Haiku Review of 2023: No Reason to Believe Maybe This Year Will Be Better Than the Last

More haiku than I can shake a cherry tree branch at. Here's another round of readers looking back on this fucked up year, which came after another fucked up year and before what will inevitably a fucked up year. 

From Q.S. on Facebook:

Hunter! Hunter! Ugh

At least he managed not to

Rob cancer patients

From H.L.W. on Facebook:

Secrets stacked in piles

Spilling from toilets out doors;

Spoils of a tyrant

From Grumpy, Esq.:

No textualist

spells Stephen Miller without 

spelling Hitler’s men.

From Rose W. in Brooklyn:

The pussy-grabber

Is finally going down

(Not in a good way)

From SPL:

daily gun slaughter

but on today's front pages

joe biden is old

From Abner in AZ:

Lincoln Logs

The Lincoln Project

Another Republican

Scam. History lost

From TMangrove in WI:

“Let’s pile on the queers

and immigrants!” is something

Jesus never said

From Sarah in Seattle:

Orca behavior 

got drastic. No wonder, with

guts full of plastic.

From Eric in Lewistown, PA:

Great economy

American Rescue Plan

Dark Brandon kicks ass

From Craig in CA:

Keep Fighting

With no more lost hope,

We can do this again, folks,

Vote in November

Okay, one more day of this and then we're done with this bitch of a year. Send 'em on: rudepundit@yahoo.com. And don't forget the form: a line of 5 syllables, a line of 7 syllables, and a line of 5 syllables. Title it if you want. Let's keep it going until the bitter end of the bitter times.

Haiku Review of 2023: The Haiku Before the Storm

Once again, I asked and you sent a fuckton of haiku. Coming in from sea to shining sea, even across a sea or two, you've once again defined the year with your simple, short poems. Here are a few of the absolute best so far (and I've only read the emails up through yesterday).

From Anonymous in AZ:

The fetus at all costs!

Until it’s born and breathing.

Then “Welcome cruel world.”

From John in Anderson, Indiana:

written on my heart

from the songs of Palestine

I wish I was free

From an American who fled to England, then to Spain, to escape the madness:

Mediocre men

Think that they should rule us all

We should smash their balls

From Rabbitearz in Los Angeles (who has gotten one in most every year):

It puts the Dick in

Dicktator. What a fucking

Blood-chilling dick-head.

From Doug in Sugar Pine:

Ethics

Clarence Thomas sucks

The meaning out of the words

Supreme Court Justice

From Ruth Ann in Madison:

Pageantry 2023

Miss America,

a nuclear engineer:

real Barbenheimer.

And from me:

Israel Can Liberate Itself

Bibi's been babied

By bilious bullshitters.

But bye-bye, bitch?

Prison Violence Is Wrong Or...

I know I should care

That Derek Chauvin was stabbed.

I'll wait 9 minutes.

Jeb = Ron

Maybe Florida

governors should stop running

to be president. 

Keep on sending them in to rudepundit@yahoo.com. I want to get haiku'd in the face repeatedly. Make that happen, rude readers.

Haiku Review of 2023: American Fiction

Welcome to the end of one more motherfucker of a year in this stupid age we're damned to live through. It was a year of repetition, of shit that we've been through seemingly a thousand fucking times yet various assholes and cockmites are forcing us to go through them again, like we're in some awful wormhole plot of a terrible sci-fi show. I mean, goddamnit, we've been through this anti-LGBT bullshit, we've been through the book bannings, we've been through the immigration hysteria, and we've had enough fucking wars between Palestine and Israel, for fuck's sake. And, Jesus fuck, I can't take another Trumpy election.

Still, as shitty as things seemed to be, there are some glimmers of what we used to call "hope" before right-wing media beat hope into a bloody heap and pissed on optimism. But, hey, listen: Donald Trump is careening towards some kind of legal reckoning. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to torpedo it, the American economy is chugging along quite well. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to torpedo him, Joe Biden is chugging along quite well, with no major fuckups since the Afghanistan withdrawal (which was always gonna suck - and we can argue about his support of Israel). Ron DeSantis was once the golden boy of the future GOP and now he's lucky if he ends up on some shit nutzoid right-wing media outlet like MAGA Ball Washing Today. So not all bad.

Around these parts, we tell the year to kiss our asses goodbye through the power of poetry. More precisely, through a couple of days of haiku, those 3-line expressions of all that is beautiful or all that is ugly or all that is awesome or all that is disturbing in this filthy, degraded world that can still give us something as lovely as, well, haiku.

Submit your haiku about anything 2023-related, fucked or not, to "rudepundit(at)yahoo(dot)com." I'm the only judge and jury here, and I am generally fickle, cranky, drunk, high, and pantsless. 

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 "Rudy Giuliani's Filled Diaper from Gunfuck, AL" or "Alisha from San Francisco" or something.

Here are a few to get your engines running:

Tuck Us

"I'll be back, bigger,"

Said Carlson upon leaving.

The rest is silence.

Hotter Than

Most of India

Will need somewhere else to live

That's how bad it's fucked

Pity the Omelet Bar Chef at Mar-a-Lago

"Add more cheese, more ham!"

Trump bellows, hoping to hide

His deep fear in grease.

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

The Rude Pundit's Annual Nativity-palooza, Now with Bonus Folk Horror

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 Threads, Twixter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Buzzfeed, 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, smiling snow kings. Did Snow Mary give birth to Snow Baby Jesus? Or did they all just make Snow Baby Jesus out of snow? And the temperature in Bethlehem this time of year is in the 60s. Is that why they seem to be festooned with turds, to try to hold their globular shape a little longer?

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. 

Not enough like the nativity you might see on the mantle of the leader of a forest cult dedicated to cannibalism and blood drinking? How about this folk horror: 

It's like the last thing you see before the cellar door closes and you wait to find out if you're meant to be sacrificed to the corn god or impregnated by the wheat cock in a fertility rite. Puritans would look at these Puritan-looking motherfuckers and decided, "Nope. There's no god. Let's just jump in the ocean."

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.)

If You Support Donald Trump, You're a Nazi

I said what I said.

I've been thinking, as former president and current inevitable doom of the republic Donald Trump proudly goes full Hitler in his speeches and social media pronouncements: do MAGA redcaps pause between filling their kids' Never Surrender Christmas stocking with Trump candy bullion and wiping their dicks with a Mar-a-Lago towel after jacking off to their iPhone videos of when they went into the Capitol on January 6 (and still haven't been arrested yet, motherfuckers) and think, "Am I a Nazi? And if I am, am I okay with that?" 

I mean, sure, sure, I know that this straw MAGA moron doesn't believe what the wackos in the fake, failing lamestream media are saying about Trump. But the orange goon himself is giving credence to the Hitler comparisons by insisting that "I never read Mein Kampf" and saying to lipless fuck weasel Hugh Hewitt, "I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works." (You just know that behind all that is that Trump doesn't want anyone to get credit for the shit he says. I'm sure he's told one of his lickspittles, "Hitler wasn't as smart as me" or some such fuckery.)

To be a loyal redcap stormtrooper, you gotta go along with Trump no matter which way his insistent madness drives his rhetoric. And, truly, you don't disagree with him when says, "They’re coming from all over the world. People all over the world, we have no idea. They could be healthy. They could be very unhealthy. They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country, but they do bring in crime, but they have them coming from all over the world and they're destroying the blood of our country." But what you're agreeing with is Nazi shit. It's flat out Nazi shit. Trump can say, as he told Hewitt, that it's not the same as what Hitler said, but it is the same as what Hitler said, except Hitler was talking about Jews and Trump's talking about undocumented migrants. And Trump wants to round them up and put them in camps before deporting them by the millions. And he wants laws passed that would allow authorities to check the papers of anyone they "suspect" of not being American. It's absolute insanity that would fundamentally alter the fabric of the country. It will cause upheaval and violence and economic ruin. But Nazis don't give a shit about that kind of thing because purity matters above all. The rest will take care of itself once the blood is purified. Or, you know, un-poisoned. 

I'm gonna bet that your average redcap doesn't give a shit if they're called "Nazis." Indeed, many of them are likely to embrace it because they think it drives the liberals crazy. They'll post memes of that screaming bespectacled woman as a snarky reaction to how the left thinks mass execution of undocumented migrants at the Trump concentration camps is wrong and tweet out to the Nazis on Elon's Internet Bullshit Factory that we should be rounding up liberals and hanging them. Oh, wait. They already do that last part.

Sure, sure, some Trump supporters, desperately hoping to rationalize away the stink of Nazi, will try to say that they know the "rhetoric" Trump uses is over the top and even problematic, but they just think what he did for the country was so awesome that they have to support him and, hey, he can't do all those bad things. You know what you call someone who tries to justify what a Nazi says? You call them a "Nazi." (You also call them "fucking brain damaged" if they don't remember how Trump gave this nation a bloody ass fisting during Covid.)

That's where we are right now in the United States as we watch the MAGA redcaps goosestep closer and closer to mass violence. Trump promises to abuse the criminal justice system: "What I’m going to do is give indemnifications to any police officer that gets in trouble for pursuing a criminal because that’s what we have to do." And to have mass purges of perceived enemies: "We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media." And he declares that America under Biden is a nightmare: "We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has lost its way, but we are not going to allow this horror to continue." Man, Nazis know how to use propaganda to keep the rubes all pissed off and ready for action.

So, yeah, I'll call these sick motherfuckers "Nazis." If you're gonna follow someone whose language lines up with Hitler, who has praised dictators and who wants to bring their methods to the United States, who promises to round up millions of people just trying to live their lives, who threatens to attack our neighbors and break our alliances, who sees non-white people as invaders or criminals who must be dealt with harshly, who wants to "cleanse" the country of people who don't believe the same shit he does, fuck, yeah, you're a Nazi. I don't wanna wait around until gas chambers are built to finally sound an alarm. 

And that's how the 2024 campaign should go. You can be with the Nazis or you can be with the people who think Nazis deserved to have their asses kicked into the garbage heap. Indeed, history teaches us that we are obligated to kick Nazi asses. If only there was a short, punchy word we could use for anti-facist...

The Republican Strategy: Make Everyone Think Democrats Are as Fucking Awful as They Are

There is one thing tying together a bunch of shit that Republicans are doing right now. They know that the GOP brand is tarnished with insurrection, hatefulness, and the stink of Trump. Rather than try to change or kick Donald Trump to the curb, which would be hard work involving convincing the idiot hordes of MAGA drones to stay on board without their orange idol or shifting policies to reflect what the majority of Americans actually believe on things like guns, abortion, and more, they are saying, "Fuck it. Let's just fuck shit up instead. It's what we're good at." Playing to their vile strengths, Republicans in Congress and their media lackeys have decided that the best way to win in 2024 is to do everything possible to drag the image of Democrats down to their level and then rub some more shit on it. 

What else explains House Speaker Mike Johnson, who always looks as if he's contemplating the next boy he'll keep in the cellar for a while, shifting from expressing doubt about impeaching President Joe Biden to full-on supporting a vote on an impeachment inquiry. This came about in the most obvious way possible: a visit to Trump at his shitty country club estate, Mar-a-Lago. And it's happening for the most obvious reason. If Biden has an impeachment on his record, even for something he simply hasn't done, then in the eyes of morons, or at least in the eyes of one flabby clown-faced moron, it will balance the ledger on Trump's impeachments (including the bipartisan second one). 

Then there's the attempt to label any protest from the left as an "insurrection." It's as ridiculous as it sounds. Republicans have said that kids protesting for new gun laws to protect them at the Tennessee state capitol was an insurrection. As the Washington Post pointed out back in April, GOP coup-supporters have said that Democratic insurrections include a protest on the Florida House floor and a protest against overturning Roe v. Wade in Arizona, not to mention an editorial saying that Trump will be a dictator who Republicans will readily follow. That last one is from a recent letter calling for an investigation into Post writer Robert Kagan from Senator and grifter extraordinaire JD Vance. He wants Kagan to be treated like the dickholes who stormed through the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, looking to murder some elected officials. All of this is a desperate, transparent attempt to make light of the actual crimes of the 1/6 insurrectionists and, again, create a false equivalence in voters' minds.

The most sinister of these has been the attack on colleges and universities for not doing enough to defend Jewish students from purported antisemitic attacks. I'm not talking about actual physical attacks or direct threats, which should be dealt with severely and quickly. I'm talking about young people having shitty beliefs about Israel and, indeed, Jews (like genocide), beliefs that should be condemned without hesitation. There's a discussion to be had about how, for instance, the presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT whiffed it at a congressional hearing where they were totally setup by Republican fuck nozzles and what their responses mean. But let's be crystal fucking clear here: conservatives are politicizing the shit out of this for two reasons. It forwards their agenda of dismantling higher education. That's a topic for another time or another writer. 

The other thing that this line of attack achieves is to equate a 19 year-old chanting, "From the river to the sea" with actual fucking Nazis doing Nazi shit in this country. If that 19 year-old is implying the genocide of Jews, then calling yourself an actual fucking Nazi is also implying that because that's what Nazis do. And Republicans have a Nazi problem. The Texas GOP just voted down a prohibition on the party associating with those "known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial." 

It's all just fuckery by the GOP. And the only real question is how much this will work on depressing the Democratic vote or getting the idiots all hot and bothered and ready for some fascist action.

I Applied for a Job in a New Trump Administration.

As you might have heard, allies of Donald Trump are gearing things up for a new administration for when (they assume) Trump wins back the presidency in 2024. Called Project 2025, it's an effort sponsored by the crazed right-wing Heritage Foundation (motto: "Unfuckable turds wrecking the joint for the rest of you") to "to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents," as Axios put it. In other words, they are going to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and install people who want to remake the government in the image of Trumpism. It's dictator shit and needs to be called out as such.

So there's an application form that anyone can fill out. Its purpose is laid out clearly: "With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government." The application is an ideological litmus test to see how deeply your head is up MAGA's dumb, cruel, spiteful ass. You, too, can be on the frontlines of taking Donald Trump's personal grievances and moronic political beliefs and making them policy. The more people you hurt, the better.

"Fuck it," I thought. I'll fill out their little bullshit questionnaire. And so I did. I gave my address as the same as Trump Tower, and then I got to work on the essay part. 

 Fingers crossed that I get the position. I am totally ready to serve.