylvania, "I went to school there and I know a lot about it." He went to the University of Pennsylvania from 1966-68. So he is saying that his time as an asshole student in his junior and senior years over 50 years ago gives him the insight into Pennsylvania election shenanigans. In fact, he said, "It hasn’t changed since a long time ago and hasn’t changed. It has gotten worse." That is "time to take Ol' Yeller out back"-levels of pathetic.

Trump lied and he lied and then he lied some more. And some of them were things he knows are lies and some of them were things that he just doesn't understand but refuses to learn because fuck you, learning is for losers. He thinks that if you don't want him reelected, you must be part of an evil cabal that is trying to undermine democracy because, surely, democracy can only have one outcome. And fuck those Black cities of Philadelphia and Detroit for being Black and therefore corrupt.

It's what he's been telling us for the last four years, since he insisted that his loss of the popular vote to Hillary Clinton had to be because of undocumented immigrants voting by the millions in California. It's what he's been telling us by saying that voting by mail in a pandemic is bad and instead spread coronavirus through rallies and, likely, through telling millions of people to stand in line to vote. You know what we get from that? The biggest numbers of COVID infection since the whole thing began.

And of course he's going to take all this to court. It's all he does. He's the whiniest fucking Karen in history, always asking to speak to the manager, always demanding that he get special treatment, always demanding that system bend to his cruel and avaricious ass.

He could have worn a fucking mask. But he thought he was too good for it.  The same goes for the law. The same goes for democracy.

Yeah. Suffer, motherfucker. 

You Can't Poll Crazy: Random Observations as We Await Joy or Doom

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Simplest Endorsement Possible: Fewer People Will Die If Joe Biden Is Elected

Update: As if to prove this post right, Trump says that he's going to fire Anthony Fauci after the election. And Deborah Birx said everything Trump says about COVID is bullshit. 

Look, if you've already voted or are voting for Joe Biden, you know that it's primarily because, for fuck's sake, we have to get back to some kind of sanity in the United States. We know that another four years of Donald Trump will wreck the federal government, creating a barely functional cult of personality, where loyalty to the leader and his goals, such as they are, is more important than experience or competence. 

I have refused to let myself go down the rabbit hole of everything that will be lost if he wins again, from the judiciary to NATO to the education system to... Yeah, I gotta stop because it's just too depressing. It's not an overstatement to say that the United States that you know will cease to exist. And no matter how shitty you think this country is (and it is often remarkably shitty), it will be worse: more racist, more divided by class, more anti-civil rights, more cruel, more violent, and so very much dumber.

That's why we're voting for Biden. Because we need to get back at least to zero, to where we were before this bovine orange bastard undulated in and fucked up the joint. And if we start to make progress past that, well, that's just a bonus. 

I'm not gonna go through all of Biden's policies here. You can go to his website or google that shit.

But lemme bottom line this for anyone who may still be stupid enough to be on the fence at this point: You vote for Joe Biden because fewer people in this country will die if he's elected. 

And this isn't even an argument. It's just fucking factual. If Trump is re-elected, then nothing will change in how the country handles the coronavirus. We'll just keep suffering and dying until there's a vaccine or some miracle treatment. And even then we'll keep suffering and dying by the tens of thousands because of how long it will take to distribute a vaccine, which will likely not work to prevent 100% of the cases anyways.

The way to prevent far, far more death and complications from COVID even when you survive is to elect Joe Biden. It really is that simple. And when you think of it that way, it's about as clarifying as anything can be. You can ask yourself, "What kind of person am I? Am I the kind of person who wants more people to die? Or am I the kind that would like to prevent more coronavirus deaths than necessary?" Yeah, it's that fucking simple.

Jesus, just look at what Biden wants to do. It's all the easy shit that Trump could have done, and if we had done it from the start, we might not be looking down the barrel of a long winter killing a bunch more of us. A massive expansion of testing, a massive expansion of the medical personnel available, a massive increase in the supplies of PPE, a huge boost in the spending on those hit by the economic disaster of the pandemic, a huge boost in spending to make schools and businesses safe, and so very much more are all part of it. Health professionals think it's a good plan. Hell, it's a fuckin' plan, unlike the lack of a plan we have now. As one expert put it, "I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘What if we had this all along during the pandemic?’ What a different place we would be in." Imagine that. Imagine being South Korea, where they never had to lockdown and where they can go out to eat and to work and to school and to concerts and live a normal goddamn life again. 

Yeah, that's fuckin' enough for me. And it should be all you need to convince you to vote for Biden.

Oh, sure, you can argue about Biden's record on lots of shit. You can tell me about his vote for the Iraq War and how many people died because of it. You can tell me about the 1994 crime bill. You can tell me about how Biden is beholden to big banks and Wall Street. You can tell me about how he doesn't support Medicare for All and how he's too moderate. And you are right. You are very right about all of that.

You know what I'm right about? Fewer dead people. There will be fewer dead people in this country if Biden is elected than if Trump is elected. 

Fine, you want more? It's still about the number of dead people. Donald Trump is trying to tear down the Affordable Care Act, no matter what the Supreme Court decides. If the ACA is gutted, unenforced, or overturned, millions of people will lose their health insurance in a Thanos-like finger snap. Thousands of people will die because of that. If Biden is elected with a Democratic Congress, the ACA will be strengthened and expanded. Again: Fewer people dying versus more people dying.

Do I even need to get into the whole "not dead/dead" comparison when it comes to women if Roe v. Wade is overturned? 

So there's my motherfucking endorsement of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I shouldn't have to make any other argument, just like Donald Trump shouldn't even be in pissing distance of winning reelection after helping to cause the deaths of a quarter million people in this country. 

I'm not being trite or ignoring other things. We're in a big fucking crisis. One candidate makes the crisis better. One candidate makes the crisis worse. For once, it's pretty fucking clear that the election is not about the lesser of two evils. It's about defeating a genuine evil.