Haiku Review of 2022: The Worst Person in the World

So we've done it again. As we have since 2004 in this rude piece of internet real estate, we've brought another year filled with the fantastic and the fucked to a fluttering close with our in-yer-face versions of lovely little haikus. Here's the last batch of them before we get the hell out of 2022 and welcome 2023, breath bated, loins girded, screams locked and loaded.

From Don J. in London, Ontario

Orange is the new Trump

The new Trump is the old Trump

Mar-a-Lago’s blue.

From Marcia in Massachusetts

Abortions happen

In shotgun shacks or back rooms

When choice is struck down

From Jeff in Alameda, CA

Kissing Putin’s ass

Stealing money right and left

I mean, fuck that guy

From Trans Dykes on Bikes for Christ, Emerald Triangle, CA

Plural pronouns thou

shalt not use for singular

We are not amused

From Plant Daddy in Portland, OR

Please die on your anti-vaxx hill

No MAGA asshole

Stay out of the woodchipper

I’ll be so triggered

From RG in Illinois

Knock Knock Knockin'...

"And you're here because...?

You do know I was brown, right?"

Said real Jesus.

And two more from me:

Drag Queens Aren't the Problem

Grooming is giving

Your child a gun and saying,

"Always shoot first, son."

It's Really Not So Difficult

"They" are we. We? Them.

Respect and love mean far more

Than abiding fools.

Much thanks to everyone who submitted. I mean, holy shit, I read a ton of haikus the last few days, with much amusement and even more delight and a touch of depression at what we've gone through this year. If I didn't choose yours, I'm still grateful I got the chance to check it out.

Now, fuck off, 2022. We're done with you. And, c'mon, 2023. Let's fuck shit up.

(Yeah, I know technically the film up top came out in 2021, but it didn't hit the US until this year, and it's terrific.)

Haiku Review of 2022: Speak No Evil

The haikus just keep pouring in. Everyone wants to get in their last digs at this fucked year, which comes on the heels of another fucked year, and another. We can't keep up with the fuckery. But you sure are in your entries, which are getting progressively nastier and darker. Here are a few more of my favorites.

From TallTrees in WA

Covid and traitors

What a fucked dance card that is

With no end in sight

From VJ in NJ

Lizzo's crystal flute

How many angry racists

Wished it was their dicks

From TMangrove in Wisconsin

Conservatives shout

"We are being silenced!" from

Thousands of platforms.

From Tim H.

Florida omen,

As Desantis fluffs the mob

Trump looks for his cock

From Craig K.

Solemn Remembrance 

We miss Rush Limbaugh

Passings forge gaps in our souls

He ate shit and died

From DJL

National Mood

2022

In like Ted Lasso, but out

Like Wednesday Addams

From Dick Fritter in Crazy AZ

A Hole in One

Dig up her grave now

Ivana, we hardly knew

you were stolen docs

And I'll end with a really great reacharound:

From Liz in Salt Lake

If I could not wake

to words from the rude pundit,

I would go insane.

Keep 'em coming. I still have a handful to go through for tomorrow's climactic post and then we can kick this year in the ass on the way out.  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. 

(The title up there comes from the film that disturbed me more than any other this year. Don't watch it. It's great. Don't watch it.)

Haiku Review of 2022: Barbarian Prey

Once more, I have called upon you to send me haikus. And, once more, you have bestowed upon me a fuck-ton of haikus. It's like the haiku truck backed up to my email and dumped a pile of lovely and cruel words, angry and hilarious lines, all for my choosing. So here's the first batch of little poems after going through just one day of the dozens and dozens of submissions coming from sea to shining motherfuckin' sea in this decadent land. 

From Heather in Sun City

The red wave turned blue,

Their real red still spraying from

Bullets, more bullets.

From Steve

new mass extinction

the planet is not dying

humanity is

From MK in Tampa

Two Garbage Governors

Abbott, DeSantis:

Evil legitimized by

Their re-election.

From Anonymous in California

Putin’s enemies,

Suffer Tall Building Syndrome,

Fall and die a lot.

From Doug S. in Denver

Fetterman won it;

Oz can go back to Jersey,

Selling snake oil

From Rabbitearz in Los Angeles

Horny Target Lady

Dildos on aisle 6.

Rep Greene goes to check-out line

We have more of these?

And lastly for today, one that made me actually laugh...out loud.

From Esther in Hawaii

2022 the Mood

Optimism lost

I learned that sea otters are

Necrophiliacs

It's just the the first 24 hours of haiku. So keep your hopes alive if you've sent them in. More tomorrow and Friday. 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. 

(The title up there is two of my favorite horror flicks from the year. They are actually surprising, exciting, and twisted.)

Haiku Review of 2022: Everything Everywhere All at Once

This fuckin' year, man. Even as shit's not really that bad, shit just feels like it's spiraling down into the toilet of our abyssal politics. You can't turn around without some jagoff screeching about "wokeism" or "groomers" or whatever nonsense word or phrase they've come up with to mean "People who make me mad for completely irrational reasons that I probably got from some stupid video." And every single time we allow ourselves to be even slightly giddy heading down Hope Street, we know that around every corner is Despair, and that motherfucker's carrying a machete. 

We approach 2023 with the prospect that Donald Trump will finally be rooted out from the Republican Party, yet we know that the disease that he unleashed on our nation will not be cured and, in fact, its symptoms will be fostered by the craven DeSantises and Greenes and Noems. We are thrilled that Democrats held the Senate, even expanding their majority, but we know that, come January, the Republican-led House is gonna be a batshit hootenanny of conspiracy theories and vengeance. And Covid is still here and still murdering people, as I know personally. Machete after machete. Dodge one and there's another about to come at your face.

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 poop, except for that one kid who took it seriously and wrote something so beautiful that the teacher brought it home to show her family and prove to them that it was possible for children now to connect with the ethereal and allow the muse to flow through them and 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 2022 to "rudepundit(at)yahoo(dot)com." I'm the only judge and jury here, and I am generally fickle, cranky, drunk, high, and yelling at birds.

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 "Elon Musk's Blood Emerald from Balltorture, AL" or "Alisha from San Francisco" or something.

Here's a few to inspire you:

The End of the Committee

A report's only

As good as the indictments

That come after it

Relax

One day, cold, alone,

Tucker Carlson will die, too.

That's it. That's the poem.

Climate Changed

No god is needed. 

We have all the floods and fires

We create ourselves.

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

(Note: Yeah, the title up there was one of my favorite flicks of the year.)

The Rude Pundit's Annual Nativity-palooza, Now Including Wooden Blocks and More Skeletons

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 unironic):

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?

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.

All of those are preferable to this fucking thing here. This might be the first of these nativities to make me feel visceral anger. Check this shit out:

It's like someone was taking a crap in an IKEA bathroom and thought, "I've got it! The birth of our lord and savior, but stackable!" Imagine the fun you could have with these. I'm already thinking about arranging the Wise Men around Ass for a sticky menage. Mostly, though, this is just middle finger to your guests if you put this out, like you're saying, "Oh, you expect a nativity at Christmas? Suck on these posts."

Wooden blocks not your thing? Want something that's a bit more of a weapon so you can strike down the heathens who won't let you say, "Merry Christmas"? Maybe a little more Flintstone-ish? Then here's some fuckin' rocks. 

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.)

Hurrah for the January 6 Committee Report, But It's Not Enough

I dunno. It's kind of a feeling, you know? Just a sense that everything is kind of shitty, even when it objectively isn't. It's really more of a zeitgeist sort of thing, that what's in the air is a sense of impending doom. Maybe not doom. Maybe impending malaise, like everything is going to stagnate. Or maybe, yeah, doom, if you're thinking in other ways. Like I said, I dunno, but I guess I should try to explain.

Perhaps the most obvious way of conveying what I feel is through the quick fall of Twitter. For many, many, many of us, Twitter was our virtual street corner of choice. No, we didn't always feel safe, but we carved out a place where, for a lot of us, it worked. We could talk to large numbers of people at once. We could occasionally meet cool strangers and even interact with those we admire or despise. Honestly, I know of no other opportunity I would have ever had to converse with David Simon, get attacked by a former speechwriter for a president, and be able to trade ideas with Washington Post and New York Times writers. But since Elon musked up the joint, it just feels like a shit bar, like a place you used to go but now assholes have taken over and they've changed the jukebox from cool shit to bro tunes (Goddamnit, you don't have to play "Mr. Brightside" for the tenth fuckin' time). For a lot of us on the left, Elon Musk's Twitter is not just an unfriendly place, like someone took the bodega on our corner and turned it into a gun shop, but it's made us be more paranoid about what we say and who we interact with. For me, I'm more likely to block some whiny tittybaby right-winger if I think they might report me for calling Tucker Carlson "a cum-gobbling little bitch" (which he is). I mean, what about my freedom of speech?

But the real reason I think that feeling's hanging over us is the lack of prosecutions of leaders for the January 6 insurrection or, really, when it comes to Trump, for anything. The agonizingly slow pace of the investigations by the Justice Department, the Attorney General of Georgia, and even the just-concluded 1/6 Committee has been frustrating, despite some on the left telling us to be patient, that justice and Justice, however delayed, are coming, in almost the same tone that assured us the Mueller Report would do Trump in finally and forever . Yeah, the final report of the January 6 Committee is a compelling summation of the treachery and fuckery done by a fascist farrago of white supremacists, Trumpenistas, and Republican politicians. Yes, the committee collected a pile of witness testimony that ought to add up to...something. 

And yet it's not enough. The only elected official directly called out for criminal referral is Trump (along with skeevy lawyer John Eastman). Other Republicans were referred to the House Ethics Committee for what will almost certainly be, at best, a finger wave and a wink. I mean, there are at least a dozen people committing obstruction of justice during the investigation mentioned in the report, let alone what they did up to and on January 6, 2020, including Kayleigh McEnany, Ivanka Trump, and Mark Meadows. Jesus fuck, how could you not suggest that Cassidy Hutchinson's attorney, Stefan Passantino, be strung up by his balls for telling Hutchinson to lie to the committee. That's the top ethics lawyer for the White House advising a White House aide to commit perjury. 

As for me, I still can't fucking get my head around the fact that Trump wasn't arrested as soon as the phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was revealed. That shit isn't vague. It's not open for interpretation. It's an attempted criminal conspiracy by the President of the United States. (And, honestly, I have more hope that the Georgia case will have actual consequences for Trump than just about any other political one.)

I get it. I fucking get it that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress have accomplished a legitimately impressive legislative record, despite the savagely conservative Supreme Court and the bullshit of the filibuster in the Senate. I understand that there is much to appreciate, celebrate, even, on that account, along with the success in getting judges confirmed and more. But, goddamnit, I can't get over this dark cloud, this sense that the motherfuckers are gonna get away with it. For some, it's enough that the revelations of the 1/6 Committee ensure a permanent historical stain on the Trump presidency and the Republican Party, but no one gives a damn about that because it doesn't change a thing.

We need to know that some shit we believe in matters. We need to know that laws matter. We need to know that the legal system is capable of punishing people who wanted to torch democracy, who still want to do it. We need to know that something is fucking sacred. We just need to know that it's worth it to fucking care. Shit has to have meaning. We can't keep "moving on" when our leaders do something awful. We saw what that accomplished when President Obama implored us to move on from the vast crimes of the Bush Administration. Now, Bush is seen as some revered elder, not that fuckclown who wrecked two nations and degraded the country in the world and should have been in cuffs at the Hague. No, no, no. Not again. We can't let the compromising bastards tell us to suck it up for the good of the country. It's not for the good of the country. It's for the good of those telling us to suck it up. Fucking hell, we just need to know that some shit we believe in matters.

So, yeah, sincerely, great work, January 6 Committee, even though I'm convinced that a fuck-ton was compromised to satisfy Liz Cheney, a genuinely evil person in every other way. Despite that, we have a record in one place of a bunch of stuff we mostly knew or understood or believed about the events of the insurrection. But it's good to see it laid out so clearly. 

Now we need the indictments. We need the prosecutions. Like I said yesterday, sometimes we have to be who we say we are. 

It might not be all that's needed to get rid of this feeling that the joint's gone to shit. I mean, I haven't brought up all the other stresses around us, including the fact that we still are in a pandemic and we still haven't figured out what that means, not to mention that the kids in America are not doing okay, and, really, neither are the adults, and that's not to mention the constant barrage of horrors from right-wing media that is inescapable in this stupid media environment. No, prosecuting and imprisoning Donald Trump won't solve everything. But it sure would show that you can't try to tear the place down and get away with it. And, goddamn, that's something.

Zelensky Challenges Us to Live Up to Our American Hype

By the time Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky finished his rather stunning speech to Congress yesterday, the Putin-humped conservatives had lost their tiny goddamn minds. There were the weirdo complaints that Zelensky, who flew in from a real, active war zone, didn't wear a suit, but instead wore the outfit he has been wearing in unity with his soldiers, as if it mattered one bit and as if the exact same people would have criticized him equally as childishly if he had worn a suit (as in "Oh, I thought he was at war. Why is he so dressed up?" And, c'mon, you know that's what these scumfucks would have done). The rest was like pure Russian propaganda coming out of American mouths and keyboards: bitching about the amount the United States has given Ukraine, bitching about... 

You know what? It doesn't matter. These are poisonous motherfuckers. I was gonna quote Tucker Carlson mouth-shitting something utterly appalling, but fuck him.

Here's the thing: I've been watching the United States fund bullshit fascists and totalitarians my entire fucking life. In Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East, this country has provided arms and money to the worst goddamn people and the most worthless causes. We've funded mercenaries and weapons manufacturers. We've funded crazed terrorists by calling them "insurgents" and funded evil militaries crushing freedom-fighting insurgents. God, the madness this nation has helped unleash on other nations.  I've watched Democratic and Republican presidents justify all of this under some vague and incoherent notion of "national security" or whatever other serious-sounding nonsense they want to use to coerce us into buying into savagery. And I heard nary a peep from conservatives about virtually any of it. But now with Ukraine they decided to take a stand? Go fuck yourselves bloody.

What Zelensky did was say to us, to we who live in this goddamned ludicrously powerful country in this goddamned ludicrously debased age, that we're supposed to represent some fucking ideals to the rest of the world. "American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom, the freedom of people who stand for their values," he said, linking Ukrainian hopes to freedom to our own American belief in that nebulous idea of "freedom." And he invoked the military history of the United States, with his references to the Battle of the Bulge and FDR and the Battle of Saratoga, fer chrissake, demonstrating that he knows American history better than most Americans and that he wants us to believe in the myths we tell ourselves. Look, Zelensky said, your mythology is based on real shit that happened, real battles with real lives and real consequences. Now we have this battle against this enemy. The consequences for failure would be genocide and expanded aggression by the lunatic Putin. For the US to walk away would be shameful. It would make us an accessory to mass murder, even more than we usually are.

"Let’s do it. Let the terrorist state be held responsible for its terror and aggression and compensate all losses done by this war," Zelensky said about Russia, and then he pronounced, "Let the world see that the United States are here." 

That's why the conservatives who dangle from Putin's taint hair went crazy. It's because they say constantly that the United States is the greatest country in the history of everything. They say all the time that we are something special. And we're saying, and Zelensky is imploring, that we fucking well act like it once in a while. Sometimes even a superpower has to put the fuck up or shut the fuck up.

In 2022, Republicans Tried to Fuck Everyone But Ended Up Fucking Themselves

The end of an election cycle leaves us with myriad questions: Who got fucked? Who did the fucking? Who fucked up? My favorite question is one that can be agonizing if you're asking it about your own side, but it's delicious when you're asking it about your opponents. "Who fucked themselves?" implies that a strategy not only failed; it worked to actively harm the strategizers. An even better version of this is when the strategy involves fuckers working intensely to fuck others but ending up fucking the fuckers. 

And the GOP in 2022 fucked themselves hard. Oh, sure, they thought they were putting on a strap-on and humping away at voting rights and faith in the electoral process while forcing even more insane candidates, more Greenes and Gaetzes and Gosars (the three Gs of the asinine apocalypse), on their voters. But the way the election turned out, even with regaining the House (barely), it sure as hell looks like they put that strap-on on backwards and fucked their own asses, which is all well and good if you want your ass reamed, but not so pleasant if you weren't expecting or desiring anal penetration.

Starting after the 2020 election (and, really, before), Republicans waged war on voting in the United States. In their mad and/or willfully misleading belief, the election process in states where Republicans and/or Trump alone lost was fraudulent and/or fundamentally broken. It's not true. It simply isn't. But that part doesn't faze the anti-voting right. So you've got Trump and his denialists out there saying that early and mail-in voting are corrupt (except in states they like and when they do it) and that election workers are committing felonies while counting the votes (and thus your vote doesn't even matter). Over on Truth Toilet, Trump turded, "You can never have fair & free elections with mail-in ballots--never, never, never. Won't and can't happen!!!" (all exclamation points quoted, all caps not because it's just obnoxious and idiotic-looking). 

Meanwhile you've got Republican-led states, where 2020 voting went perfectly fine, doing shit like adding restrictions to or curtailing mail-in and early voting or just insidious nonsense like limiting the number of ballot drop boxes. In Georgia, for instance, the new voting laws allow for only one drop box per 100,000 people. That's fucking cruel in metro areas. It also compels rural counties to have at least one drop box, so that makes life easier on them. And that's on top of the ongoing fuckery where there aren't enough polling places on the almighty election day for people in, say, majority Black districts.

All of this was a calculated effort to fuck Democrats on voting. Except it didn't. In fact, what happened that made Republicans fuck themselves had a couple of threads. The anti-voting messaging made Republican voters avoid early voting and mail-in ballots. Shit, it worked so well that some Republicans didn't vote because they thought it didn't matter or that Trump and his minions would just be installed by Supreme Court magic.

The lack of Republicans voting early or by mail is now a full-on crisis for the GOP, so much so that even Trump's tightly-suctioned ass remora, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, said, "Our voters need to vote early. There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote early.’ And we have to stop that." She said that on Fox "news," which has flogged the vote-by-mail conspiracy bullshit of 2000 Mules and the like. Other putative Trumpinistas, like Murdoch Nazi android Laura Ingraham, said that "everyone said, ‘Don’t vote early, it’s corrupt.'" Wonder where "everyone" got the microphone to do that? Fox "news" is filled with aching assholes from all the self-fucking.

The other thread is that even though Republican candidates got more votes than Democratic ones overall, Republicans couldn't convert that into bigger wins. The percentage difference should have given Republicans a 20-30 seat lead in the House and at least a tie in the Senate. Nope. Republican candidates ran up the numbers in some places, especially where there was no real Democratic opposition. But the slate of Trump-endorsed fucking insane candidates damaged the rotten Republican brand. Fucking Dr. Oz? Kari Lake? QAnon nutzoid J.R. Majewski? Democrats may have intentionally raised the profile of some of these unelectable lunatics, but Republicans voted for them in the primaries. In the general, independents said, "Yeah, fuck that" and even some Republicans couldn't hold their noses and vote for Herschel Walker, for fuck's sake.

So, yeah, it's kind of hilarious to see how fucked the GOP is after fucking itself. It used to be that Democrats were the ones who were shit at messaging and shit at getting out the vote. But at least Democrats never stopped believing that you should be able to vote easily and took advantage of opportunities to do so. 

Sure, sure, Republicans can still fuck us with their control of the House, but even some Republicans foresee Republicans staying away from crazy Republican candidates or early voting for the next few cycles. You can't unfuck yourself after you've fucked yourself. And if you don't figure out why you fucked yourself (as in "Oh, the strap-on goes on that way"), you'll just keep doing it.

A Thanksgiving Poem from Indigenous America

"Indian Mascot, 1959"

by Janice Gould, who was a member of the Concow tribe

Now begins the festival and rivalry of late fall,

the weird debauch and daring debacle

of frat-boy parties as students parade foggy streets in mock

processions, bearing on shoulders scrawny effigies of dead,

defeated Indians cut from trees, where,

in the twilight, they had earlier been hung.

 

"Just dummies," laughs our dad, "Red Indians hung

or burned—it's only in jest." Every fall

brings the Big Game against Stanford, where

young scholars let off steam before the debacle

they may face of failed exams. "You're dead

wrong," he says to Mom. "They don't mock

 

real, live Indians." Around UC campus, mock

lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung

the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead

from the merrymaking. On Bancroft Way, one has fallen

indecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle

that happened three generations ago in California's hills, where

 

Native peoples were strung up. (A way of having fun? Where

did they go, those Indian ghosts?) "Their kids perform mock

war dances, whooping, re-enacting scenes of a debacle

white folks let loose," chides Mom. "Meanwhile we hang

portraits of presidents on school walls and never let fall

the old red, white, and blue. My dear brother is dead

 

because he fought in a White man's war. How many dead

Indians do they need to feel okay? This whole thing wears

on my soul." In the dark car we go silent, and the fall

night gets chillier. In yards, blazing bonfires mock

the stars that glow palely somewhere above. A thin moon hangs

over the tule fogs. I've never heard the word "debacle”

 

before and wonder what it means. "What's a debacle,

Mom? " I ask. "Oh, honey, it's a terrible and deadly

collapse. Complete ruin." I've noticed how the hung

Indians have their heads slumped forward. They wear

old clothes, headbands with feathers, face paint, moc-

casins instead of boots. Little do we know, this fall,

 

living Indians at Feather Falls

leave tobacco to mark that, indeed,

we're still here, lungs full of indigenous air.

The Republican House Is Gonna Be Filled with Insanity and Fuckery

In the wake of Republicans winning the House of Representatives, even by a narrow margin, we got a preview this week of how much we're damned to hear about every detail of the business dealings and, no doubt, personal life of Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden. Conservatively, it'll be "a metric fuckton." More likely, it will be "Benghazi times Hillary's emails to the 10th degree." To the gibbering madpeople and the skeevy fucks who lie to them, Hunter Biden and his Laptop of Mystery is the goddamn Rosetta Stone of bringing down the president. Or at least making him embarrassed. It's a completely worthless, utterly bullshit subject, especially in the wake of the GOP overlooking decades of criminality by Donald Trump (who really was the president, a fact that dry humps my brain every day) and his shitty children. And it will be everywhere.

On the BBC Newshour this week, porcine drink-spiker and delinquent child support payer Jason Miller, who is also an "adviser" to Trump, was asked a reasonable question: Why doesn't Trump just say that he lost in 2020 and now he's back to win? Miller's response was, no shit, "Shouldn't Joe Biden come out and say his family had shady Chinese business dealings and maybe also that Hunter shouldn't have been on the board of Burisma?" That's not an answer to the question, which he was asked three times. You wanna compare the business ethics and financial shenanigans of Trump and Biden? Then let's go.

By the way, Republicans had control of the House of Representatives in 2017 and 2018. If you'll remember, we got zero investigations into Hunter Biden. You could argue that Joe wasn't running for president then so the country didn't have to worry about any allegedly shady shit, but you could also argue that it's odd that no one gave a damn about Hunter until Joe announced to run if he was such a nexus of corruption and depravity. Besides, the Senate did do an investigation into Hunter in 2020 and found not a goddamn thing more than "Well, he probably shouldn't have done a couple of things because they look a little hinky." That's it. A Republican-led Homeland Security Committee, chaired by fucking loon Ron Johnson, said Hunter and Joe Biden didn't do anything illegal, and they were trying to make that case. Of course, the Laptop of Mystery appeared after the report from the committee came out, so that's another secret sauce of conspiracy on top of the nutzoid sundae.

It's all Hunter, man. In a pissy little Republican press conference this week, Rep. James Comer, an election denier with his head so far up Trump's ass that he uses Trump's dick as a periscope, and Rep. Jim Jordan, who is Jim Jordan, for fuck's sake, announced that they will be probing Hunter Biden like an Ohio State wrestling coach probes the assholes of his athletes and Jim Jordan will probably ignore the truth here, too. Look at this shit: "We're going to provide you all with something you're not used with respect to congressional investigations, and that's evidence," Comer said in his slick as snakeskin Kentucky con artist voice before talking about how "experts" have "reviewed Hunter Biden's laptop" to discover how "the Biden family swindled" people of hundreds of thousands of dollars and used "influence peddling" with China and Russia to make money. In other words, money laundering. And, first off, "hundreds of thousands of dollars," motherfuckers? That's chump change. No one at Biden's level is risking everything for that pittance. But they'll keep saying, "China" because it sounds evil, and they'll keep saying, "Russia" because it makes it seem like Trump is exonerated from his money laundering.

Republicans say they're using Hunter as a way of getting to Joe.  "The president's participation in enriching his family is, in a word, abuse of the highest order," Comer asserted, and they will dig into everything Hunter to prove it. But Democrats didn't have hearings about Ivanka, Eric, or noted cocaine vlogger Don, Jr., and they fucking well worked for their father. Shit, Ivanka and her creepy wraith husband Jared worked in the fucking White House, and Jared couldn't wait to bob on sweaty Saudi knob once he was free of the mild burden of his "duties" for the federal government.

On top of this, trashcan troll doll and de facto Speaker Marjorie Taylor Greene is promising to try to use an obscure procedure to cut funding for any investigations into Trump, and I guarantee that the crazy caucus will attempt to shut down the government to stop any indictments. We've got Fauci hearings, immigrant caravan hearings, and "abuse" of January 6 terrorist hearings coming. Kevin McCarthy or whoever is cursed to be the real Speaker of the House is gonna need Democrats to get any shit done, and that's fuckin' hilarious. Meanwhile, House committees are gonna take anything said on right-wing propaganda bullshit networks as truth and use their subpoena power to fuck up lives and find absolutely fucking nothing. I look forward to the hearing on Hillary Clinton drinking baby blood. 

It's laughable that some in the media and even in Congress think that the narrowness of the GOP's margin in the House would take some of the bugfuck wind out of their lunatic sails. Fuckin' please. It's like saying that Merrick Garland appointing a special counsel to take on the investigation of Trump would show it's not political. By the time he finished that statement, Republicans were screaming about how political it is, including Trump. Haven't we fucking learned that nothing chastens Republicans? Nothing teaches them any goddamn lessons? Not winning. Not losing. Nothing. 

The only upside is that, for two elections now, Republicans have run, at least in part, on Hunter Biden, and it hasn't done shit for them. Fuckin' let people see what they do when they have power. Maybe a few more will understand that it's only a show for these shitheels. It's life and death for the rest of us.

Blaming Trump Lets Republicans Off the Hook (and Other Observations on a Pretty Good Election)

(Started writing this early in the week, but because Covid is still a thing, I've been back in Louisiana with to see a sick, hospitalized family member. Things are looking good now, but it was dicey. Get vaccinated. Wear masks. Do the shit you need to do.)

In the wake of Republicans having their raging red wave erections slapped flaccid by the firm, stinging hand of reality in the 2022 midterm elections, blame for this epic cock block has seemed to come to rest on one major cause: Donald Trump, who really was once president of the United States (something that still boggles my mind every goddamn day) and is still, to some, the de facto leader of the Republican Party. "A red wave of criticism crashes into Donald Trump after midterm losses," says the Washington Post, quoting current Republicans about how Trump's endorsements and his general Donald Trumpishness didn't help. The Guardian goes with "Republicans have someone to blame for their disappointing result: Donald Trump." And Fox Business quotes former Trump adviser Mercedes Schlapp, which is the name of a real adult human and not an SNL character or terrible branding exercise, saying that Republicans were being too hasty to blame Trump.

The problem, of course, is that blaming Trump is some cheap-ass bullshit. Oh, sure, Donald Trump always has and always will suck the hair off donkey balls if he thinks it can get him some attention and devotion (and cash).  His ego is a black hole of need, and those who venture to the event horizon are almost always remorselessly sucked in and sucked dry. But Trump didn't force any of the candidates to buff his dickhead to a bright orange sheen. They all had a chance to bail on him after the January 6 insurrection, but they didn't. They fucking went along with whatever lies he wanted to tell. They went along for the ride, like the ass remoras they are, nourishing their ambitions from his free-floating verbal detritus. Republicans are to blame for Republicans fucking up the midterms.

There are exceptions for the GOP, of course. Down in Florida, for instance, scaly sweat worm Marco Rubio easily defeated the genuinely noble Val Demings. And, yeah, completely shitty Gov. Ron DeSantis, who acts more or less like the abusive manager of a telemarketing scam company, trounced Democrat Charlie Crist, who should just stop. Some of the best advice I heard came from a pal at a Major Financial Institution who was told that it's time to give up on Florida, that people are moving there for low taxes and "freedom" to dick over others and they control the joint now. There were other GOP victories, like Sen. Ron Johnson not losing in Wisconsin when he fucking well should have. And the less said about how New York fucked up redistricting, the better.

But, holy shit, the tradeoff is that Michigan and Pennsylvania have come back from the dark side of the moon. Imagine how well John Fetterman would have done had he not had a stroke in May and been the subject of a pathetic, shameful attack on his health. And we Democrats will almost surely have won the Senate in the next couple of day when incumbent Catherine Cortez Mastro pulls ahead in Nevada, which I think will lead to an easy Warnock win in the runoff in Georgia's Senate race because why hate yourself so much that you vote for Hershel Walker if control of the Senate isn't in the balance? And, perhaps most importantly to the future of democracy in the country and, frankly, the outcome that has actually given me hope that we can pull back from the brink of fucked-beyond-fucked, all the nutzoid, election-denying, barking mad candidates up for Secretary of State in swing states, officials who could have shit on election results they didn't like, they fuckin' lost. It was like the United States said, almost as a whole, "Oh, fuck off. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Deal with it."

Sure, Republicans will almost surely end up with the House, but with a slim majority where the even semi-rational members understand that voters were saying, "Stop with your bullshit! We don't give a fuck about Hunter Biden! We support abortion rights!" Except there are the complete fucking loons who want to whole-hog impeach Joe Biden for unknown things, arrest Dr. Anthony Fauci for not being an antivaxxer, and have anal probe hearings on how the FBI has harassed poor, innocent Donald Trump. And those cockscabs will shut down the government to gut Social Security or end Obamacare or, as I've been saying, to stop any prosecution of Trump or January 6 traitors. They might even cause the collapse of the world economy if Democrats don't shitcan the debt ceiling in the lame duck session. So, truly, fuckery will likely occur. Or, perhaps, we're about to see "GOP in disarray" stories as poor bastard Kevin McCarthy tries to corral a bunch of feral, rabid weasels. Goddamn, it's gonna be fun to watch them bite his ass over and over. Gonna be even more fun when he realizes he needs to make deals with Democrats to get shit done.

There are many things you can say about the 2022 election. It didn't suck nearly as much as it could have, and there's still a chance for it not to suck much at all. Joe Biden wasn't a drag on the Democratic Party. The nation rejected crazy, but gerrymandering works wonders. Without it, Republicans wouldn't have a prayer at getting the House of Representatives. It's hilarious watching pollsters and pundits get their asses handed to them with results that defy almost all of their expectations. It's doubly hilarious to watch the tough GOP operatives and politicians scamper away from real confrontation over the election results, like the fucking cowards they always were. Mostly, though, it's like the American people just said, "Enough already," and, yeah, that did mean "Enough with Donald Trump" (although I'd caution that we thought that would happen after January 6 and it didn't), but it also meant "Enough with all of you monstrous assholes who don't give a shit about governing." As Death's double, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, said, Republicans simply didn't have any plans for anything other than owning the libs. You can't run on that. Or, really, you can run on that once, and that was 2016. After that, you gotta govern.

However, the real problem isn't that Republican politicians suck. No, the actual blame belongs with their voters, as it always has. You don't get off the hook because you supported absolute garbage candidates like Blake Masters or Lee Zeldin or Kari Lake or Dr. Oz, for fuck's sake. Fuck you for being so gullible, so simple, so hateful that you'd rather put Doug Mastriano in office than someone who actually gives a shit about your problems, like Josh Shapiro (unless your "problems" include critical race theory and drag queens, in which case, grow the fuck up, you idiot children). Fuck you for thinking that Fox "news" and other assholes tell you anything about what the world is like. Kids claiming they're cats and shitting in litter boxes? Goddamn, how do you look yourself in the mirror and not laugh at how dumb and debased you are for believing things like that. Join reality or go live on fucknut island somewhere, unvaxxed and uneducated.

Blame them all, Trump, Republicans, their media, their voters, because they form a clusterfuck of insanity and degradation, a heaving shitball heading towards a cliff.  2022 was us stepping out of the way before it dragged us with them. We're not out of danger yet, but, goddamn, it sure feels like we dodged a catastrophe.

Vote Because Fuck Them

Goddamn, I can't fucking take them anymore, any of them, any of the assorted MAGA racist freaks and moral lepers and violent morons, any of the QAnon fucknuts who are so goddamn deranged that there should be a Bedlam opened just to store them in and keep them out of the sight of decent human beings, any of the shitposting mob masturbating to bleeding over their oh-so-edgy memes, any of the gun-fellating, immigrant-hating bible-humpers, any of the cadre of corrupt cunts and cocksuckers who claim that the 2020 election was corrupt, any of the narcissist fucking billionaires who we're forced to believe have some secret understanding of the world when they are just pampered and isolated imbeciles, any of the shit-smeared liars and rube exploiters who make bank and gain power because that's better than telling the motherfucking truth, any of the scurrilous lickspittles groveling on the ground, prostrating themselves before the slothful, gluttonous, greedy, lustful, pride-engorged, envious, and wrath-driven Donald fucking Trump, as loathsome a corpulent creature to ever undulate out of the depths of crude criminality to demand obeisance and tribute from the vile and deranged and scabby and dumb crowds who would rather blow up the country than even entertain the possibility that they have been, are being, and will be conned and manipulated and mentally raped by savage purveyors of faith, of falsehoods, of fantasies, from Fox to Falwell. I cannot fucking take them anymore. 

So I'm gonna go vote on Election Day because fuck them all. Fuck them in front and then turn them over and fuck them in the back. Vote because if enough of us do, we will force them to show their asses sooner than they wanted to. We know, we fucking well know, that they are begging for an excuse for violence. They are begging for a chance to assert the power they believe they have, that they have accumulated because of the mental illness of their ideology, helped by the fucked up timing of Trumpian rhetoric and pandemic-induced paranoia. They want to show how they can overturn our votes, how they can just toss them out, how they can change them to their favor. They've teed it up: only they can win and it be legitimate, and they are mostly so rankly stupid that they don't see there is no logic in that idea. They don't fucking care. So vote because they are voting. Vote because they wanna kill us. Vote because they wanna dominate us. Vote because we can win this. Vote because our winning will drive the final nail into their empty heads, breaking their tiny brains and forcing their worst plans into the light. Then we can have that fight and not wait to see how fucking bad it gets in 2024.

And we may very well fucking lose. But they want that despair to engulf us. They wanna convince us we already lost and keep us from voting. I don't give a fuck right now about that. Fuck them. Fuck them hard and fuck them rough. If we're gonna lose, I gonna go down swinging. 

I want us to go down swinging for Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock and John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro and Val Demings and Charlie Crist and Gretchen Whitmer and Tim Ryan and so fucking many others. I want us to go down swinging for what we know is right. I want us to go down swinging because we love the country that we can be, not the country we used to be. I want us to go down swinging so that if we lose we can say that we made it fucking hurt.

But I don't wanna fucking lose. If you already voted, fuck yeah. You go, you millions of beautiful believers in reality. And if you haven't, if you're like me, with an Election Day voting fetish, then line up and, especially in places where they wanna try to stop you from voting, stand there and look tough and smug and vote like your fucking life depends on it. Like all our lives depend on it. Like you wanna finally turn, at last, and tell every single one of those disgusting motherfuckers up top there to, truly, shut the fuck up already.

Barack Obama Calls Crazy "Crazy" and We Need More of That

We needed Barack Obama to lay it all out for us: "Imagine if you hire your plumber. You've got an overflowing toilet. It's a problem," he said during a rally in Michigan. "[The plumber] comes in and, you know, you're waiting for the toilet to be fixed. He starts, 'Have you heard about the latest conspiracy of the Lizard People?' and he starts talking to you about all this stuff. 'We gotta do something about that.' You'd be like, 'No no no, I just want you to fix my toilet.' You'd find another plumber." 

What Obama has done as he crosses the country for Democratic candidates in tight races is to say that crazy motherfuckers are crazy motherfuckers and we need to say they're crazy motherfuckers and stop acting like their crazy motherfucking is in any way valid. In that Michigan speech, Obama brought up how Governor Gretchen Whitmer's opponent, Republican Tudor Dixon (which sounds like what you'd call a shitty mobile home park to make it sound fancy) said in 2020 that Democrats are trying to topple the U.S. government and control people through Covid-19 restrictions because they lost the Civil War. Obama exclaimed, "Now first of all...what?" And then he turned to the laughing crowd and gave a confused/concerned smirk, adding, "Wha...what?" The "the fuck" is implied. He continued, "I mean, I know some people go down these rabbit holes on the internet. They're up too late. But that's like a subway tunnel. That's deep. That's the darkest rabbit hole I've ever seen."

It's funny, sure. Obama has such good comic timing that he drove Donald Trump to run for president. But it's also the goddamn truth. As I've said before, we need to treat the people who spout crazy shit like they're crazy. That means anyone who believes that what's real isn't really real should be shamed for it. And I'm not just talking about the QAnon blithering madness. I'm talking about those who say, for instance, that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged or whatever. Our leaders should be mocking them more, especially the politicians who say that. Yeah, they are a threat to democracy. But they are also fucking nuts. But they say this shit shamelessly because no one of any power is shaming them.  Yes, many of them are lying just to keep Trump and the MAGA rubes happy. But their intentions in saying crazy shit have no bearing on how they should be treated.

Instead, we get CNN's new CEO pushing a policy on allowing the nutzoids on the air: "CNN won’t ban guests who have supported the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, but the network will attempt to keep conversations with those people in safe zones of truth." Read another way, that says, "We'll have liars and insane people on and hope they don't lie or say something insane." You know what the best way to avoid that shit is? Don't fucking invite them on unless it's to point and laugh at how fucking mad they are. CNN had the newest Trump clone, Kari Lake, on a couple of weeks ago and just let her get away with saying that she wouldn't accept the results of the gubernatorial election in Arizona if she lost. The next question from Dana Bash should have been "Do you know how fucking deranged that sounds? I mean, that's objectively fucking nuts."

The justifications for insanity are equally insane. Take the crime against Paul Pelosi, which was meant to be an assault on his wife, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. On his show Tucker Carlson Laughs Like a Sugar-Buzzing Child Stomping Snails, the host offered about the hammer attack, "Why should the rest of us sit here and accept obvious inconsistencies in a story that has public policy implications and not say anything?" And guest Glenn Greenwald, whose primary role now seems to be jock strap for fascists, agreed and said, "Skepticism itself can never be wrong. Skepticism says there is evidentiary holes, and there is faulty reasoning in what we are being told, even if evidence does emerge later on to prove it, the skepticism itself was not just valid, but necessary."

That's all fucking nuts. No one was saying that we didn't want the whole story. But there's a vast fucking world of difference between "Some details are missing that need to be filled in" and "82 year-old Paul Pelosi was in a hammer fight with his secret gay lover." The former is acknowledging that the public should be informed. The latter is utterly idiotic and isn't "skepticism." It's the opposite of skepticism. It's saying that your extravagant speculation is valid without any proof at all. Like I could say that it's obvious to me that Tucker Carlson can only orgasm while fucking his wife if a German Shepherd is licking his asshole while he's fucking her. I don't have any proof that this is the case, but it would be irresponsible not to speculate because I'm skeptical about Tucker Carlson's ability to jizz while fucking his wife. Details are missing that need to be filled. I have a duty to assume that he needs a German Shepherd to get its snout all up in his anus, just eating him out, while he is sweatily humping the misses, and until someone shows me otherwise, that's fuckin' canon right there. 

You see what that shit does? Now it's in your head for the rest of your life. And no matter what, when you see ol' Tuckus, you're gonna think, "That dude needs canine analingus to get off." In the same way, because the "skepticism" on Paul Pelosi was treated as fact, it will never not be an article of faith among the brain-fucked MAGA cretins that David DePape and/or Pelosi just wore underwear during the attack. People who say that shit shouldn't be treated with any respect. 

One of the triumphs of conservatives starting in the 1980s isn't that their beliefs attracted followers. No, it's that they turned liberal beliefs into something that many people became embarrassed to espouse. They turned helping the impoverished and the sick into some kind of weakness while amping up the fear of crime and immigrants and the need to be tough and cruel. So people fled from liberalism, Democrats pivoted to the center and the rights, and the stain of that refusal to broadly fight for those liberal ideals has carried through to this day. Some voters won't ever go for a Democrat because they will never not believe that Democrats are communists who want to gender change your children.

What I'm saying is the same approach needs to be used for this terrifying insanity that has gripped so many millions. There are voters who are choosing Republicans who do know that Trump lost the 2020 election, but who just can't bring themselves to vote Democratic. Well, they need to be made to feel too shitty and ashamed to vote for Republicans. The way that is done is not just by saying Trump is a ludicrous, gluttonous shitpile who will wreck things worse than he did before. And not just by saying that democracy is fucked if Republicans get any power. And not even by saying that abortion rights and LGBT rights and more will be gone, too. 

The shit that the majority of the GOP candidates believe is fucking loony, befitting end-of-the-world screamers on street corners or shit-tossing maniacs in an institution. Call crazy what it is. Don't let them get away with pretending that it's normal to live in a backed up toilet full of shit. Let everyone know that the choice is to be dragged into the toilet with them. Or get a goddamned plumber.

They Once Blew Up a Classroom Over Textbooks, So, Yeah, There Will Be Violence

In 1974, in West Virginia, protesters used dynamite and Molotov cocktails against the buildings of their enemies. The protesters were upset that the Board of Education of Kanawha County voted to update the textbooks in the district's language arts classes to include more modern authors in an effort to be more inclusive and multiracial. Kanawha County is the biggest in the state, and it includes the capital, Charleston. A fundamentalist Christian member of the board, Alice Moore, discovered that some of the new books included profanity, sex, evolution, and Freud. Oh, they also contained works by Black activists like Malcom X. Moore said that she was upset that the new books would teach American history in a way "unduly favoring Blacks." Yeah, the connections to the current fuckery over curriculum in schools are that blatant. 

Moore was able to get churches and conservative groups all worked up and calls for the books to be banned became school boycotts, which became marches that included the KKK and, of course, Confederate flags, and those marches led to violence, including 15 sticks of dynamite used to blow up part of the school board building and dynamite thrown into a first grade classroom, where, fortunately, no one was present, but the room was ruined. The books were temporarily removed from schools, but, as a Village Voice article from 1974 says, "During the weeks the books were out of the schools, English teachers all over the county were scared to teach anything but grammar in case any work of literature, even Shakespeare, goaded some hotheads to bomb their buildings." Shots were fired at a school bus, homes were shot at and bombed, and more. 

And it was all over goddamn school textbooks. I mean, look, if I feel like giving any credit at all to the violent fucknuts that plague us, I can, in the most abstract way possible, understand how someone who has been gorging themselves to vomiting on lies and Christian bullshit would get it in their heads that clinics where abortions are performed are murdering people, so they need to be closed. Again, the violent fucknuts are wrong and insane, but I get it. I get bombing military recruiting centers in the Vietnam War. I don't agree, but, shit, I get that when you think you're saving lives, you might be inclined to extremism. But this shit was over books, and the crazed motherfuckers went full-bore terrorism, based in the area's churches that preached their bible is the only book anyone needed. And to prove how fucking Christian they were, "one preacher prayed fervently and publicly for the death of three school board members."

This was fear, man, fear of how the world was changing, how nonwhites were being treated with increasing equality, how women were going to work, how kids were rebelling against the nonsensical religious garbage. When the old ways die and when there are people in power who support the old ways going into the shit heap of history, the desire to halt what we might quaintly call "progress" will inspire savagery. 

Today, I don't think we're heading into a civil war. I've said before that we are too lazy a nation, and arresting people can do a helluva job in slapping down the insurrection erection to a flaccid effort. 

However, it's hard not to believe that we're going to see violence going into and as a result of November 8's midterm election. Death threats have gutted local elections offices. Armed fucknuts are showing up to oversee ballot drop boxes. And that's not getting into the nonstop stream of death threats and other threats of violence (and, with the most recent attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband by a fucknut who wanted to assassinate Pelosi, actual violence) against elected officials. You shouldn't need to have a spine of steel to sit at a goddamn table and count votes for minimum wage. You shouldn't have to worry about your life being ruined by online barbarians just for doing your job. And I haven't even gotten into all the threats and violence against school officials and teachers.

Right now, Republicans are telling MAGA cretins and other assorted shitheels and scumfucks that they are going to win back the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. They are saying that there is no way they can legitimately lose, and, in fact, if they do lose, it must be because of Democratic fraud, cheating, and theft. Tucker Carlson, who has the laugh of someone having a great time fucking a corpse, has proclaimed as much to his millions of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent viewers. GOP candidates like Kari Lake, who you know masturbates with a Trump-shaped dildo, and Blake Masters, who you know masturbates with a Peter Thiel-shaped dildo, are refusing to say they'll accept the results of the election if they lose. 

How do you think those armed and ready assholes are gonna react if Democrats end up winning? Hell, the GOP could win both houses, but if there's an election where they think they should have won, like with Herschel Walker in Georgia, that's gonna tell the locked and loaded crowd it's go time. Christ, speaking of Georgia, I don't wanna think about how insane the state's gonna get if Stacey Abrams wins the governorship. If you tell gullible motherfuckers that those who oppose you are satanic baby murderers who steal elections so they can murder more babies, more than a few of those motherfuckers are gonna react as if that's true.

It's fucking madness that we're even living through this, that we're not just talking about it, but fully expecting it and preparing for it. 

And the point of the story I started with, about what became known as the "Textbook Wars," is not just that violence can happen over the stupidest goddamn things. No, the point is about what came after, when the violence was over and the protests ended and people went to jail for the worst acts and everyone went back to their lives and the books were allowed to be used.

Yeah, that's right. But the Board of Education gave each school the right to say whether or not they used them. And a good many of the schools did not. After a few years, in some schools, thousands of unused books were burned just to dispose of them to open up storage space. And Alice Moore got the school board to pass a new regulation that prohibited any books that "pry into home life; teach racial hatred; undermine religious, ethnic, or racial groups; encourage sedition; insult patriotism; teach that an alien form of government is acceptable; use the name of God in vain; or use offensive language."

In other words, the regressive bastards won the battle. And the war rages on.

(Some of the info in here comes from the fascinating BBC podcast Things Fell Apart, where Jon Ronson delves into the origins of some recent culture war battles. I was dismayed and angered remembering some of the stories in there.)

The Questions Republican Candidates Aren't Being Asked Enough (or At All)

We know that if Republicans win back even one house of Congress, the whole place will become a nightmare of masturbating clowns, all cackling wildly as they rub and tug their greasepainted genitals to a screaming spurt and then declare they're ride-or-die Americans just engaged in old-fashioned horseplay to own the libs. Unfortunately, not enough attention has been paid to just how fucking insane that is. The typical Democrat will say, "Republicans will take away your abortion rights and destroy democracy." What they need to add is "and they're scary clowns jacking off on the Constitution." 

I don't think that most Americans really understand that part. Sure, we here on the musky Twitter machine have that awareness, but we are not most Americans. While the moderators of the debates I've seen or read about do ask if the Republican accepts that Joe Biden won the 2020 election or if the Republican will accept the results of the 2022 election, voters need to know what they're getting with the GOP candidates. Because, see, it sure as shit seems as if a lot of voters think that when they vote for Republicans this cycle, they're trading already tenuous abortion rights for cheaper milk and safer streets. They don't realize that what they're really getting is a pack of crazed clowns who will spooge on them after they murder them.

For instance, as far as I've seen, no debate moderator or TV interviewer has asked a GOP candidate, "If the Justice Department indicts former president Donald Trump, will you do anything to hinder that prosecution?" We know already that, should the GOP win in November, potential future Speaker of the House and awkward walrus Kevin McCarthy and rejected Glengarry Glen Ross character Jim Jordan, among other skeevy Republicans, have pledged to investigate the DOJ over the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump's decaying fake home in Florida. We know that the GOP is promising to shut down the government and gut the economy with a rusty shiv and dance in its entrails if they don't get to cut Social Security and Medicare. So since the pieces are all there, c'mon, make the motherfuckers say if they'll use us all as a human shield to prevent anything happening to Trump. 

Along those lines, ask them if they'll do anything to prevent prosecutions of the criminals who attacked the Capitol. Again, we know that a Republican House will shut down the January 6 Committee. Hell, some of them have even said they'll investigate the members of the committee for...fuck, I don't know, so let's just say "for reasons." The majority of Americans support the work of the committee. It seems like it might be important to find out if the GOP plans to cut its legs and heart out.

Ask candidates what investigations they will support. Republicans are teeing up a shit-ton of probes. They're gonna investigate Hunter Biden because Fox "news" and QAnon nutzoids demand it, even if there's not a single goddamn reason to do it. They're gonna investigate Dr. Anthony Fauci because of course they will. They're gonna investigate anyone who ever said or did anything to make Donald Trump or his terrible children feel bad, including the FBI. And you bet your fucking life they're gonna investigate the absolute horseshit about the "stolen" 2020 election. The crazies will riot if they don't. They're gonna investigate critical race theory, drag queens, and doctors who help transgender kids. And the fucking voters deserve to know if this is the shit they're voting for. In 2020, Democratic candidates were very clear that investigating the Trump administration was on the table. Get the GOP candidates on the record.  

And if Republicans are going to make a big fucking stink about things, ask them what the fuck they're gonna do about it. "Okay, Rep. Trumphumper, you keep saying inflation is out of control. What the fuck are you gonna do about it?" Or "Tell us, Mr. Qsucker, what the fuck are you gonna do about all the crime you say is going on out there?" The answer, of course, is not a goddamn thing. On inflation, they say they're gonna cut government spending. So? All that does is harm people at the bottom. And they say they're gonna end government regulations. This shit is to make life easier on corporations, who will almost assuredly not pass the profits on to the consumers (see: the greedy pigs in the oil and gas industry). On crime, they're gonna "incentivize" the hiring of more cops, which is utterly fucking meaningless. They have no fucking plans beyond controlling people's bodies and minds and enriching the rich while tricking the rubes into thinking that racism and hatred is a viable course for domestic policies as long as their evil Christian nationalist ideology can fuck shit up for the rest of us. While these questions may get asked, candidates need to be pressed to give real answers.

So this note is for local media, including debate moderators: Ask your candidates if they are going to do their fucking jobs or waste everyone's time on utter and complete bullshit. And ask Republicans point blank if they intend to join in any effort to shut down the federal government, something that the vast majority of voters despise. In the MAGA districts, it won't matter: the more batshit, the better for those troglodytes. But in races where it's tight, get 'em on the record. If a candidate is a masturbating clown, it's better to know now that to wait until they're in office and put on the wig and nose and break out the lube.

Oh, one more question: Ask Republican candidates if they intend to support the effort to impeach Joe Biden. Just to see. 

(Note: I have not watched every debate or read every article on every congressional election. I'm only one human being, goddamnit. If these questions have been asked in a race you're watching, lemme know and I'll be glad to update.)

The Patriotic Case for Jailing Donald Trump

Thursday's hearing by the January 6 Committee was clarifying in the way that a great closing argument at a trial can be, pulling together threads that had previously come up and demonstrating how someone is guilty of the crime or crimes they've been accused of. What is so absolutely glisteningly clear is that Donald Trump, while President of the United States (a thing that really did happen), tried to overturn a legitimate election he had lost. What's more, he knew that he had lost the election and he knew that the election had been legitimate. What's more, he knew ahead of time how the voting was going to go for the election, that mail-in ballots, the number of which surged because voters were encouraged to vote by mail during the pandemic, would be counted later and break towards Biden. Because he knew this, he planned, with others, in advance to say he had won, even if he had lost, and then to fight it out to the bitter end, making everything that came after premeditated.

What's more, he knew he was calling on supporters, many of whom were inclined towards violence against Democrats and what they perceived as RINOs, to come to Washington, DC and march on the Capitol to stop the counting of the Electoral College votes. What's more, when the expected violence started, he did nothing to stop it for hours, abandoning his Oath of Office and watching on TV to see if the violent mob might succeed. 

What's more, to this day, Trump keeps propagating something he knows is a lie, which is not only causing threats of violence and harassment of election workers and politicians. And his language is leading to the strong possibility that a bunch of those who go along with the erroneous election belief will be elected themselves, so that, even if Trump doesn't run, they will do possibly irreparable harm to the democracy and to the nation. 

And yet, for some reason, Donald Trump has not been jailed. He is free to "truth" out election lies and QAnon conspiracy madness. He holds rallies where he preens and prances like a parody of a dictator, warning his decreasing crowds of crazy cretins to be prepared to fight for him or to make sure that his lies never die, even if he goes ungently into that good night. He is investigated and investigated, giving the impression that those investigating him do not have enough to indict or arrest him, let alone convict him. Perhaps that is true, but that hasn't been tested yet, but the narrative sticks because of how Trump has slipped out of any attempt to hold him accountable, except for the 2020 election.

Maybe I'm naive, and I'm certainly not a lawyer or legal expert, but if someone's stated goal is to overthrow the elected government of the United States and that someone is fomenting violence and threats of violence against those who don't want to overthrow the elected government of the United States, then it would be patriotic to arrest that person. It would be patriotic to hold them without bail until trial so that they can't keep fanning the flames of rebellion, a rebellion that is based on lies that have been called lies by people across the political spectrum and by dozens of courts of law.

This isn't some wild, leftist idea about what Trump deserves. It's based on Trump's words, actions and inactions, and the results of all of that. Even in his petulant letter responding to the January 6 Committee's subpoena of him, Trump holds the insurrectionists blameless, implying that the riot, violence, and lawlessness that day was justified. He said that the committee has "targeted only those who were, as concerned American Citizens, protesting the Fraud itself." How does that not send the message that Trump wanted the violence on that day? He is saying that what the rioters did was right.

He continues to insist that there is a vast conspiracy involving thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, including members of Congress of both parties, state and local officials of both parties, election workers of both parties, and more, without a shred of genuine evidence to support any of it. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, which is now primarily existing to support the lies about the 2020 presidential election (but, oddly, not the election of anyone else in that year), is poised to get elected hundreds of people who are fully invested in the conspiracy and who want to declare invalid any election where their candidate loses. They want to be able to easily overturn the will of the people in presidential elections and, no doubt, any other election, undermining the very foundation American democracy is built on, however wobbly that foundation might be. And despite the power they will have, these officials will represent a minority of population of the country, and they who will use any means to gain this power. Right now, they talk constantly about using violence to achieve those ends if they have to. 

Again, I'm asking how is it not the height of patriotism to want to stop that?

One other genuinely chilling thing discussed at the hearing on Thursday is that Trump wanted to act deliberately to undermine an incoming Biden administration (which, obviously, he would only do if he knew he had lost the election). "Knowing he was leaving office," Republican Adam Kinzinger said, "he acted immediately and signed this order on November 11th, which would have required the immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia and Afghanistan, all to be complete before the Biden inauguration on January 20th." If it had been acted on, there would have been a "catastrophic" mess left behind for Biden to clean up, in addition to the catastrophic mess of the economy and the Covid pandemic Trump was dumping on the way out. But think about that order for a moment: Trump was going to cause deaths and plunge nations into anarchy just to make Biden's first days in office miserable. At least when Biden withdrew troops, the outcome was his to deal with.

All of this and I haven't even gotten into how the Secret Service and FBI are likely corrupted by Trump and his ground troops in the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and other groups, to the point that some agents may very well have been coordinating with the 1/6 rioters. It is damn hard to escape the idea that Trump was hoping that members of Congress who opposed him would be killed. I can't help but think that that's what he wanted when he watched the events unfold for over 3 hours on January 6, 2021, refusing to lift a finger to stop the mayhem. This is a man, after all, who loves going to boxing matches. He enjoys violence. 

So I'm not saying that Trump shouldn't have a trial. But I am saying, as I have before, that we hold people who are obviously dangerous in jail without bail as they await trial. This isn't a game. The normal rules have been tossed out the window. If it's all unprecedented, then we need to respond in unprecedented ways.

What could be more dangerous than a former president trying to wreck the country and force it to conform to his fantasy? We know what happens when leaders do that. It never ends well. For the good of the country, for the good of our constitution, that's what needs to happen to Donald Trump. It's what should have happened on January 6. 

The MAGA crowd keeps insisting that they are the real Americans, but if to be American, you need to fall in line behind one person, then that's antithetical to what the country is supposed to be, even in its worst moments. So I'm taking back American identity: if you love this country, you want to see Donald Trump behind bars. That's the measure of who is a real patriot.

Herschel Walker Proves That All That GOP Abortion Shit Was a Lie

I've never seen a grift given away quite as blatantly as it was by right-wing talk thing Dana Loesch (motto: "I was too fucking crazy for the NRA"). In talking about the revelation that ultra-anti-abortion Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, running against incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock, paid for a girlfriend's abortion, Loesch started with "What I’m about to say is in no means a contradiction or a compromise of a principle," which automatically means "I'm throwing my principles out the window faster than a priest at Disney World." Then she just fucking said it, the thing we all knew was true but that none of them had the guts to just let everyone know: "I am concerned about one thing, and one thing only at this point. So, I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate."

And there you go. Loesch has previously and repeatedly called abortion "infanticide." Or, you know, "baby murder." So, by that logic, within the rhetoric of the anti-abortion right, Herschel Walker is like someone who has paid a hitman to off someone, which is, you know, a crime. But Loesch is way cool with Walker conspiring to murder a baby as long as he might get elected and vote to stop more abortions. Or, as Loesch put it, "If the Daily Beast story is true, you’re telling me Walker used his money to reportedly pay some skank for an abortion and Warnock wants to use all of our monies to pay a whole bunch of skanks for abortions." In other words, abortion isn't the serious crime they keep saying it is. I mean, you're pretty much saying, "Hey, I'd elect Son of Sam if he promised to stop more serial killers. He only murdered 6 people."

If she had an ethical bone in her body (spoiler alert: she does not), if anyone in the GOP had an ethical bone in their body (spoiler alert: they do not), they would say that it's time for Walker to step aside and regroup, awaiting someone who isn't a goddamn brain-damaged, violent, misogynistic lunatic who paid for at least one abortion (because there really might be more than one). Of course, that's not what they're doing. They got their concussed Black candidate to run against the genuinely decent and genuinely progressive Raphael Warnock. 

Frankly, the exploitation of obviously mentally-unwell ex-football player Walker is downright disgusting. I'd pity Walker if I thought he was capable of change, if I thought he might have a moment of self-reflection and wonder, "What the fuck am I doing?" Instead, every bug in Walker's brain becomes a feature or another bunch of dust to be swept under the very lumpy carpet. Walker has threatened to kill his ex-wife and his grown son. He lied about the number of children he had, leaving off the ones he had abandoned, all while condemning the Black community because of the number of "fatherless" kids. And he's said bizarre, moronic, and downright incomprehensible things on the campaign trail, all with the same placid smile that says, "I don't fully grasp the meaning of what I'm doing, but I sure like the attention." Running him as a candidate is one of the most cynical things the GOP has done this election cycle. As Elie Mystal has put it, "Republicans have rallied around him because they think Black Georgians are just addled enough to vote for touchdowns over basic public competence." Spoiler: They're not.

I get the notion of tolerating the sins of your candidates. No one is perfect. But when a politician does literally the opposite of what they claim they believe and what they claim you believe, it's beyond hypocrisy, a word that has no meaning anymore for Republicans, and into flat out lying. But, as we know with Trump, lying doesn't matter. Living in an alternate reality doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Hell, it doesn't matter that Walker can go on lipless fuck Hugh Hewitt's show and say about paying for the abortion, which he denies doing, "Had that happened, I would have said it, because it’s nothing to be ashamed of there." What the fuck does that mean? The very party he's part of wants to criminalize his behavior. In Texas, Walker would have a bounty on his head for doing it. Not feeling shame would seem to make the whole thing worse.

But Walker is forgiven because of the deep desire for more power. That shit means more than anything. Hell, it's why fundamentalist Christian nutzoids put aside their beliefs because Walker is a meat puppet for the radical right and will get more judges in place in a GOP majority Senate. Oh, and Walker has given the all-purpose out: he's proclaimed his love for Jesus. "I was forgiven, the Lord has forgiven me," Walker said. He didn't explain how the fuck he figured out he was forgiven of his sins by an invisible sky wizard, so I'm gonna go with "Made that shit up like every born again asshole." Seriously, unless you get a fucking letter in fire or some shit, don't tell me you know what your god says about you. But the MAGA Christians are all in on Walker and don't give a shit that Warnock is an actual, you know, reverend. Whatever God says, they've forgiven him for paying for (at least one) abortion and I'm sure they'll forgive him for all the lies he's telling now.

The GOP simply doesn't give a shit about how shitty Walker is. They'll put up with anything. He could fuck a donkey while shoving a crucifix up his ass, and they'll say, "Well, at least he'll vote for tax cuts for the wealthy and for judges who will end birth control and gay marriage." His son Christian, who is ultra-conservative himself, could put out a video showing Walker beating a baby to death, and good church people would say, "Herschel gets a pass on baby murder because he'll definitely stop others from murdering babies, no matter how many babies he murders, even if that's a lot of babies."

It's nihilism. It's exploitation. It's horrendous and pathetic. It's everything that Republicans are right now. They couldn't give a dry rat shit about what we think about their hypocrisy and mendaciousness. They will damn their souls gleefully to bring damnation to the rest of us. And the repulsive fuckstains who make up their base will gobble it up like shit from Jesus's ass. None of them care. 

And that fucks us on the left because we actually do give a fuck. We lose power because we give a shit who is in power. That shouldn't be a quaint notion, but it's getting goddamn hard not to debase ourselves just to keep up.