Haiku Review of 2021: Blue Weekend

I'm loving the pouring on of haikuing that's happening. Yeah, slap me with haiku. Tickle me with haiku. Peg me with haiku. Here's another 10-spot of 'em to kick 2021's ass out the window.

From Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane's Political Madness Blog in NYC:

Evil Dick’s spawn Lynne

Tries to save Democracy.

Hell’s frozen over.

From Q. Santi in Belize:

New GOP

Party of losers

Stolen election my ass!

Go cry in your beer

From Jim in California:

Merry Christmas from the Boebert Family

The happy Boeberts 

Clutching their guns with dreams of

A Muslim bloodbath

From Heather in Sun City, AZ:

Grandchild

A new baby breathes.

My planet just keeps dying.

I must smile and cry.

From Rabbit Earz in Los Angeles:

On the house tonight

Bleach-A-Ritas cure Covid

Drink until you die

From RG in Illinois:

Lather, Rise, Repeat

The fuck, man! The FUCK!

WEAR THE FUCKIN' MASK! YOU FUCK!

YOU FUCKING FUCKER!

From T. Mangrove in Wisconsin:

MAGA’s response to

The Audacity of Hope:

Fear, anger, and spite.

From Beth in Alexandria, VA:

Cicadas

Red eyes, freaky sounds,

Bodies falling from the trees,

Brood X in my yard.

From Mel in rural Oregon:

Q has gone silent.

Under psychiatric care?

Or tired of the joke?

From Jack in a hellishly red area of a hellish blue state:

Twenty twenty-one

Rotten to the goddamned end

Rest well, Betty White

I might have one more day of haikunification in me. I've still got a few dozen to get through. Thanks to all who made the effort, whether you got in or not. 

(The title is from Wolf Alice's incredible 2021 album.)

Haiku Review of 2021: Pink Noise

Once more, you have inundated the ol' inbox with a load of magical, mad, and messy little poems. Keep 'em pouring in until I'm slobbering drunk on your words. Here's a sampling of some of the quality haiku you've sent in from sea to not-so-shining sea and even around the world:

From The Human Stain from We Ain’t Gonna Make It, USA:

Doctors, nurses, and

COVID vaccine researchers

Pandemic heroes

From Seattle Snowflake:

1776-2021 (R.I.P.?)

Hey Joe and Kirsten--

Change the filibuster rule

So we all can vote

From Eve Fisher:

Dershowitz is now

shitting bricks. Trump wishes he'd 

pardoned her, not Flynn.

From SPL:

The kid with a gun

Cries tears on the witness stand

What tears for the dead?

From Suffering fools sadly in WI:

Reject the science

Fire Fauci! Burn those masks!

Doctor, help me breathe

From VJ in NJ:

Billionaire playtime

Cock rockets, crypto, and lies

They're our heroes, right?

From Jenny in Staunton, VA:

Marco Rubio

Dude's not worth the syllables

Not even counting

From BB in LA:

Manchin blocked the bill

Someone may have snorted crack

West Virginia bleeds

From Arthur Tiersky:

2021: On the Bright Side

In February

Racist fuckwad Rush Limbaugh

Went to rot in Hell

From Chris in Hong Kong:

Hong Kong under the

Chinese Communist Party

eviscerated

I've only been through the first 24 hours of haiku. So keep your hopes alive if you've sent them in. More tomorrow. And probably Saturday. Once again: 5-7-5 syllables. Titled or untitled. Send 'em to: rudepundit (at) yahoo.com. And make sure you tell me your nom de rude and some place somewhere. 

(Note: The title up there is from Laura Mvula's 80s dance party of an album from this year.)

Haiku Review of 2021: Smiling With No Teeth

Remember how we thought this year absolutely had to be better than motherfucking 2020? The shock is that it objectively was a better year in so many ways, but it felt like a goddamn sequel, shinier but somehow shittier. Yeah, we got rid of Trump, but Trumpism's rank stench continues to pollute everything in this nation. We will not live to see the world rotate out of the eclipse shadow of his orange, jowly moon. Whatever hope we voiced with the vaccine's availability was quickly drowned out by the heaving fuck yawps of humping morons, squealing in orgasmic delight over how they're sticking it to the libs by not getting vaccinated and dying at a much higher rate than the rational rest of us. We saw a fleeting moment of actual bipartisan unity in the moments after the attempted coup on January 6, only to have the MAGA ogres and right-wing media monsters tear it apart like so many billy goats under a bridge and elevate election lies that inspired the mob of yahoos to the level of holy beliefs that one must have in order to be a true Republican shitheel.

Sure, sure, some good things happened, with that vaccine at the top of the list. And Biden's infrastructure bill. And the judges that have been approved. And, hey, howzabout that economy, huh? But all that gets ass-fucked by the two-headed Gorgon of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and it gets face-fucked by the Supreme Court, tearing down the right to abortion, and it gets skull-fucked by the nutzoid state legislatures that are pissing all over voting rights. And let's not even get into how the climate change apocalypse is here and we somehow can't get our heads around it, even when we're being burned and frozen and drowned and blown away by it. Or racism. Always racism.

So around these parts, we kick the calendar year's ass out the door with haiku, those little 3-line poems you were forced to write in grade school and everyone made it about farts, except for that one kid who took it seriously and wrote something so beautiful it made the teacher cry and believe, once again, that her career choice was right. What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah, haiku. Send me yours. Here's the deal:

Submit your haiku about anything you want having to do with the fucked up 2021 to "rudepundit(at)yahoo(dot)com." I'm the only judge and jury here, and I am generally fickle, drunk, high, and yelling at squirrels.

I'm also 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 ones I like the best 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 "Marjorie Taylor Greene's Hammer Toe from Jizzpond, AL" or "Alisha from San Francisco" or something.

Here's a few to inspire you:

Insurrectionism

Break windows and doors

Beat cops bloody with our flags

Trump over country.

Covid Isn't the Only Illness

Vax should be enough

But fools would rather drink bleach

Soon, a million dead

Today's History Class at the MAGA School

White people are good!

Sure, slavery happened. So?

America rules!

Okay, now it's your turn. Send 'em on.

(Note: The title up there comes from Genesis Owusu's majorly cool debut album, which was one of the things that made this year tolerable.)

The Year of Unmagical Thinking

If we hung out, sometimes you might ask me why, seemingly out of nowhere, I've gotten angry. It's not like there aren't thousands of reasons all the time to be angry, but, mostly, we all keep that in check. This last two years, though, I haven't really been able to, and I'd get morose and snippy and generally unpleasant. I can pinpoint why pretty exactly. 

It's not just the pandemic, although that would be enough. It's not the deaths and suffering, although that never goes away. It's not about my own experience of this time because I know that I have not had it nearly as bad as so, so many others. It's specifically when I think about young people, those in college and graduating during this damned period, and all the opportunities that have been lost, all the lives that have been stunted or postponed because of the foolishness of our leaders and the selfishness of a large part of the population. I'm angry for those young people because I'm a generation or two older and we should have been looking out for them and we didn't. And I'm angry because someone needs to be held to account, and we're not doing that...

If I start to list all the things connected that contribute to my anger, I'd never stop. 

I've talked to many, many people who find themselves or people close to them suddenly upset or anxious, who feel trapped or despondent, who no longer enjoy things like they used to, who don't accomplish as much as they once did, and who beat themselves up over feeling any or all of that. "Maybe it's because we're dealing all this," I'll say, gesturing at, well, everything, primarily meaning the pandemic, but all the damage that has been done because of it. I don't mean that as a diagnosis or anything. I mean it as an observation, that we have been living through trauma and damn if that's not going to have an effect on, well, everything in our daily lives. That's what collective trauma does. 

And how could it not be traumatic? At this point, we're certainly not far removed from people who have died from Covid. All of us know someone who has had it or we've had it ourselves. Again, it's not just the disease. It's being forced to learn how to interact in the world in a new way (and resistance to that is its own kind of demonstration of trauma), from how we work to how we shop to how we go to school to how we gather to how we breathe. It can be relatively minor. For instance, for years, I knew to check before leaving: Keys, wallet, phone. Now I have to add "mask." Or it can be more severe, like the fact that I've barely taught in person for nearly two years and didn't see members of my family for extended periods. It's the involuntary nature of it that gets to us. We didn't choose this, like moving to a new house or getting a new job. It was done to us.

And, for lack of a more concise way of putting it, it's fucked us up. Badly. And extensively. The world was one way and now, in the blink of an eye, really, it's another. 

"Maybe we just need to be more forgiving," I'll say to people, to fellow professors, to friends, to myself. "Maybe we need to forgive ourselves and forgive others for sometimes not being able to hold it all in. Maybe it's okay to feel like that."

I have learned the act of forgiveness in so many ways over the last two years. I've been advising professors to be forgiving to their students in ways that we never would have been prior to March 2020. Many students have written to me about how they've had to negotiate the pandemic landscape, how they've had to care for family members, how they've gotten sick, how they've just felt depressed and unable to work. Maybe I'm a sucker, but I can't help but feel like I need to forgive them and let them make up work or turn it in late or help them out. I'll be a more discerning judge of their pain in the undefined future.

The trauma is especially keen now because we've been told, at least twice now, that we were emerging from the pandemic and back into whatever normal is going to be, only to have it Greek-lettered away. And that trauma is on top of the steady thrum of stress and trauma we were already dealing with on a daily basis, the personal events or racism or sexism or poverty or abuse or some terrible combination of those and more. Yes, there are things that shouldn't be written off as related to the pandemic. But one exacerbates the other. 

Just to be clear, though: No, I don't forgive the willingly unvaccinated, especially those who refuse to get their children vaccinated. I'm only human, after all, so I won't forgive those I blame for putting us in this terrible time and those who are keeping us in it.

But this last year has been one where I had to remind myself that, despite however many meds I suck down to keep me from going on a five-state killing spree, of course I'm going to be upset, irritated, angry, even. I've been in mourning for nearly two full years. Now, though, I'm not mourning for what's past. I'm mourning for what is. And I'm trying to push myself through dread for the future. 

I want next year to be better. Truly. I'm not despairing yet. Hell, I keep writing and sending stuff out. That's gotta mean I believe in a future. I know we've got a big fight waiting for us politically in 2022, and I wanna fight it. Hell, I'm planning trips, buying tickets to concerts and shows, and looking forward to seeing friends. Hell, I'm heading to a bar now to meet up with people. See? Hope. And whiskey.

I'm filthy with hope, but I'm exhausted by this last year spent hoping. I'm exhausted because I know it's not enough, but it's what we've got.

In the back of my head, though, I know we're one slight push from it all being swept away. 

And I forgive myself for thinking that.

The Rude Pundit's Annual Nativity-palooza, Now Including Weird-Ass Glass and Metal Ones

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, Reddit, TikTok, 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 my 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 I've 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.

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 then there's 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.

Speaking of implications, think of what this dog one means:  

This means there is a dog Pilate who will sentence dog Jesus to dog crucifixion. It means that there is a dog Mary Magdalene who is a dog prostitute. This is not to mention the dog centurions who routinely torture and kill dogs, the dog slaves who serve their dog masters, and the Jewish dogs who get blamed for everything. But don't worry. Dog Jesus will rise from the dead in three days. Have some damn kibble waiting for him. 

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, you might think they're singing Christmas carols, but they're all screaming in horror and pain. Essentially, that's Christmas in the time of MAGA and Covid.

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.

Maybe your taste is more cutting edge. Well, you fancy motherfucker, you can cut lots of shit with this one: 

I mean, come the fuck on. It screams, "I want to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but I don't want my friends to think I'm too Christian-y." It yells, "Look how pretentious I am but still love Christmas." It cries, "A nativity, but with multicolored ghost blobs." It announces, "I don't have children and fuck you if yours break my glassy Mary."

Finally (for real), here's one I actually like. It's the Recycled Auto Parts Nativity: 

C'mon. It's got everything. Skeletal camels, edges that would slice open a loaf of bread and some fishes, and baby Jesus sleeping on a bed of chicken wire. That's awesome art by Armando Ramirez, and I'd proudly put that up in my home next to my Peanuts creche and dare some internet asshole to talk shit about it. 

Merry Christmas, baby. Let's just get out of this year alive. May George Bailey finally get to push Mr. Potter into the frozen river.

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

The Bad Guys Are Winning and I've Lost Hope That They Can Be Stopped

I've tried to write a bunch of different posts this week. We've had a wave of ludicrously sinister political news, like the texts of frantic Fox "news" hosts desperately trying to get sweaty lackey Mark Meadows to convince then-President (no, really) Donald Trump to call off the red-hatted goons as they stormed the U.S. Capitol, waddling and stumbling around in hopes of murdering their way to overturning the 2020 election. Adjacent to that is the pathetic mewl of dried jizzstain Donald Trump, Jr. also attempting to get Meadows to talk to Daddy, which is like the stupidest, saddest episode of Succession. There's the gruesome, slow garroting of the Build Back Better bill, with Democrat-adjacent Senator Joe Manchin of (dicking over the people of) West Virginia standing nude and red-faced behind it as he tightens the rope on its neck, its gasping last breaths bringing him closer to the powergasm he so intensely desires. There's the wildfire of the Omicron variant of Covid, sweeping through the world and hitting our population of moronic antivaxxers so hard that you'd think it would bitch slap some sense into them, but it won't. It just won't. 

Over here on the left, we keep hoping. We think that there is going to be some deal, some prosecution, some shift in the vaccination zeitgeist. If you are damned to be on Twitter, you might see someone say, "Boom!" when a piss dribble of news about New York prosecutors investigating Trump comes out. Yet there will be no "boom" moment, even if every revelation seems like it should be. No matter how may times Joy Reid burns Tucker Carlson or Eric Swalwell destroys Marjorie Taylor Greene or Twitter eviscerates Ted Cruz, it doesn't really mean shit beyond the masturbatory release of dopamine we get whenever we see our team get tough with the players on the other. 

But it never sticks. It never hurts. The rhetorical disemboweling of Sean Hannity because of the texts he sent Meadows is meaningless because Hannity doesn't have to make you happy. He just has to keep humping Trump's leg and that pleases the yahoos who will forgive whatever hypocrisies he's committed. I mean, it doesn't even matter that right-wing media and elected officials are literally causing the deaths of their constituents by "questioning" the legitimacy of the Covid vaccine and of mask use. If it makes those same yahoos hate the "libs" even more, then cords of stacked corpses are a legit price to pay.

But we know all this. We know that 30-40% of this nation is lost in the racist, xenophobic, anti-science, anti-reality fog that the right has created, and we know they will never come back. The fever will never break because they are the virus itself. We know that the right has been working for decades to shift all power in their direction, from state legislatures to the judiciary. We know that they have worked the refs and roughed the players. 

Still, so many of us believe that, somehow, the good guys will win. 

I was once writing a play, and I was in a workshop with a Great Writer. In a one-on-one meeting, he said he liked some aspects of the piece I was working on, but he thought the end rang false. He asked me, "Do you think the good guys always win?" I said that of course, I didn't. He said that was the problem with the end. It was wishful thinking that goodness would triumph in the situation of the play. He was right. We want the good side, our side, victorious so badly that we delude ourselves to the point where our own experience and understanding of the state of the things is shoved aside in favor of that desire to see the heroes win. So I changed the ending.

This week, I finally gave in to the idea that the bad guys are not only winning, but that they have closed off the paths to being stopped. Let me be as clear as possible: I think that Republicans will win back the House in 2022 because of open racism and unchecked gerrymandering and restrictions on voting. I think that they will use the power of the purse to immediately shut down any investigations into or prosecutions of Donald Trump and those responsible for the January 6 coup attempt. I think that the 2024 presidential election will be stolen. I think that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade and other decisions that have made life fairer and healthier. I think that even if Democrats actually do the things we think will ameliorate some of the damage, that same Supreme Court will undo most of them. I think that we're fucked when it comes to climate change and this virus and the next.  I think that a civil war is now in the realm of possibility. I think that all of this is going to be so much worse for non-whites, for LGB and especially T Americans, and for women. And I think the only hopeful thing I can say is that we need to start thinking ahead on how to react to any or all of that happening. It's gonna take a fuck-ton of hard, hard work. 

I originally wrote that "it is far more likely than not" that those things would happen, rather than just saying what I truly believe because I don't want to give up on the hope of the prosecutorial unicorn jailing these traitorous motherfuckers or that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will finally say, "Fuck the filibuster" or that all the election fuckery will be overwhelmed by Democratic turnout or that Brett Kavanaugh will grow a soul.

But, if I'm being honest, I'd say that I know the bad guys will win. Oh, sure, sure, there have been moments when the good guys have scored, like on getting judges confirmed. There will be victories along the way for us, maybe even on voting rights. Yet that just feels like it's staving off the inevitable. I mean, the best-case scenario when it comes to elections, for instance, is that either the country is divided even further by right-wing lies about fraud and chicanery and that leads to violence. Or that Trump is actually prosecuted and that leads to violence. More likely, we'll just watch democracy swept away like so much dust on the floor, our civil rights wither, and the nation fall apart, not with a "boom," but a whimper. 

I want to be dead wrong about all of this. I want to look goddamned foolish in a year or two. That's the most optimistic thing I can offer right now. I can't shake it, though, this feeling that the bad guys outplayed us. They did it right. They turned language itself against the left, outright changing the meaning of words. They made the news media afraid to be honest while creating their own information ecosystem devoted to lies. They made misdirected hate into a virtue and incoherent rage at the Other into a sacrament while declaring that the problem is the hate directed against them. They pushed a mutant version of Christianity into the central organizing principle while unapologetically committing every sin repeatedly. And while we have ourselves to blame for a whole lot of the ways in which we've slouched towards Armageddon, I have to tip my non-existent hat to the right. 

Well-done, you moral lepers, you shit-spreading freaks, you savage monsters. Instead of trying to make it get well, you fucked the dying country hard until it's become a corpse and now you're fucking the corpse while telling everyone that it's alive and more beautiful than ever. You played the long game. You sowed the wind, but the whirlwind belongs to us all.

They Really Thought They Could Overturn the 2020 Election

In the lunatic Powerpoint that Donald Trump's former Chief of Staff and loyal cumrag Mark Meadows turned over to the committee investigating the January 6, 2021 coup attempt, there are two words that completely undo any assertion that there was any real fuckery in the election. Without those two words, these weak-minded, strong-arming fucktoads could have perhaps tried to say that they were more concerned with the integrity of the elections than anything else, that they were standing firm for America's democratic traditions and laws. But there was no way that they were going to be allowed to make the case without them because that's all it really was about and no one was gonna be fuckin' permitted to forget it.

The two words? "Trump wins." 

It's not that we all didn't know that the goal was to wipe away the legal election of Joe Biden in favor of another term lurching through shit with Donald fucking Trump. But the Powerpoint file makes clear: they wanted to do anything they could to install Trump, even if it tore the country apart. The short sentence "Trump wins," in all capital letters with two exclamation points after it, appears twice. It's a declaration of purpose and a call to arms against reality. 

When I saw that in the goddamned file, I couldn't help but wonder how this could have gone if they hadn't been so stupidly evil, if Trump's morbidly obese ego hadn't put his cheating his way to victory front and center. Would it have given cover to more Republicans to sign up to the Big Lie if they had played it as about election integrity as an end in and of itself? Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and begged for him to conjure out of thin air the exact number of votes for Trump to win the state. Instead, Trump could have merely said he was concerned about the vote there and wanted to assure that Biden's victory was real. 

That's how you do shit subversively. You put enough questions out there without the overarching narrative of overturning the election. You give enough cover for Republicans to fuck around with the actual vote count. You give Pence an excuse to slow things down. As another page in the Powerpoint put it in a list of possible actions by the Vice President, "VP Pence delays the decision in order to allow for a vetting and subsequent counting of the all the legal paper ballots." He might have done so if the goal was generic election legitimacy. 

I don't know if anything would have gone differently, but "Trump wins" is like walking up to a murder scene and saying, "Oh, I wanted him dead."

And that's the thing about the whole coup attempt (and we can stop being coy about this shit. Call a coup a "coup"): the people behind it weren't fucking around. They just smoked their own stash too much and believed that others in the various levels of government throughout the country would go along with the coup. Or they were riding Trump's mania like a surfboard, hoping they'd catch a sweet wave of Republican officials willing to shitcan democracy for the sake of the ego and potential criminal liability of a fake billionaire and wannabe Mussolini.

The rest of the plan of the gang that couldn't coup straight includes references to a "federalized National Guard" counting paper ballots and the Supreme Court affirming the suspension of the part of the Constitution dealing with the appointment of electors. In other words, Meadows and others believed they had corrupted the government enough that every branch, every area would do its bidding. Or, if not, they would fire, say, Attorney General William Barr and appoint someone who was even more of an anus-licking lackey. Hell, they were advising that Trump declare a "national security emergency" to secure all the ballots so that they might be recounted by their own people.

I'm betting that Trump and his inner circle of syphilitic whores were deranged enough to believe that they could just roll over local election officials, that they could intimidate a lowly voting-system implementation manager like Gabriel Sterling in Georgia, and that others, like Michigan legislators, would be dazzled by having a meeting with the actual Donald Trump, the orange godhead of the GOP. I'm betting they were counting on all that being enough to tilt the scales in their favor. 

And when it wasn't enough, well, fuck it. They went full insurrection as a last-ditch effort. 

I sincerely don't understand why anyone who in any way supports the Big Lie is allowed anywhere near a decent reporter or news show, let alone run for or stay in office. Who the fuck cares what Josh Hawley has to say about anything if he won't agree that 2020 was a fair election? If your neighbor likes to fuck weasels to death, you shouldn't care about his opinion on lawn maintenance. How could you even ask him? Every time you look at him, you wanna say, "Jesus, there must be ten jizz-covered weasel corpses in your backyard, Josh Hawley. You can keep your perspective on racism to yourself."

I believe that the January 6th committee is moving towards some kind of reckoning. But the longer it takes, the more that our Netflix-fucked attention spans shove the coup attempt back into the delusional recesses of the brain, where weird thoughts like "George W. Bush wasn't that bad" are born. What should be hammered again and again by Democrats is this message: they tried to take an election away. And if they didn't try to do it themselves, they are almost all helping cover up the fact that it happened and it's still happening. Maybe it's time to treat the fucking criminals like the fucking criminals they are.

"Trump wins" needs to stay in the realm of the masturbatory fantasies of the soon-to-be-imprisoned.

The Conservatives on the Supreme Court Want to Punish Women

If things go as awfully as they very well may in 2024, we might end up with a Republican president and Congress. Surely, this will be the result of multiple levels of GOP fuckery, from gerrymandered districts to restricted voting rights to outright refusing to accept slates of electors from states that voted for the Democrat for president. This is not idle doom prophesying. It's legitimately the plan of Republicans in order to force the majority of the country to live under its heavy, corrupt, and very white and male hand. 

If that happens, I fucking promise you that one of the first orders of business will be shitcanning the filibuster in the Senate in order to ban abortion nationwide, which will be the next order of business. I would bet that abortion and the GOP's fetus fetish will be given as the imperative for the aforementioned shitcanning. And then that's it. The extremist right-wing Supreme Court would uphold the law. The Court has long wanted abortion rights to be codified by Congress. A barking mad conservative court would be hooting in pleasure to send the nation back 50 years, you know, when America was great or some such shit.

Yesterday's Supreme Court hearing in the case of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, about the Mississippi law that cuts off abortion rights at 15 weeks, was a ghoulish display of mock sensitivity to the lives of women and the potential lives of fetuses by the conservative majority. It was a display of sadness and frustration by the three liberal justices, who were almost mourning the future they know is coming.

I mean, look at this shit. Justice Rapey McLikesbeer actually said to Mississippi's counsel, "So if you were to prevail, the majority of states or states still could and presumably would continue to freely allow abortion, many states, some states would be able to do that, even if you prevail under your view. Is that correct?" Except that nearly half the states already have laws on the books ready to ban abortion if Roe is overturned and those states contain at least half the population of the country. So, yeah, the majority of  Americans would not "freely" have access to abortion.

The justice who seems most likely to jack it to snuff films, Samuel Alito, showed how little he gives a shit about women, at one point stating, "The fetus has an interest in having a life." No, motherfucker. The fetus has no interest in anything. It's a fucking fetus. Alito kept pressing Julie Rikelman of the Center for Reproductive Rights, who represented the Jackson Women's Health Organization, on abortions past the point of viability, which is generally towards the end of the second trimester. He asked, "Upon reaching the point of viability, does not the woman have the same interest that she had before viability in being free of this pregnancy, that she no longer wants to continue?" He wanted Rikelman to admit that the viability line was ever-shifting and that religious concerns weren't guiding the religious nuts like Alito who wanna force 12 year-olds to give birth to that rape baby. 

Justice Amy Coney Superspreader appeared to believe that carrying a pregnancy to term, giving birth, and then giving the baby up for adoption (through "safe haven" laws that allow that) is no big deal. She said to Rikelman, "In so far as you...focus on the ways in which the forced parenting, forced motherhood would hinder women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, it’s also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?" 

Rikelman must have had to fight to hide a "What the fucking fuck?" face as she responded to Justice Superspreader, shredding Mississippi's cruel indifference to pregnant women: "Pregnancy itself is unique. It imposes unique, physical demands and risk on women, and in fact has impact on all of their lives and their ability to care for other children, other family members, on their ability to work. And in particular, in Mississippi, those risks are alarmingly high. It’s 75 times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi than it is to have a pre-viability abortion. And those risks are disproportionately threatening the lives of women of color."

In other words, equal protection under the law, motherfuckers.

That point seems to have eluded Justice Likesbeer. Like the little bitch that he is, Likesbeer kept pretending that he was protecting the integrity of the Supreme Court, which was already undermined by having Likesbeer on it. He bitched, "Why should this court be the arbiter rather than Congress, the state legislatures, state Supreme courts, the people being able to resolve this. And there’ll be different answers in Mississippi and New York, different answers in Alabama than California, because there are two different interests at stake. And the people in those states might value those interests somewhat differently. Why is that not the right answer?" 

Essentially, Likesbeer is saying that it's okay to force women to have children they don't want in one state because "interests" while they don't have to in another. That's utter bullshit, and Rikelman pretty much said that: "It’s not the right answer because the Court correctly recognized that this is a fundamental right of women. And the nature of fundamental rights is that it’s not left up to state legislatures to decide whether to honor them or not. And it’s true different rules would prevail throughout the country if this court were to overrule Roe and Casey. But what that would mean is that women in those states who are refusing to honor their rights and who are forcing them to use their bodies to sustain a pregnancy, and then to bring a child into the world will have no recourse other than to travel, if they’re able to afford it, or to attempt abortion outside the confines of the medical system, or to have a child, even though that was not the best choice for them and their family." It's as good a comprehensive "shut the fuck up, person who can't give birth, just shut the fuck up" as I've heard.

The liberals really were flailing about at times. Justice Stephen Breyer tried to appeal to the principle of stare decisis, that decisions with long standing are established law. But Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Alito all made strong statements at their confirmations about honoring stare decisis, and now, especially Alito and Kavanaugh couldn't give a fuck about it. Breyer also attempted to bridge gaps between what was being litigated, the Mississippi law, and Roe v. Wade, and he just seemed out of step with the passions involved here.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was more effective, slamming Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who clerked for Clarence Thomas and was a deputy attorney general for Donald Trump, so, basically, a vile shit-slinger. Stewart brought up the "fetal pain" idea as a reason to change ideas about the viability of a fetus. Sotomayor was having none of that noise: "A gross minority of doctors who believe fetal pain exists before 24, 25 weeks is a huge minority, and one not well-founded in science at all. So, I don’t see how that really adds anything to the discussion." Then she further reamed him out: "Virtually every state defines a brain death as death. Yet, the literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain-dead, responding to stimuli. There’s about 40% of dead people who, if you touch their feet, the foot will recoil. There are spontaneous acts by dead brain people. So, I don’t think that a response by a fetus, necessarily proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness." As she usually is, Sotomayor was great, bringing up the shitty state of medical care for working class pregnant women in Mississippi, as well as telling Webster to shove his idea of when life begins up his bright white ass.

This was one of those hearings where you don't have to read the tea leaves because an air horn was blaring. The best possible outcome here is that Chief Justice John Roberts, who legit seemed queasy at the idea of completely overturning Roe being part of his legacy, convinces four of the other five dickhole conservatives to go along with his narrow decision to support the Mississippi 15-week ban and leave Roe in place, reamed out and wheezing in pain, but still there. But the other five ranged from Thomas and Alito fondling themselves under their robes as they contemplated punishing women to others bullshitting their justification for overturning Roe, all hiding a freakish, extreme Christian agenda that they were put on the court to enforce. 

The clock will turn back for women in this country, and it won't be that way for women of means like Amy Coney Barrett. The fallout from overturning Roe will be bloody and brutal and played out on the bodies of women and girls, with conservatives toasting each other for their protection of fetuses while they stand on the corpses. Then they'll move on to banning it altogether because fuck all of us.