Afghanistan Done (Part 2 of A Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown)

My dad always wanted to nuke shit. If there was some issue between the United States and another country, he invariably believed that the best solution was to launch nuclear missiles. When I was a kid, he regularly expounded on how the Vietnam War could have been won easily if we had just nuked the Vietcong. "Turn it into a glass parking lot" was a phrase he used often enough that it would describe his approach to foreign relations. Any time the Soviet Union farted in the direction of the United States, he was ready to start a massive nuclear war. During the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, he said that his solution would be simple: "I would call the families of the hostages and tell them that we're going to drop a low-yield nuclear bomb on the embassy and their loved ones wouldn't suffer." I don't know where he got the idea that there were nuclear weapons with such precision that they wouldn't cause massive collateral damage. He did read lots of Len Deighton novels, so maybe from them, but I suspect he didn't care how many Iranians died. He passed away in 1980, so he never got to see how the hostage crisis ended, but I could hear him in my head after 9/11 saying something like "Call the Taliban and tell them that they have 48 hours to turn over bin Laden or we're going to level all the mountains and turn the whole country into a glass parking lot." 

At some other time, I'm sure it would be fascinating to get into the psychology behind the desire to rain mass destruction down on your nation's enemies in every situation. But not right now.

It's a comforting myth, that somehow the United States can just bomb something into submission. I mean, we're told that was part of how we won World War II, with firebombing of cities like Dresden and atom bombing the fuck out of Japan, except historians have told us that neither action was really necessary. But we cling to that idea, that somehow we can win a war that way, that the big dog needs to bark loudly.

To those bomb-loving members of Congress and in the warmongering media, the United States's withdrawal from Afghanistan is a defeat for some vague-ass idea of "security," in that the nation would become a haven for terrorist groups despite the fact that the nation was a goddamn haven for terrorists even while we were there. Two weeks ago, the chaotic retreat and evacuation of Americans, allies, and Afghans was seen as a "catastrophe" all over the political spectrum. When the ISIS-K suicide bombing happened at the Kabul airport, killing over 100 people, including 13 American soldiers, all of a sudden the bloodthirsty mongrels of the right were ready to bomb the place into a mass grave and impeach President Joe Biden. Fuck, if 9/11 happened now, Republicans would blame it on cancel culture and trans people and demand Democrats kill themselves as penance. Unity is for suckers.

The problem, of course, is that the withdrawal wasn't a catastrophe. It simply wasn't. Yes, there were tragedies large and small, but the airlift of 120,000 people, mostly Afghans, was something of a miracle. It exceeded even the most optimistic predictions about the evacuation, and it made all the naysayers seem like damn fools. 

According to so many who understand Afghanistan far more than I do, the end of the war was what it was always going to be: the second the U.S. started withdrawing in earnest, shit was going to go nuts. There was no subtle way to do it. Chaos was going to happen. How could it not? The entire 20-year boondoggle had been a waste of time, lives, and cash, a payoff to military contractors and another woeful experiment in attempting to cram the round peg of democracy into the square hole of another nation and pretend that the stench of colonialism wasn't behind it. There was no way that it all wasn't going to collapse. Nation-building is a Jenga game on a wobbly table on the best days. 

Instead of understanding this, what we have gotten, from the right, center, and moderate left, is an outcry, about the withdrawal as a betrayal of American values, about how Biden isn't fit to be president, about how we have some kind of obligation to stay forever in a country that, truly, doesn't mean dick to us. Yes, what's going to happen to women there is awful. But what's happening to women in a fuckton of places is awful. You wanna bomb Saudi Arabia? What makes Afghanistan so fucking special? Because a guy we wanted dead hid there 20 years ago? Foreign policy is about shitty choices. But too many in Congress and in the media are invested in making this whole withdrawal effort seem wrong for reasons that they can barely describe beyond the idea that we should just keep doing what we've been doing. It's ludicrous. 

And, as Biden put it forcefully today, the rational choice right now is to get the fuck out of Afghanistan. He's right that it's idiotic to keep putting money and lives into an effort just because we can. Goddamn, we haven't fought a war worth fighting in my entire life, and in the post-Vietnam era, the idea that it took 20 years to come to the same conclusion as we did in Vietnam is depressing beyond words. In many ways, Biden's speech was pro-military and pro-veteran. He was saying that he's not going to send them into places for bullshit reasons. And give the man points for consistency. He's been wanting to be out of Afghanistan for at least a dozen years now. 

One other thing that Biden is doing is saying that the U.S. will abide by its agreements, unlike Donald Trump who shitcanned the Iraq nuclear weapons deal and the Paris Climate Accord. With a strengthened Taliban in the wake of Trump's deal with them (helped by 5000 Taliban prisoners released as part of the agreement), the options were to abide by the deal and leave or to go full-on aggressive war, with all the civilian casualties and misery that would cause, as well as the increased US casualties and exploding cost. At least that latter path is foreclosed. Hopefully for good. It's over. It's really goddamn over.  

But, hey take comfort, war-humpers. We're probably still gonna drone missile the fuck out of people living in stone huts in some godforsaken rural area of Afghanistan because freedom. My dad would advocate nuking them, but, as I said, he was a bit of a one-strategy guy.

A Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Part 1: Mask Madness)

The first time I saw the irrationality of large groups of adults happened when I was an adolescent in Lafayette, Louisiana. My mom took me to a parish council meeting (in case you don't know, parishes are counties but they're called "parishes" in Louisiana because Catholicism) for a debate over allowing fluoridation of the water in the community. I had asked to go because I've always been perverse that way. To my family, it seemed like the easiest call: Of course. We had moved from a town in Florida where the water was fluoridated and we were all fine.

I wasn't really surprised at how many people opposed it. However, I remember being shocked (and, lemme be honest here, amused - I was around 12) by the passionate way these putative grown-ups, some of whom were parents of friends of mine, spouted insane bullshit. It wasn't just that they were ignorant. They were proudly ignorant, wanting to share that ignorance with the whole goddamn city. Even in the dark ages of pre-internet time, they had done their own "research" and brandished supposed studies that showed how fluoride caused all kinds of maladies, from mental illness to bone destruction. It was weird and eye-opening. I mean, none of us who drank fluoridated water had grown a third arm or shit out teeth or gone dumb. Besides, the garbage put into the air by the oil industry and the chemical plants was gonna get us if the lead paint and asbestos in our schools didn't first. That didn't matter. 

What mattered was some egghead doctors thought they knew better about how to take care of children's teeth than the gathered moms and dads and that shit just wouldn't fly. And to this day, there is no fluoride in the water in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, and the state's overall dental health is consistently among the worst in the country. 

Ignorance and cowardice won because, well, it usually does. Right now, for instance, the Covid vaccination rate in Lafayette Parish is around 39%, and it's not close to the lowest in the state. And its rates of infection, hospitalization, and death are at or near the highest since the start of the pandemic, which proves that the fucking worst people can fuck things up even in a state with a Democratic governor who has issued a mask mandate that most everyone is just ignoring because all the right-wingers are ear- and eye-fucking them with waves of disinformation and lies that they gobble up like kibble from Jesus's asshole.

That scene of brazen, public, proud ignorance I witnessed as a kid is playing out every damn day. 

In Michigan, Kalamazoo County's Health Department held a meeting on mask mandates where the people said shit like, "Don’t tell me how to raise my family" and "We as parents should decide what that risk is going to be." At a Kent County meeting, you could hear some fucknut say, creepily, "We are responsible for our biological property, which is our children" while people fucking applauded those sentiments. Not to get all into moron logic, but the second your kids step outside your house, they gotta play by the rules or go the fuck home to their biological owners. (Yeah, that's genuinely creepy. Can we get child protective services over to that house?)

Up the road a little ways in Ottawa County, parents dragged kids to chant, sing, and pray outside a Board of Commissioners meeting. One man-shaped butt plug shouted at the commissioners, "There's hell coming and I'm not doing it to threaten anybody but there's a lot of good guys out there ready to do bad things soon. Watch what's coming." These little bitches do this all the time: they aren't threatening anyone, but here's a threat. Fuck you, you fake warrior. Make a goddamn threat and take the consequences or sit the fuck down. 

In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont had to stop a back-to-school roundtable at an actual high school because anti-mask dickmites showed up to yell at him and other officials. They were called "criminals" and one asshole called out, "When did we start living in Nazi Germany, Ned?" The answer, of course, is when a bunch of unelected thugs started refusing to follow legitimate laws and used force to shut down dissent with their extremist beliefs. But that's a bit too nuanced for the Masks = Holocaust crowd.

I just wanna say to all of 'em, "Motherfuckers, we're the ones who should be pissed off. We got vaccinated. We did what was good for the nation, what was good for everyone. We thought we were gonna be in unmasked bliss and getting back to normal, but you ignorant fucks blew it for everyone. Eat my whole ass." But that won't matter to someone who thinks they are so right and righteous in their stupidity that they need to show everyone, like a proud toddler with an erection.

And let's not even begin to get into the basic fuckery behind Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's executive order suspending laws so that no government nor any body that receives funds from the state can issue a vaccine mandate. Abbott, who has decided to try to out-Trump Trump on deranged and harmful acts, is sucking so hard at the nutzoid right teat that he'll go cross-eyed from the effort. There should be a national vaccine mandate and anyone who doesn't like it can go live on Covid island where they can pass around variants until they run out of Greek letters or people.

Or Florida. Jesus fuck, Florida.

The GOP has put this nation on a ledge and threatened to push it off. And every day, they keep chipping more and more of that ledge away through their actions and inaction. For those who know that they're spreading utter bullshit, it's brutal and cruel. For those who are true believers, it's dumbfounding. We're approaching a convulsion point where the only way some will know how to react is through violence. And that still won't be enough for the conservative jackals feeding on our anxiety and rage and conflict.

We've been close to madness in modern times before as a nation, but each time, we seem to pull back just before we plunge over that edge. I'm not so sure we can this time.

(In Part 2: The Afghanistan withdrawal is breaking the brains of the warmongers.)

Note to Anti-Maskers: You're Not Revolutionaries. You're Just Assholes.

At one point in the chaotic Louisiana Board of Secondary and Elementary Education meeting in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, a local Christian extremist pastor, Tony Spell, announced as the elected officials tried to start things, "Let’s welcome the board to our meeting today." He was standing on a chair, surrounded by a couple of hundred people there to protest the school mask mandate issued by Governor John Bel Edwards. Despite the requirement, almost none of the gathered flesh lumps wore masks in the tight space. 

Spell, his hair greased back, declared, "King Edwards is the biggest lawbreaker in the state history," an objectively false statement since, you know, the fucking state was pretty much founded by pirates. Hell, even if Edwards were breaking the law, he wouldn't be the biggest lawbreaker who was governor. The ghosts of Huey Long and Edwin Edwards (no relation to John Bel) must have been thinking, "What the fuck? Forget about us already?"

But facts were hard to come by in the meeting room, as they are in all these school board and other meetings where whiny assholes wail about their children's loss of freedom and order is barely or not maintained and no one has the fucking guts to say to the cops there, "Arrest these dumb pricks. They're too stupid to walk and breathe at the same time."

After watching and reading about a bunch of the anti-mask uproars, two things are perfectly clear:

1. You don't fucking know how to raise your kids better just because you pooped them out or spewed some jizz into a woman who pooped out your kids.

2. These motherfuckers really do think they're revolutionaries.

Look again at what Skeevy Spell said: "Let's welcome the board to our meeting today." Before that, Spell essentially declared himself as the leader of the whole goddamn thing, saying, with no sense of irony, "We're going to run this meeting by Robert's Rules of Order" and then started calling witnesses. In other words, the group of deranged virus-lovers believed they had taken over the state school board. While the police remained idle, the board members did vote to shitcan the whole meeting.

This kind of scene from the depths of MAGA madness is playing out all over the country. In the Philly suburb of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, the North Penn School Board was deciding on whether or not to have a mask mandate for students, and its meeting last Thursday devolved into a shouting match where one fucking moronic woman actually brought up, "The Nuremburg Code of 1947, U.S. federal law, prohibits forcing or coercing anyone, under any circumstances, to participate in a medical experiment. And the code states: 'the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.' In lieu of all of this information, my kids will not be adhering to the mask mandate — which by the way is not a law." The Nuremberg thing is bullshit that's been around for months in the Facebook shit pages of the nutzoid right because it's one of those things that idiots say to sound smart. Of course, the meeting had to be shut down because of the barbaric yowls of the anti-maskers, but the school board did pass the mandate.

And that's because something else is true: the people at these meetings don't represent how actually reasonable most people are. Polls show that over two-thirds of the public support mask mandates in schools. But you know who don't go to meetings where they know that a bunch of screaming fucknuts aren't going to be wearing masks? The people who support mask mandates.

None of these shit-smeared yahoos is the revolutionary they think they are. At best, they're the loudest farting assholes in the right-wing flatulence chorus. You think that's too harsh? Check out these motherfuckers from a school board meeting in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This is how they reacted to speakers who favored masks:

"A woman snorted with laughter as a teen said she was in favor of masks because she worried about people like her dad, who has one lung.

"A man rolled his eyes at an 11-year-old who asked for unity in the face of the virus, suggesting she was just manifesting her mother’s fear: 'Good job, mom,' he said with a snicker.

"The crowd laughed at a board member while she talked about comforting children who have lost a parent to COVID-19."

The board voted in favor of the mask mandate, so suck on that, you cruel jizz stains.

I have long, long ago given up having any sympathy for the belligerently unmasked and/or unvaccinated. I have given up feeling bad when someone who said Covid is a hoax or vaccines are mind control ends up dying from the virus. As I've said, I want them to be vaccinated. I want them to save their own lives. But, you know, you fucked around and you found out. Just stop taking up ICU beds from people who gave a shit or the kids you gave Covid to.

But the anti-mask warriors behave as if the school board meetings are the U.S. Capitol and they all have painted faces and are wearing horns, ready to overthrow the government. It's worse than the Tea Party bullshit back in 2010 because, as stupid as that was, at least it was mostly directed at full-time members of Congress. This shit is just neighbors attacking neighbors. It's less 1776 and more Lord of the Flies.

When, After All, It Was You and Me: Spreading Blame Where It Belongs for the War in Afghanistan

Those of us who opposed invading Afghanistan in 2001 were few, with overwhelming public support for bombing the shit out of the Taliban for harboring 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and possibly supporting al-Qaeda (they really don't have the same goals). Or that's what we were told. When I said that I opposed the war two decades ago, I was looked at like a goddamn traitor. I've said multiple times that the 9/11 attacks were crimes, not acts of war. What's the difference? Scores of soldiers from the Japanese military were involved in attacking Pearl Harbor. 19 deranged fundamentalist dickholes, exploited by cave-dwelling zealots who sure as fuck weren't doing a suicide mission themselves, were directly involved in taking down the Twin Towers, hitting the Pentagon, and losing a fight over Pennsylvania. A couple of decent metal detectors and an extra frisk or two would have ended the whole thing. As I've said often, 9/11 was a James Bond villain plot where James Bond didn't defuse the bomb in time. 

I remember clearly (and wrote about this in 2004) when then-comedian and political writer Al Franken interviewed Boston Globe columnist James Carroll on his Air America show (yeah, that was a lifetime ago). Carroll shocked Franken by stating that he thought the invasion of Afghanistan had been a huge fuckup, just like the invasion of Iraq. Franken said the thing that most on the left still say (and, to be honest, I've said once or twice): we had the Taliban on the run and the Iraq War was a massive distraction from accomplishing the mission in Afghanistan. Carroll stood firm that it was all a complete clusterfuck we had no business fighting. Franken left it at a kind of agree-to-disagree stage because Carroll was right, as was Rep. Barbara Lee, the sole vote in Congress against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the blank check given to President Bush (and all presidents after) to wage war, as were the tiny percentage of us who opposed the war on the grounds that it's a fucking war against a nation that didn't, as a nation, attack us, that, at worst, was harboring a criminal that it was willing to hand over to a neutral country. (No, really.)

There are mountains of blame to go around for the failure of the United States to stand an army and a stable government in a place that, in its best times, had a couple of cities that were islands of progress amid a rocky land of ignorance and poverty, in a nation where opium and heroin make up a big share of the GDP (at least 10%), which the Taliban has been controlling. And while we could date the blame back to the fucking British attempting to make it another goddamn colony or perhaps blame the United States for arming the mujahideen against the Soviet Union for stupid Cold War reasons (or, you know, the USSR for backing the assassination of the Afghan president and a coup in 1978), so much of blame for the war started in 2001 clearly and obviously rests with the vile George W. Bush and his cabal of neocons with imperial hard-ons who wanted to fuck countries into freedom without their consent. 

It's tempting to leave it there. But I can't because that lets others off the hook. And I'm not talking about Obama and Trump. No, I'm talking about the bloodthirsty American public who, for years after the attacks of September 11, wanted to keep murdering people overseas in order to satiate an impossible desire for vengeance. And I get it, I get it. I can remember right after the attack thinking, "Someone was really fucking dumb for deciding to poke the fucking bear." I can remember feeling the desire to fucking waste some motherfuckers in the name of the dead. Fuck, I had family that barely got away from the collapse of the towers. That's only human to wanna fuck shit up. What's also human is to take a moment and think, "Okay, yeah, lizard brain can take over but what if it didn't?"

Almost everyone let their lizard brain run rampant. Polls from September 2001 and for nearly a year after showed 85-94% support for going to war in Afghanistan. One November 2001 poll asked, "How long would you be willing to use combat forces to deal with the problem of terrorism -- less than one year, one to two years, three to five years, or more than five years if it takes that long?" 63% said more than five years, with 10% saying up to 5 years. The support for extended war in Afghanistan crossed party lines, ideological lines, generational lines, all the fucking lines. 

You wanted war. You already hated the Taliban for how they were making life a living hell for women because of their bullshit adherence to bullshit Sharia law. You wanted al-Qaeda destroyed because you were told, over and over, that 9/11 changed everything. You wanted blood. And you can sit there and try to say you didn't want this, but, really, c'mon, the best you can do is that sometime five or seven years after the war's start, you finally started to think, "Whoa, this is way fucked up." 

Or maybe it was even longer. In June 2009, a Pew Research poll showed that 57% of Americans, including 45% of Democrats, still thought that we should stay in Afghanistan. 76% said that it would be a "major threat" to the U.S. if the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan. By September 2009, the support for the war would finally drop to 50% and it continued downward. The surge in troops that President Obama did (against then Vice President Joe Biden's advice), with the accompanying rise in American casualties in the war, seemed to turn the tide, with support, already dropping, bottoming out for Democrats. 

Clearly, if we're judging things by public support, we should have gotten the fuck out of Afghanistan in 2009 and not stayed for another dozen years before facing the inevitable. But the American public bears the burden of fighting this war that was misguided from the start. Americans needed pounds of flesh, needed to get repaid for the murder of Americans with multiple degrees of interest on that debt. 

I wish we had been wrong, those of us who opposed the war. I wish we had set up a glorious oasis of democracy and freedom, with schools, with alternate crops for the poppy farmers, with modernization of the nation. Yeah, that's my Western mindset at work, sure, but when it comes to the horror that Afghan women in particular are facing, well, fuck it. 

This is a tragedy. It was never not going to be a tragedy. Yes, President Biden was brave to decide this was a mistake and it was time to stop making it, even if the speed at which Afghanistan fell was breathtaking (and truly telling). We should be letting in refugees by the tens of thousands, at least those Afghans who helped our troops during this disaster, if not thousands upon thousands more. We couldn't shoot our way to peace. We poured in money and killed so many people and had so many killed. And still we promised more than we could ever deliver. Let's at least own our role in ruining their lives.

(Note: Of course, the real villains here are the Taliban. Fuck those delusional incel motherfuckers.)

(Note: If you want to know what the Afghans were thinking in the first decade of the war, check out this report.)

Now Abbott, DeSantis, and Other COVID Accomplice Governors Need to Resign

At some point, if vaccination rates climb in Texas and Florida and other states where the Delta variant of COVID-19 has been allowed to freely lung-fuck the residents, I'd almost expect the governors of those states who refused to do jackshit to mitigate the virus to say, "See? It took a few thousand more deaths, but now people are making the personal choice to get vaccinated. Government didn't force them to. Reverse psychology in action."

Of course, they aren't that crafty. What we have are ideological pig fuckers who are getting high on the power they have over the lives and deaths of the people in their states. They see defiance of rational actions to slow the spread of the virus as some kind of mighty stand for freedom and rights and the economy when, really, they're just accomplices to the murder and maiming that Covid is doing. 

Over in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis is the discharge from that infected penis of a state, the hospitals in the central part have been inundated with patients at record levels as cases surge to their highest levels in the pandemic. In St. Petersburg, emergency rooms are so full that patients have to wait for at least an hour in an ambulance before being allowed in for, you know, their emergency. Nearly 70% of Florida hospitals will experience a shortage of staff in the next seven days. In Brevard County, where 313 patients are hospitalized with Covid, only 3 are vaccinated. That's over 99% of patients unvaccinated. The Florida Department of Health and Human Services is reported to have requested hundreds of ventilators from the federal government, and it seems like they didn't tell DeSantis about it. Meanwhile, DeSantis and the savages in the Florida GOP are against vaccine mandates and masking requirements, as well as vaccine passports, essentially inviting Covid to speed around the state and fuck up everyone. DeSantis is a sentient hemorrhoid that was cut off Donald Trump's asshole, and fortunately, mayors and county school board superintendents are telling the governor to go fuck himself, even with the threat of legal action hanging over them.

In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott is the dry cow dung on the bottom of a cheap pair of boots, the ICUs are filling up to capacity with Covid patients. Austin activated its emergency alert system to warn people about the worsening situation, and Houston hospitals are putting up tents to deal with the extra patients. While going to fucking war over mask mandates, Abbott has asked hospitals to postpone elective surgeries to make more room even more sick and dying. At this point, it's like Abbott's tiny, fucked-up brain has been taken over by Covid and it's forcing him to not only allow Covid to spread, but to make it comfortable while it kills Texans. Fortunately, like in Florida, leaders in different localities have told Abbott he can eat their whole asses when it comes to school mask mandates. One judge in Dallas said, "The citizens of Dallas County have and will continue to be damaged and injured by Governor Abbott’s conduct." Of course, Abbott has said he would fight that decision and one in San Antonio because, goddamnit, he has to strangle more children to calm the Covid brain worms.

Where the fuck else do you want to go? Down to Mississippi, where Gov. Tate Reeves, who really looks like he's got a woman pit in his basement, has also shit all over mask mandates and the CDC, even as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths blow up all over the state. By the way, less than 35% of Mississippians are fully vaccinated. Up to Missouri, where Gov. Dipshit Magoo said he thought it "undermined" confidence in the vaccine to ask the vaccinated to mask up, but when you have a toxic soup of disease and assholes in your state, where only 41% are fully vaccinated, then it's pretty fucking hard to trust people to wear masks voluntarily. And, yeah, the hospitals are overwhelmed, too. 

Republicans (along with most Democrats) were screaming for the head of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for sexual harassment, and, thankfully, he resigned yesterday. It was the right and decent thing to do because he had demonstrated that he no longer could be trusted to run the state (and, as an employee of the state of New York, I'll just say, "Fuck, yeah" to his departure). 

So what about DeSantis, Abbott, Reeves, and Parsons (the aforementioned "Dipshit Magoo")? They are essentially accomplices to the spread of Covid, helping it thrive and continue, allowing it to take down more children, providing it with incubators for more variants. They are feeding the people of their states to a dragon that promised them electoral gold in exchange for sacrifices. There should be an outcry for them to resign in disgrace because while Covid giddily run rampant through their populations, what the fuck have they been working on? Fucking anti-critical race theory laws? Restricting voting rights? That's not fiddling while Rome burns. That's jacking off on the ashes of the dead.

Like Cuomo but different in kind, their behavior has demonstrated they are unfit to lead their states. Get the fuck out of the way and let someone who gives a damn try to fix things. Jesus, at least Gov. Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas admits he fucked up on mask mandates. The rest of them are shamelessly doubling down. Of course, they're Republicans, so shame isn't really in their vocabulary or the menu of emotions they feel. 

(Note: The outlier here is Louisiana, where the Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, has reinstated a mask mandate in response to the shocking surge of cases. We'll see what the people do there. I don't have much faith in my home state.)

Maybe We're Just Sick of Ignorance and This Time We Can Do Something About It

The easiest way to describe the genuine anger at the anti-vax idiots is that we're fucking sick of their shit. We're tired of having the direction of our lives decided by the most credulous and easily manipulated motherfuckers in the population. We've reached the end of our proverbial ropes and, goddamnit, we're done buying longer ropes.

You saw that today when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who successfully guided his state through the worst shit in the first part of the pandemic, was fucking done with the anti-vax protesters at a news conference he was having. "Because of what you are saying and standing for people are losing their life... and you have to know that," he told the hooting morons, calling them "knuckleheads," a favorite term of his. 

I could go back a long fucking time in detailing all the shit we've been forced to eat, but let's just concentrate on the last few years. So much of it was assholishness and savagery that we had no fucking say in and no control over. We've had to sit there while knuckle-dragging, Fox-lobotomized cock dribbles cheered for all the brute bullshit that Donald Trump and the various infected pustules in his administration could do, like banning people from mostly Muslim-majority countries for no rational reason and separating migrant children from their families for the specific purpose of being dicks to them. We could do nothing when the perverse Republicans in the Senate not only prevented Barack Obama from making a Supreme Court pick nearly a year before the next president would be inaugurated, but then decided it was cool to rush through a nominee after people had already started voting for the 2020 election, thus allowing a SCOTUS face-fucking on issues like abortion and voting rights all but inevitable. We watched in horror as the federal government was used as a weapon against Black Lives Matter protesters and as open, enthusiastic racists were welcomed, even honored, by the GOP, who couldn't be bothered to do a goddamn thing about the ongoing execution by cop of black people. We couldn't do a fucking thing as Trump pranced around the globe, dicking over the United States's longtime alliances, wiping his ass with the Paris Agreement on climate change, and pissing on the Iran nuclear deal. And speaking of climate change, we've had to watch dumbfounded for years as Trump reversed even the small bit of progress that the country was making, essentially declaring that he'll be dead, so fuck it, burn all the fossil fuels you can, fuckers, because wind turbines are ugly and kill birds. And that's not even getting into the scandal upon scandal upon scandal, all happening while the sinister cuntmites in the GOP grinned, their teeth slicked with MAGA jizz, discovered that they fucking loved being openly evil, and enabled, supported, aided, abetted, and cheered the filthiest urges of this filthiest of presidents and his mongrel circle, making celebrities out of the skeeviest, stupidest of their pitiful lot. 

And then we were helpless for the first year of the Covid pandemic, aghast as we saw the White House simply refuse to do basic things to help not just the sick, but the front line workers who were working themselves sometimes to death trying to keep the rest of us alive. We saw organized groups threaten to fucking murder leaders over efforts by state governments to mitigate the spread of the virus. And we saw Trump and the GOP act as if this was all just the price to pay for some debased notion of freedom, one that was contorted around allowing a certain number of people to die rather than raise taxes on the wealthy in order to prevent economic collapse.

And, through it all, we had to watch the idiot hordes of MAGA cretins whoop it up, acting like every fucking day was asshole Christmas, electing rank boobs to Congress just because they promised to be Trump's ass remoras while doing nothing except piss off the liberals. The last fucking straw was the vaccine. That was it. That was the breaking point. When these yahoos who aren't fit to live in sewage ditches refused to get vaccinated from the very vaccine that their great and powerful leader bragged about helping create, when they decided that that vaccine was a plot to control their brains or poison them, and when their monstrously dumb decision allowed the virus to regroup and fill the hospitals with patients again in places where their idiocy ran amok, when the yahoos and their skeevy leaders mock the idea that masks might be needed again because of the actions of the very yahoos who need to masks, well, that fucking does it. E-fucking-nough.

So, yeah, we have some fucking control, some power here, and we're gonna use it. Companies are saying, "Get fucking vaccinated or fuck off." Cities and schools and other places are saying, "Get fucking vaccinated or stay in your homes, you plague rats." And while some states have banned mandates for localities and schools, many of those are based on the emergency authorization and would expire once the Covid vaccine receives full FDA approval, which is expected in the next couple of weeks. 

When I read shit like "Stop Harassing the Unvaccinated" by Washington Post columnist and torture apologist Marc Thiessen, I just wanna say, "Bitch, we've been polite up until now." Shit, most polls show that at least 60% of Americans support vaccine mandates. We haven't even started harassing them.

We're done. We've eaten enough shit force-fed us from the right-wing moron brigade. Finally, there's something where we have some control, where we don't have to beg GOP senators for crumbs or where we don't have to try to convince Joe fucking Manchin or Kyrsten goddamn Sinema to end the filibuster rule. Those of us in places where hospitalization isn't skyrocketing because of the rate of vaccinations want to keep it that way. 

And we're saying, "Fuck you" to the unvaccinated because, at last, we can and because we're tired of bearing the consequences for your irrationality and ignorance.

(Note: This shouldn't need to be said, but, obviously, if you can't get vaccinated because of some medical condition, you're not included. Also, if you're in an underserved area, that's a different case.  And kids. But if you're just being stubborn, selfish, and/or stupid, yeah, fuck you.)