Two Extra Depressing Moments from the Republican Debate of the Damned

1. Honestly, the conservadouche Fox "news" moderators, Bret Baier and Martha MacCullum, could have phrased things differently at the first debate of the future losers of the Republican nomination for president on Wednesday night in Milwaukee. Baier asked for a show of hands in answer to the question, "If former President Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice?" He might as well have asked, "If President Trump wanted you to come to his prison cell and suck his dick, would you?" The response would have been the same, with fast-talking, bright-toothed, empty-headed rich fucknut Vivek Ramaswamy eagerly raising his hand to volunteer that he'd vigorously gobble some orange knob and others joining in to demonstrate how much they want Trump's balls slapping their chins with pathetic, shouty worm Ron DeSantis and America's mopiest stepdad Mike Pence grudgingly admitting that, yeah, they'd mouth the mushroom. Only sad, hairless scrotum Asa Hutchinson and beach ball with high blood pressure Chris Christie had the nerve to say, "No, get that thing out of my face."

It's not that it's surprising that six out of the eight future losers would say they would support Trump, even if he's a convicted criminal. What were most of them going to do? Say the opposite and tempt Trump's animal packs of voters to flood them with death threats and doxxing? That's fucking frightening, sure. And it's not surprising that most of the half-dozen cowards deflected onto other issues, like accusing Joe Biden or Merrick Garland or Christopher Wray of politicizing law enforcement, as if law enforcement isn't a political entity everywhere and all the time. Between that and pretending to be tough by threatening to disband the FBI or fire someone, it was pathetic. 

What also wasn't surprising but was telling as hell is that not one of those who said they were fine voting for a felon convicted of attempting to overturn an election claimed Trump was innocent. Not one. Even Ramaswamy, who couldn't bend over fast enough for a train of MAGA morons to be run on him, didn't make the case that Trump is innocent, although he came close when he said, "There’s a difference between bad behavior and illegal behavior" to Chris Christie, who called "bullshit" so fast that it winded him. Ramaswamy added, "The fact is that these are politicized indictments and we have to call out the truth," which, again, is not the same as saying that Trump is innocent of the crimes he's accused of. 

It's just fucking depressing that so many Republicans couldn't say, "Fuck no, I'm not voting for a convict." But every single one of the candidates who said they'd vote for a guilty Trump is sure out there pretending to be tough, law and order, no-shit-taken, cop-humping, jail-filling motherfuckers. Every one of them would support going after Wray or Garland or Jack Smith, but, you know, that's not political. 

2. In Milwaukee on Wednesday, it hit 100 degrees with a heat index of 110-120. Schools were closed because of the high temperatures, about 20 degrees above normal. The heat advisory was in effect until 9 p.m., which is when the GOP debate began. The extreme weather this summer meant the question of climate change couldn't be avoided, and Baier and MacCullum didn't ignore it, listing some of the crazy shit that's gone on. 

When asked for a show of hands on who believe that humans cause climate change, DeSantis dickishly put a stop to the activity and called for a "debate" about it before not debating it at all and making some weird remark about needing "to be present" when disaster strikes. Ramaswamy, who, it should be noted repeatedly, is fucking insane, said plainly, "The climate change agenda is a hoax...the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change," which is objectively idiotic. Nikki Haley seemed like she was on the verge of saying something compelling but she zigged right over to blaming China and India. 

It was honestly weird to watch the governor of Florida and the former governor of South Carolina not calling out climate catastrophe denialism for the dangerous bullshit it is. Their states are fucked if nothing changes. Haley could have talked about how she started the South Carolina Disaster Recovery Office that also focused on being prepared for the floods and storms and other shit that would be caused by climate change. The others could have attacked DeSantis for having his head so far up his ass on climate change that he's wearing his kidneys like Disney mouse ears. Young Republicans give a shit about this, but the candidates didn't. How in the world can you begin to talk about immigration issues without talking about how climate is affecting migration? 

The world is gonna burn and drown and these putzes are bleating on about getting rid of the Department of Education and how much they wanna bomb Mexico and other foolishness.

The Georgia Indictment Is a Defense of the Workers Who Make Democracy Function

One thing that comes across in the indictment of Donald Trump and the cabal of scoundrels, dregs, assholes, and Rudy Giuliani for racketeering and other crimes in Georgia is that Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis treated Trump like a criminal who happens to have been president. It's a contrast with the indictments from Special Counsel Jack Smith, who treats Trump like a former president who happens to be a criminal. In the federal indictments, for stealing classified documents and refusing to give them back, as well as for inciting the January 6 insurrection, Smith writes with a sense of mourning overlaying some measure anger, as if it's just a shame that it all had to come to this, but, alas, it did and now we must do something about it. That's not to take away from the effectiveness of the indictments. I'm just talking tone here.

Not Willis, though. Her indictment is a full-on bitch slapping, a cry of outrage that these motherfuckers came to her state, to her county, and shit all over the joint, and, yeah, someone needs to do something about that. One major difference between the Willis and Smith indictments is in how they deal with the actual real lives of people that Trump and his co-conspirators, indicted and unindicted, fucked up completely. Smith touches on it in vague mentions, but Willis? She’s fucking done, man. These traitorous assholes fucked with election workers, constituents she’s sworn to defend, and Willis wants the assholes to pay.

Willis lists “Harassment and Intimidation of Fulton County Election Worker Ruby Freeman” in the "Manner and Methods of the Enterprise" of Trump and his "criminal organization." Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, provided some of the most compelling public testimony to the January 6 committee, detailing the hell their became because the goddamn president, his goddamn lawyers, and other goddamn scoundrels couldn’t shut the fuck up lying about what Freeman and Moss did while counting ballots. Freeman and Moss were doing jobs for the government of Fulton County, for Georgia, and for the United State, important work, and these craven dickholes wanted to destroy them or force them to lie.

Freeman’s name comes up 40 times in Willis’s indictment. Each and every time Rudy Giuliani slurped out her name in an official and unofficial capacity is listed as “an overt act in furtherance of a conspiracy.” Every time some other piece of Trump’s garbage attempted to harass and harangue and intimidate Freeman into joining them in lies is there as evidence of how mercenary and cruel the conspiracy was on an individual level, as if Freeman was a representative of the nation as a whole, as Trump’s savage goons tried to beat us all into submission. And every shit word about Freeman that fell out of Trump’s sphincter mouth, greedily gobbled up and foully vomited up as death threats and doxxing and misery for Freeman and Moss, all of that is there. 

I mean, fuck Giuliani forever for saying that “Ruby Freeman, Shaye Moss, and an unidentified man were ‘quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they're vials of heroin or cocaine’ at State Farm Arena to be used to ‘infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines.’” At least a racist piece of shit like Giuliani is consistent.

Freeman and Moss stood strong against this onslaught, standing up for what's right and what's real. They should be treated as heroes, but Trump couldn't stand that ordinary people might have some power that damages him, so they must be coopted or wrecked. Willis is standing up for them, for the people who do the grunt work of keeping shit running on very level of government. Someone fucking has to.

Freeman isn’t mentioned at all by name by Smith. She’s just an “election worker.” That’s not to disparage the federal indictment. It’s got a focus on going to trial quickly to put Trump behind bars and burying him where we don’t have to hear his ignorant farted words or see his raggedy basketball face wobbling as if ready to burst or implode at any moment. 

Willis also makes sure that attacks on election workers in general are not lost in the story of this pathetic chapter. Giuliani is called out for saying that “Fulton County election workers were stealing votes and that Georgia officials were covering up a crime in plain sight,” among other ludicrous things flung at the Georgia legislature and the public. 

The other amazing thing that Willis does is she points the way for other states to get in on the prosecution. She says that the criminal enterprise operated in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, in other states, including, but not limited to, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, NewMexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and in the District of Columbia." And then she goes on to describe who did what to fuck with those states' elections and election workers.

It's a righteously angry document, and it's what we needed to express just how supremely angry we all are at what was done to us and what is continually being done to us and what will be done to us if people like Fani Willis aren't there to say, "Fuck, no. Not here. Not you."

Why Doesn't the Right Defend Kai Cenat's Actions as Free Speech?

This guy, Kai Cenat, has 6.5 million followers on Twitch, including 80,000 paid subscribers, and millions more following him on YouTube. He streams himself gaming, does pranks, and basically fucks around and makes a shit-ton of money doing it. No judgment. Anyone who makes a living doing what they love, as long as it's legit and/or doesn't hurt anyone, good on them. 

So Cenat and another online content creator, Fanum, said last Friday afternoon that they were giving away Playstation 5s and gift cards in Union Square in the middle of Lower-ish Manhattan. It's a busy area even when it's not peak tourist season, which it totally, fucking annoyingly is. The announcement caused thousands of mostly young people to swarm Union Square. After being delayed, Cenat arrived and live-streamed for a little while from the event until it got too intense to keep going. It doesn’t look like Playstations were given away, but the crowd started to lose its shit and jumped on cars and tore up a subway entrance construction site and other parts of Union Square, getting into fights with the cops who arrived, all while Cenat drove away as people held onto his SUV like it was the last helicopter leaving the Fyre Festival or something. 

Cenat was arrested for first-degree rioting and inciting a riot, along with unlawful assembly for doing all this without a permit. 

Now, Cenat didn’t riot himself. He never encouraged people to riot, even if he did watch it and film it. All he did was tell people to show up. I mean, crowds have shown up at other events he’s held spontaneously and nothing remotely like this fuckery happened, but, at the end of the day, like at those previous giveaways and get-togethers, didn’t he only speak? Yet would anyone deny that he bears responsibility for what occurred? 

I mean, right-wing dirthumper media sure has no problem pinning the blame on Kai Cenat. Conservative columnist Cal Thomas, who I didn't even realize was still living, decried the riot, blaming a lack of fathers and seeming to imply they should be shot or threatened with being shot before being beaten with sticks. Over on Trump’s Truth Toilet, they’re saying things like, “Throw away the key.” Or as another stated flatly, “Social media star Kai Cenat INCITES dangerous  NY riot over promise of huge gaming giveaway.” You'd think they'd be defending his right to free speech.

But Cenat even cautioned people, “We're making sure to have good like protection and shit. You already know, we're trying to chill and shit…” And in hyping it, he seemed to anticipate that things could go awry and wanted to prevent it: “That shit might end really quick depending on how rowdy you get and shit like that. Make sure you pull up with somebody. Just make sure you pull up with a friend to make sure ya'll are good and shit like that.” Another way to put that? “Be there, will be wild.” 

Right now, Trump and his legal team of cockmites and asslickers are trying to make a case that everything Trump did to try to overthrow the results of the 2020 election and install Trump as a de facto dictator, up to and including the insurrection at the Capitol, were just free speech in action. Trying to get the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” enough votes to give the state to Trump? Free speech. It was "aspirational." Writing out a fucking plan to steal the election? Free speech. Telling the mob at his January 6 bullshit protest to march to the Capitol “you'll never take back our country with weakness.We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore”? Free speech. Sure, he also said to march “peacefully and patriotically,” but Kai Cenat told people to chill and make sure they’re good. That didn’t stop him from being charged. 

There are lots of reasons why Trump’s actions don’t fall under free speech. And the example is right there in the Kai Cenat arrest. You can’t do something that convinces people to commit crimes. You talk people into starting a riot, even unintentionally. And you can’t fucking well ask an official to create fake electors to substitute for the real ones and overturn an election. If you call it all "free speech," then I suppose it's free speech if Joe Biden talked to Hunter about business deals, right, MAGA freaks? Or when someone hires a hit man to murder their spouse? It's just aspirational speech until there's a corpse. The murder is the only crime, no? It gets absurd pretty fucking quickly.

Yeah, I'm comparing January 6 to the Union Square riot. The big fucking difference is that, unlike the January 6 motherfucking insurrectionists, virtually no one is defending the Union Square rioters. Large swaths of politicians aren't declaring them innocent or just tourists or that they were in a public place or anything of the sort. I know there are some concerns about violence in the police response and those should be dealt with, as should the assaults on the cops. Again, though, with very limited exceptions, no one is trying to minimize that shit, certainly no elected officials.

By the way, unlike Trump, Cenat has apologized and condemned the riot. First there was a statement from his publicity group that said, “We apologize to all of those impacted. We are fully cooperating with local authorities.” Then, yesterday, he unequivocally told the people who did the rioting that they fucked up: "I am beyond disappointed in anybody who became destructive that day. That shit is not cool... I had good intentions for this whole thing, and none of that was my intention. I don’t condone any of the things that went on that day. None of that is cool." He added, "As a whole, we all have to do better." He did not thank the rioters. He did not express love for them. He included himself in those who had fucked up.

So a fuckin’ Twitch streamer has more honor and decency than a former president. 

New Trump Indictment: Trump Didn't Give a Solitary Fuck About Anyone But Himself

One thing that has always bugged the shit out of me with the reaction of Donald Trump, who really was president of the United States for a weird, fucked-up period of time, to the results of the 2020 election. It's something that has bugged lots of people and it's something that others have said but deserves to be stated again in this new, post-third indictment context. So I'm not treading new ground when I say this: the easiest way to see that Trump knew that he lost the 2020 election is that he only ever says that his election was "stolen." 

See, if you gave a single fuck about "election integrity" or some such shit, you'd have to insist that the whole goddamned election was screwed up and everyone who got elected did so unfairly, including any Republicans. But even in that case, you'd think that Trump would have made the play because Democrats kept the House and Senate. If the election was all kinds of fucked with cheating and machine hacks and shady workers, if Republican area ballots were stolen or Democratic area ballots were illegally cast multiple times, then that's the case you make. You'd say all of it was fucked, including local races, including ballot initiatives, the whole damn thing. Toss it out and do it again.

By not insisting on these broad-based election shenanigans, but instead absolutely ignoring every other race (except for some late in the game concerns about the Georgia Senate races), Trump and his legal team were saying something that was simply impossible. If Trump votes were thrown out, then that meant other votes were, but Trump insisted that some people just voted for president and nothing else. Indeed, he insisted that dead people voted for Joe Biden and no one else. But there was no evidence of that. It would have had to be a massive fraud scheme with precise details and many different ways of going about it, overvoting for Biden in some places, ignoring Trump votes in others. You'd have to be fucking deranged or, you know, the stupidest of MAGA cretins, which is not a high bar to clear, in order to believe that you could commit fraud with such precision on such a broad scale. 

Yeah, the easiest fucking thing would have been for Trump to say the whole election was fucked and that he was standing up for everyone, every single candidate, every single voter. But Trump's poisonous narcissism would not allow that. It was about him and only him and fuck everyone else. The only votes that mattered were the ones for him. All other votes were worthless. 

Special Counsel Jack Smith points this out in the indictment when he discusses Trump's doltish attempts to get Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find one more vote than needed to cover the spread between him and Biden. That came after Georgia's Bureau of Investigation said it "was examining all such claims and finding no merit to them." If the allegations of election fuckery couldn't be proven, then, fuck it, Brad, just fuckin' lie about the votes. That's proof right there that Trump knew he lost because, again, that's not what you do when you think something terrible has happened to the nation. It's when you don't want something terrible to happen to you. If you are defending the right to vote, you don’t ask the Georgia Secretary of State to find just enough votes for you to win the state.

Again and again, what comes through in the indictment, as it did in the report of the January 6 committee, is that Trump and his lawyer lackeys and lickspittles all thought that Democrats are simply not valid as voters or, indeed, as citizens. In fact, no one is really, truly American unless they support Donald Trump and would be willing to go to the barricades for him, quite literally on January 6, 2021. You are someone who is just trying to count votes? Fuck you, you're part of a conspiracy. You're a Republican elections official certifying votes that show Trump lost? Fuck you, you're RINO. You're a judge who rules that reality is actually real? Fuck you, you're a deep state puppet. 

What Smith has done is say there is one clear fucking reason for all this and its name is Donald Trump. You either can believe that thousands of people were involved in a massive, virtually undetectable effort to steal the election or you can believe that Donald Trump lost and couldn't fucking handle it because he knew that his criminal ass was exposed. And Smith is rightfully aghast that it was the motherfucking President of the motherfucking United States who committed all these acts. 

Think of how fucked it all is. To take one example, think of how many people degraded themselves for him, throwing themselves into committing crimes at his crude bidding through screamed speeches and hysterical tweets. Think of the lives destroyed just by listening to this prissy, bourgeois, orange pig man. Check out this paragraph on the false electors scheme: "On the same day [as the legitimate electors voted], at the direction of the Defendant and Co-Conspirator 1 [Trump and 'Big Tits' Giuliani], fraudulent electors convened sham proceedings in the seven targeted states to cast fraudulent electoral ballots in favor of the Defendant." They got state officials involved in it. Now, I'm no fancy shitheel attorney clawing at Trump's wallet pocket, but that's not First Amendment shit. That's "broke the fuckin' law" shit.  Trump didn't care, man. Trump didn't care that people were being induced to commit crimes. Trump didn't care that he was inspiring violence. As long as they were doing it for him, shit, that just shows they're good Americans. And, also, in the end, at its climax, it was a Hail Mary pass, a long shot, and he sat there for hours, waiting to see if those motherfuckers really got it done for him on January 6. 

Yeah, we're grateful for those who didn't allow themselves to be sucked into Trump's fantasy maw. And, yeah, it's all well and good that people like Attorney General Bill Barr resigned rather than participate in the dicking over of the American people. It's fine that Vice President Mike Pence realized that his ass might be in a world of shit if he didn't certify the election and stood up to Trump. But it's not fuckin' fine that they stayed pretty damn quiet about how Trump was wrecking the joint until fairly recently. 

Barr and Pence and so many others who flinched at the end won't be charged with crimes. But they are guilty for putting the country in this fucking bind, for abetting a louche loser for as long as they did, riding his flabby coattails until they finally frayed too much for them. They let him shit all over the nation repeatedly and wiped his ass and said he could load up on fast food and do it again. 

Yeah, Trump, that rancid garbage dump of a human, needs to be jailed. But the stench from him will permeate us for the rest of most of our lives. The derangement will take a generation to phase out. It all starts with Trump finally being punished, and, truly, it looks like he really might be.