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.
12/31/2022
Haiku Review of 2022: The Worst Person in the World
12/30/2022
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.
12/28/2022
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.
12/27/2022
Haiku Review of 2022: Everything Everywhere All at Once
12/24/2022
The Rude Pundit's Annual Nativity-palooza, Now Including Wooden Blocks and More Skeletons
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.
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.
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:
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.)
12/23/2022
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.
12/22/2022
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.
12/09/2022
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.