The Immigrant "Invasion" Is Just WMDs All Over Again

There is no immigrant invasion at the southern border of the United States. That needs to be said at the outset any time you wanna talk about What's Wrong With Our Country. No matter how many times people say it, no matter how much it's covered, no matter even if elected Democrats agree, it's simply not true. The immigration system in this country is broken but that's because Republicans have refused to fund the courts needed to quickly process asylum claims and other cases. 

The idea of an immigrant "invasion," as Donald Trump (who we really elected president for a second time - I know, it's fucked up, right?) puts it constantly, has one purpose, and that's to scare the public with a lie so that a cabal of power-mad assholes can remake the nation to suit their warped, contorted viewpoints. That should sound incredibly familiar for those of us with brains that actively remember shit more than a tweet-cycle old. 

It's weapons of mass destruction all over again. 

Oh, sweet children of America, you need to know that in the scary months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (that's the "9/11" you hear about every year, in case you weren't born yet or are fucking dumb), the administration of President George W. Bush decided that the nation of Iraq needed to be attacked and remade as a "democracy," free of its dictator Saddam Hussein. The fact that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks and the fact that the dictator of the country that did have a great deal to do with them, Saudi Arabia, was apparently off-limits was not something you were allowed to say openly lest you be labeled anti-American. Besides, we were assured, endlessly, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, big missiles, perhaps nukes, shit that could fuck up, say, Israel or even our allies in Europe or maybe even the USA itself. So we had to invade Iraq, take it over, and prevent the mad leader of the country from unleashing hell on the earth. In 2002, the president was given blanket authorization to use military force against Iraq by a bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress. Again and again, we were told that we needed to bomb the fuck of the country to prevent a mushroom cloud over DC. Anyone who disputed that idea was treated as a traitor, even if you were a veteran. Ads were run declaring your support of terrorists if you dared say that WMDs (as the shorthand went) were a lie. The foreign policy and economic policy of the United States was remade around the goals of eliminating WMDs and turning Iraq into a shining example of freedom in that region of the world. If that sounds weird and hyperbolic, if anything, I'm understating how this shit went. 

And, of course, it was all a lie. There weren't WMDs. The whole thing was bullshit, but two-thirds of Americans believed Iraq had something to do with 9/11. Two-thirds believed the WMD lie. All of them were wrong (I could say, "All of you were wrong" since I was right, but I don't wanna be smug about it), but Democrats and Republicans leaned into the lie because of the fear of opposing such a huge part of the population. Nearly three-quarters of the country supported the war, which eventually changed to over half coming around to saying it was mistake. But the damage was done to Iraq and to the US, even if the defeat of the GOP in 2008 was one of the outcomes of the entire fucktastrophe. 

Of course, since we're Americans, we're damned to repeat every goddamned mistake in an endless cycle, and while we're not being lied into war this time (although there's weird talk about sending troops into Mexico), we are once again watching policy decisions being made that will wreck millions of lives because of hysteria over a lie that has caught fire. 

So not only did Donald Trump run and arguably win on his unending declarations of "the greatest invasion in history" happening at the US-Mexico border, but it's become a standard line for every Republican in office at all levels. And Democrats have joined in, going from accusing Republicans of stoking fears with their rhetoric to campaigning on the very restrictions that the anti-immigration right wants. Hell, even some supposedly left-leaning pundits have used Trump's language. And, again, it's all a lie. I don't want to go into all the ways it's a lie (like the fact that the majority of undocumented people came into the country legally and just stayed).

Like the WMD lies, this lie serves a policy purpose and it's not just to get the rubes all heated up to vote for fascists, although that worked pretty fuckin' well. The very word "invasion" is important because a declaration of an invasion could be a pretext for Trump using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to get the military involved in rounding up and deporting anyone who is undocumented. Beyond that nightmare, making everyone believe that the hottentots are rampaging through the border in order to pillage our villages and rape our dogs and murder our women or whatever the fuck puts a violent justification on policies that are simply ignorance and racism, stopping the Great Replacement and White Genocide and that kind of bullshit that gets Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk all hard and throbbing.

And, like invading Iraq (and that was really an invasion), billions of dollars will be spent to act on this lie. It will enrich a few loyal companies who get the contracts to build the detainment camps. It will cause wanton violence as every armed fucknut jonesing to go nutzoid on their immigrant neighbors tries to "help." And, eventually, it will fail as people realize what a horrific clusterfuck of family separation, caged children, and decimated workforces is doing to the country. 

What can be done now is for Democrats to stop giving in to the Trump language on immigration. Leave that shit to Fox "news" and it's devolved descendants. Let shitheel podcasters scream into the void about migrant caravans or whatever. We've already ceded so much ground by allowing the GOP to exploit every story of a migrant committing a crime. How about instead talking about how migrants are mistreated and killed. How about showing some goddamn strength instead of going along with the raging pitchfork-waving mob? Put out some torches instead of helping to light them.

Maybe, just maybe, we can stop this lie before it fucks things up as badly as the last lie. 

Sorry, CNN and MSNBC, But It's Not Us. It's You

I haven't watched CNN or MSNBC for a single second in the month since the 2024 presidential election. I've been a loyal viewer of CNN pretty much since it started, through the bullshit times of enforced patriotism, like the first Gulf War or after 9/11, and through the transition from being a news channel to being, in its current state, an extended talk show, one long episode of The View or the Sunday political chat fests, with occasional breaks for a news story. 

With MSNBC, I've had a more tortured relationship, vacillating between appreciating the early weirdness of the channel as it featured shows hosted by liberals like Phil Donahue and crazed conservatives like Pat Buchanan, to being a semi-regular viewer of Keith Olbermann and an occasional guest on Ed Schultz's show. But as it descended into a kind of smug insider party with smirky outrage expressed in the most pin-headed way possible, it lost me. And not just because of Morning Joe. I've never been able to handle the most recent primetime lineup, probably since the failure of Mueller Report to do anything that it was hyped to do by the hosts on that lineup.

And these things are relationships. We build up trust with the hosts we choose or the network we watch. You see that in the fervent devotion of Fox "news" viewers who refuse to believe anything that's related to "reality" without getting the okay from the Fox fucknut brigade. One dear friend of mine had MSNBC on pretty much all day, every day, whenever she was home. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were her morning coffee klatch and she didn't go to bed until she heard the history lesson that Rachel Maddow was dishing out. But not anymore. She's also gone cold turkey.

We on the left that still watched the corporate media's news networks had a kind of deal in our heads: we'll put up with your bullshit as long as, at the end of the day, we're on the right side of history. In the last few years, that meant tolerating the deranged bothersiderism that pretended that anything Hunter Biden was remotely equal to a single hour of the criminality of Donald Trump. That means watching CNN bring on guests and analysts who were objectively despicable human beings who regularly lied. Sorry, but a rational news organization wouldn't invite back anyone who said the 2020 election was stolen. That's fucking deranged and the people who believe it should be treated as such, up to and including Trump. And I'm not even talking about the regular awful conservative jizz spewers like Scott Jennings. 

But we hung in there because we got our fix of appalling acts by Trump and his administration and then the MAGA freaks when Trump was out of office. And they were covered like the appalling acts they are. And it was good enough. For a while, that is.

In the 2024 election, on CNN, we watched as every outrageous thing that Trump said he would do if reelected and every crime that he was on trial for and every horrible fucking cretin in his circle and every consolidation of oligarchic power around him was simply another story and not anything abnormal or alarming. To an extent, with Trump's vows about controlling the media, CNN was reporting on its own destruction with the objectivity of a crazy person recording his observations of the scenery after leaping off a tall building. And, I mean, just fuck you for the act of faux balance. If someone is about to kill you and you've got access to a gun, you don't discuss the ethics of gun ownership in the United States and the propagation of violence because of it. No, you shoot the fucking gun and explain yourself later. Journalism had a responsibility to prevent Trump from getting reelected because it's a check on unchecked power, which Trump promises to wield. If you are part of a democratic system and exist because of that democratic system, then when something is going to tear down that system, you deal with it like a threat. Instead, we got more yahoo safaris where Trump voters were interviewed as if their fucking stupidity was down-home wisdom.

On MSNBC, it was arguably worse because they were attempting to fight the good fight but in the most annoying way possible: by assuming that everyone was terminally online. It said what we wanted to hear, just feeding an anti-Trump emotional algorithm that was satisfying as hell, but ultimately was worthless. (Again, I find MSNBC mostly unwatchable, but your mileage may vary.)

Since the election, ratings have plummeted for CNN and MSNBC, which is to be expected to an extent, but usually the falloff post-election is across the board as people pay attention to other shit. However, Fox "news" is gaining viewers, and, of course, the mad motherfuckers there are crowing about it. 

But this isn't about ratings. It's about a very real feeling that we were abused and hoodwinked into a belief about the election that simply wasn't true. To an extent, that's on us. We wanted to cling to the hosts and guests who declared that they thought the polls were way off and Harris would win in a blow-out. But we have to live with ourselves. We don't have to live with the people who fostered that fantasy. 

And with the frightened voices of Joe and Mika talking about how they flew to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump's voluminous ass echoing in our ears, with CNN reporting on family separation policy as if it's the same as a new tax on Corn Flakes, with the shift in the reporting on the economy to emphasize how great it is as opposed to the gloom and doom of the pre-election period, with the pretense of objectivity and the mask of fairness making the monstrous innocuous, with the billionaires who own the mass media desperate to kowtow to the incoming fascist regime, I can't figure out a single reason to go back to my decades-long addiction. 

I've kicked you out, CNN and MSNBC. You fucked it all up and now I'm fucking done. Get your shit together or just disappear.

Note to Democrats: We Have to See You Fight, Even If It's a Losing Cause

Since the (re)election of Donald Trump, it's natural that Democrats would engage in some self-reflection. Of course, it's not like Republicans did that after Trump lost in 2020 and then tried to overthrow the election. But, you know, if you're a rational group of humans, you reassess after you lost and think about what you could do better. Perhaps you come up with some new ways to inspire voters. Perhaps you think about the running of campaigns and methods. Maybe you even figure out how to present your party's beliefs in a way that makes more sense. 

You know what you don't do? You don't cry, "Uncle" for an extended period of time while punching yourself in the face repeatedly. You don't decide that the real solution to your failure to move the needle the two percent it might have taken to win is to abandon your values and to turn your back on the rhetoric you used throughout the campaign about Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. You don't throw people and movements under the bus. And you don't, you absolutely don't offer a helping hand and any words of encouragement or praise for a man who you declared a "fascist" and a "Nazi" and a criminal and a rapist whose return to power would mark the end of American democracy and would plunge the world into chaos. 

But that's exactly what Democrats have been doing. From Joe Biden, who is still president, acting chummy with Trump at the White House to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis praising the lunatic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to Bernie freakin' Sanders starting a tweet about the Pentagon budget with "Elon Musk is right." You know what you call someone who is willing to work with fascists? I don't think I even have to answer that. 

Sanders has been extra odious, saying that the election results were because Democrats "abandoned working class people." Then you add in Democrats like rank opportunists Reps. Seth Moulton and Tom Suozzi blaming their party for refusing to condemn the extraordinarily rare occurrence of transgender girls playing in girls sports in high school, with Suozzi saying that the party was "pandering to the far left." Look, I don't think Kamala Harris ran a flawless campaign at all, but one thing you cannot say about her or the Biden administration is that they didn't do anything for the working class or that they did anything about transgender rights. It's simply false on both accounts. And it's giving Republican lies credence instead of saying what's really true, which is that Trump won because people believed his falsehoods, not because he was telling any hard truths. You have to be willing to tell people who voted against you that they're wrong, not that you're wrong.

What Democrats are missing right now is that we, the base, desperately need to see them out there fighting. Yes, there has been some strong condemnation of Trump's alarming parade of criminals, predators, freaks, and con artists as nominees to cabinet and other offices. But that's not enough to rally us because lemme tell you something, Democratic leadership, we're hurting. We're watching as the cases against Trump for genuinely serious crimes (like, you know, leading a coup and stealing top secret documents) disappear. We're watching as the other cases are ground down in proceedings that will likely end with dismissal. We're waiting for the Biden administration to go into overdrive for not just judicial appointments, but for things like renewal of Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of migrants. 

But even that's not enough. One of the things that Republicans did successfully when they were out of power was fight and fight, even if they were losing battles, like the constant effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act. And I know you're tired, Democrats in office. God, we voters are, too. But we're angry, and you're giving us nothing to focus our anger and our desire to resist.

Right now, I'd love to see some Hail Mary passes from the Biden administration. I want to see him grant blanket immunity to every migrant who has applied for asylum and to pardon all the Dreamers and give them a path to citizenship. I want to see him try one more time to come up with a way to do away with student loan debt. I want him to commute the sentences of every federal prisoner on death row so that Trump can't come in and start executions again. 

And I want to see Democrats go for it on whether or not Trump is ineligible to take office under the 14th Amendment's prohibition on anyone having committed insurrection from being president. 

I know, I know, I know these are all causes that are likely doomed to fail (except for the commutation of sentences, which is totally within the president's power). But losing causes also draw a line in the sand; they clarify what you believe in and what your opponents believe, and they show that you are willing to fight, even when the odds are against you. That gets people ready to go again when the 2026 midterms come around: we can see what's possible if power is shifted, we can get the messaging tested and strong, and we can see you're not just laying down your arms.

Even on a symbolic level, I want to see the groveling before Trump to stop. No Democrat should go to the inauguration. By going, you are ignoring his lies, and you might believe you are honoring the American tradition of peaceful transfer of power, but you're actually giving aid and comfort to someone who ended that tradition. You're forgiving a criminal who has show no remorse and you're abandoning everything that Democrats have fought against for the last decade And for what? For the hope that he maybe won't set a Kash Patel-led FBI after you for having opposed him? For a moment of his idiot hordes not inundating your offices with death threats? Being decent to indecent people is a fool's game.

Because, see, right now it seems like Democrats aren't fighting. It seems like they've surrendered. And that sucks because the rest of us out here in the trenches haven't.

A Thanksgiving Poem from Indigenous America

"after Sacred Water"
by Kinsale Drake, a Dine' and a member of the Navajo nation

I.
we inherit:
every gathering pool a blessing
formed by careful hands each monsoon
a heartbeat turquoise vein
the sound of underwater
brimmed with mosses
here laps the quiet tide of love

II.
in the summers we would flock to my great-aunt’s
swimming hole down the canyon
dizzy from the jumbled journey in a truck bed
poke at the tadpoles squirming in the red clay
my mother watched from orchard shade
she had been down here many years before
with her sisters her brothers
picking apples, following the bend
of the river leading the goats to the wayside to drink
now the water is too polluted
with cow manure uranium
we trace the mud with our eyes
watch the petroglyphs stretch in the shadows
miss the feeling of the sun wicking river from our skin

III.
in 1956/ the glen canyon dam began construction/ with an explosion/
was hit with a demolition blast keyed/ by the push of a button/
in the oval office/ the bottom of the canyon/ dotted by navajo/
ute/ paiute footprints/
still cooling/ the explosion/ a scar in the earth still aching
with uranium mines/ yellowcake/ yellow corn/ tumbled
in the runoff/ what do you call ancestral homestead/
stopped like a kitchen sink/ the water/ of your people
redirected to ranches/ fatten cattle that render the san juan undrinkable/
quench the white men in bars that don’t admit ndns/ water
and mineral/ packed into bombshells/ how do you drown
by your own artery/ today
the lake has never been shallower/ a drought
of its own becoming/ not even time to weep/ before the crossing/
before the fleeing/ marina of familiar fossils/ zebra mussels
scour the bones of old adobe/ stilled
beneath the surface/ the ancient sun rendered closer/
every day/ as the ranchers lament the withering/ the tourists
sticky with sun/ dock their houseboats/ the people who have known
this land/ see the slickrock
still emerging

IV.
in the third world, coyote took the water monster’s baby
so the water monster decided to make it rain endlessly
the water rose and flooded and choked the peaks
of sacred mountains
and the beings that lived there
did not know where to escape the flood
what saved the world was a reed curling
into the sky a way to climb out into the fourth world
an offering by First Man beloved by the gods
the one from which we all were formed
there are things that remain stolen that holy people
weep for and others look to us with upturned hands
ask where the reeds come from flee to the highest peaks
dream of another world they can scurry into
through a wound in the sky
we have no answer for them we have known this the entire time
tell our stories go to the water
tend this land
and remember

Democrats Must Stand Up for the Rights of Transgender People, Including Trans Youths

It wasn't that long ago, less than ten years, in fact, where, in a confirmation hearing for Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was a prick even before his mouth became Donald Trump's penis koozie, wailed and gnashed about the growing passage of laws in the states allowing same-sex couples to marry, "What’s the legal difference between a ban on same-sex marriage being unconstitutional but a ban on polygamy being constitutional? Could you try to articulate how one could be banned under the constitution and the other not?" While this whole issue would be put to rest a few months later by the then-relatively sane Supreme Court in the Obergefell decision, Graham's screaming mimi routine had been echoing throughout the nutsosphere for years: same-sex marriage would lead to legalizing marriage with animals or marriage with babies. It was crazy shit. One ultra-evangelical group of fucknuts said that if New York legalized same-sex marriage in 2011, it "could prove to be decisive in the culture war for America's soul."

Of course, of course, of fucking course, none of this came true. Not a goddamn thing. No one tried to get a law passed so they could marry their dog. Babies are still single. And polygamy is still illegal even if some religious shitdicks practice it. The worst thing that's wrong is that it was not, in fact, decisive in the culture war. All that happened is that same-sex couples could get married and have the pleasures and pains of matrimony that opposite-sex couples got to enjoy. For nearly three-fourths of Americans, it's all good. That mass support for same-sex marriage happened pretty fucking quickly after the Supreme Court decision, but it had been building for years as more and more states legalized it and more and more people got exposed to it. What once seemed exotic and alien now just seemed normal as hell to most everyone. Essentially, they realized that it didn't affect them in any way whatsoever, so why the fuck should they care? God bless the apathetic USA, I guess.

One of the biggest issues in GOP ads in the 2024 election was rights for trans people, both youth and adult. The Trump campaign and his party decided that the idea of trans kids participating in sports (or, to be specific, trans girls participating in girls sports since no one seems to make a fuss about trans boys doing the same in boys sports) and the idea of a trans woman using a bathroom for her gender rather than biological sex (or, to be specific, trans women using women's bathrooms since no one seems to make a fuss about trans men using the men's room) would freak people the fuck out and turn them against the Democrats. They and their PACs spent a couple hundred million dollars on the ads, running them in Senate races and elsewhere, and flooding the airwaves with them for Trump. The accuracy of the ads didn't matter, as truth and reality doesn't matter at all to the right. One line in an ad, "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you," pretty much said everything that assholes wanted to hear.

And while the jury is out on how much they tilted the election for Trump, they defined Democrats as supportive of some kind of deviancy, even if the real deviant fucknuts are those who obsess over the genitals of children and those of people taking a shit. I'll just add that, anecdotally, everyone I've talked to who voted for Trump told me it was because of trans issues. I've heard the same from other friends who dares to ask Trumpers how they could vote for someone who is objectively one of the shittiest people ever to draw breath. 

Lots of people will be quick to point out that Kamala Harris didn't talk about trans people at all. Sure, Tim Walz might have, since he actually did something to assure gender-affirming care for trans kids in Minnesota. But the Democratic presidential campaign avoided the issue like a potato on fire, and that was fucked up. I'm on the side of people like Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania, that it was a huge fucking mistake not to stand up to the attacks and defend trans rights. Like not allowing a Palestinian speaker, it was political malpractice not to have a trans speaker at the Democratic National Convention. It didn't matter that Harris wasn't campaigning on "woke" or trans or anything else. Republicans were going to say she was, so, fuck it, may as well do the honorable thing and defend people who need defending. 

Harris's silence on all things trans (except in the most generalized mention of LGBTQ+ rights) allowed Republicans to damage not just her but, more importantly and in a far worse way, trans people. If nothing else was being fed to people about trans men and women and youths, if all they heard was the horrific negative shit, then they'll assume that's all there is to say about it. Fucking hell, they barely came at Trump for saying that kids go into school and get their sex changed at recess or some such bullshit, which was legitimately insane. Trump and the GOP are planning to unleash hell on trans people, especially on kids seeking gender-affirming care. And, instead of calling out the GOP for being fear-mongering little bitches, Democrats are actually debating if they should abandon trans people altogether on some issues. 

That's an absolute dereliction of political and social duty and so anti-progressive that you may as well close up shop. You can see the effects of this refusal to engage in the battle with Republicans feeling absolutely free to be the worst version of their already motherfucking awful selves, especially with the election of Democrat Sarah McBride as the first transgender person in the Congress. A former LGBTQ+ ally, Rep. Nancy Mace did a heel turn and decided to make life miserable for McBride and all trans people in the Capitol by getting Speaker Mike "I want to see what porn my son sees" Johnson to say that everyone has to use the bathroom of their biological sex, which begs the unanswered question of who is going to check and how. Not one to be out-crazied, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a troll both inside and out, allegedly said that she'd "fight" a transgender woman who came into her precious ladies room. 

To their credit, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrats have finally found a spine on this trans issue, speaking out against Mace and Johnson for their transphobia. Now how about translating that into other action? How about saying that unless someone announces their biological sex, it's impossible to know whether the person in the bathroom stall has a dick or a pussy? How about saying that if it was so easy for men to get away with sexual assault by putting on a dress and going into a bathroom, a whole fuck of a lot of them would have done it (and even if that did happen, it's about a cis male committing the act, not a trans woman)? How about saying that the number of trans girls playing high school sports is so small that it's fewer than the number of trans people who are murdered for being trans each year? How about saying that it's between kids and their parents if they want to take puberty blockers or have top surgery? How is that any goddamn business of anyone else's? You get to stand up for parental rights there.

This is what the fuck we're supposed to do as Democrats: work to make sure that oppressed and demonized groups feel safe in this America and have the same opportunities as everyone else, including the right to just live their fucking lives. Don't do the assholes' job for them by being silent. Speaking out and being an active ally can lead to normalization, yes, but also demystification. See, the more you talk about it, the less scary it becomes. The more visibility Democrats give trans people, the more it just becomes another thing that everyone learns is no big deal to anyone except the trans person and their loved ones. That, like same-sex marriage, it's not about you unless it is you. 

Biden Will Be Remembered More for What He Didn't Do Than What He Did

Other than the election and everything related to it, one thing stuck in my craw this past week, and it stuck there hard, so much so that I can't cough it up. At her daily briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if President Joe Biden would pardon his son Hunter, who is facing sentencing after pleading guilty to federal charges related to tax evasion and lying on an application for buying a gun. She responded, "We've been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no."

Now, you can tell me that Joe Biden respects the law and lots of such shit. But Hunter Biden was the subject of a slavering witch hunt by Republicans who were out to destroy his life for simply being Joe Biden's son. The fact that we know anything about him at all is a testament to how clean Joe Biden's record is: they had nothing on the father, so they went after the son so they could make the father guilty by association. In other words, the motherfuckers wanted blood, and they weren't going to stop until they got it.

Yet here's Joe Biden, who is not only leaving office, but that office is being taken over by the man who put the target on his family's backs. When a parent has the power to save a child from a pack of wolves, that parent has an obligation to pluck the child to safety. Sure, the GOP and the gabbling goblins on the right would lose their shit, but they'll lose their shit if Hunter Biden is sentenced to anything other than the death penalty. 

It's ragingly frustrating. Pardon your son, Joe. Jesus Christ, use the power you fucking have while you have it. Don't let the bastards get everything they want. Fucking hell. 

In late 2019, I wrote that I didn't want Biden to be the Democratic nominee because he believed too much that he could work with Republicans and that he wouldn't bother punishing Trump and the fuckers who aided and abetted his crimes. Biden actually said at a fundraiser back then, "With Donald Trump out of the way, you’re going to see a number of my Republican colleagues have an epiphany. Mark my words. Mark my words...It’s going to take two things: One is somebody who in fact, knows how to reach across the aisle and get things done." 

I know we all blame Merrick Garland for the failure to prosecute Trump quickly and we want to hang him up like pinata and pummel him (rhetorically, of course). But I would not be the least bit surprised if Joey Gladhand up there didn't hold the Justice Department back, thinking that not going after Trump would buy him some good will with the GOP as he tried to get shit done. He learned the lesson that all Democrats are cursed to learn too late: Republicans are motherfuckers and they will try to fuck mother every chance they get. That's what they do. It's right there in the word. 

Biden made restoring norms that Trump had shit on and tossed into the garbage more important than wielding power. But he didn't realize that institutionalists like him were worthless in the Trump-warped DC landscape he returned to. And Democrats followed his lead. Sure, they were able to get some pretty amazing things passed, but they never used the power they had. When Jim Jordan, who looks like if armpit sweat were a person, defied a House committee subpoena, they never once threatened to bring charges against him or have him arrested. They just let it go. That was a pattern: Republicans do or say something outrageous and Democrats just keep their heads down and plow ahead, not realizing the outrage is actually hurting them. If you're MMA fighting but you want to treat it like a boxing match and only use those moves, don't be surprised when you get kicked in the throat and land on the ground, gasping for breath.

It continues even after the 2024 election. We went through a couple of years of Biden and Democrats telling us that Donald Trump's reelection is an apocalyptic event that will wreck our nice democracy and shatter our alliances around the world and send the country reeling into despair. But what does Biden do after Trump won? He fucking congratulates him and tells the country that everything is just fine. No. Just fucking no. Be mad. Chastise us. Tell us it's fucked up and now we need to be vigilant or Trump will shred what remains of our national character. "I've said many times, you can't love your country only when you win," Biden said after the election. But you don't need to roll over and pretend shit's not fucked up. Biden loved his son when his son was fucking up, but he sure as shit let Hunter know he was fucking up and needed to do something about it. 

I'm not blaming Biden directly for Kamala Harris's loss. I don't know what would have happened if he had dropped out early and Democrats had gone through a bruising primary battle. But I am blaming him for allowing Trump to be able to run. I blame him for not immediately having the lead insurrectionist arrested after inauguration. Like Barack Obama's failure to hold Wall Street bankers or George W. Bush to account for all their crimes, it casts a pall over the presidency and the system of justice. The only way ruthless assholes learn to back down is to be a ruthless asshole to them. 

I'm writing this as a way of saying that the Democratic leadership of the future should not be so invested in returning to doing business as usual. Biden promised us that, but it wasn't enough because Republicans and their media outrage machine didn't fucking want it and Trump wouldn't allow it. That ship of comity and cooperation has sailed the fuck away. If we ever have another election, whoever emerges as a leader out of the reckoning that Democrats are having would have to be a take-no-prisoners destroyer of norms because norms aren't fucking laws. No one gets punished for not doing things the Way They've Always Been Done, so don't. Break open the Supreme Court. Fire anyone who Trump leaves behind (like Postmaster Louis Dejoy). Fuck process. Fuck procedure. Fuck any of it that gets in the way of putting this strain of politics in this country in its grave. Republicans learned that the only thing that should encumber them is laws, and then they will test those laws until they reach the breaking point or they can get away with whatever the fuck they want to do. I'm not saying to be the abject Constitution-haters Republicans are, but, Jesus fuck, murder the Senate weirdness like nominees being held up when a senator from that state objects. Use power like you like having power.

Institutionalism is bullshit. Tradition is often just another word for "behind the times." Goddamn, I can't get over that the president won't even pardon his maligned and persecuted son because of a belief in the innate goodness of institutions. Biden's tragic flaw, like its been for so many Democrats, is believing that if you just show your opponent that you're playing by the rules honestly, they'll respect that and work with you. It simply doesn't work that way anymore (if it ever truly did). The price we now have to pay for that fucked up adherence to an idealized past is incalculable. Despite all the good that Biden did do, much of what he got done will now be reversed by these jabbering jackals who could give a shit less if it hurts people to do it. Despite having made a significant contribution to helping the working class, mitigating climate change, getting us out of a pandemic, and more, that failure by Biden to evolve, even after having a front-row seat to Republicans obstructing Barack Obama endlessly, even while watching Republicans devolve in increasing and frightening ways, will be his legacy.

(Note: Well, that and his failure to even attempt to rein in Benjamin Netanyahu, but that's a post for another time.)

America Is a Floating Island of Garbage

Pundits and political commentators and randos on social media will come up with a thousand ways to explain what happened last night.

Some of them will blame Harris's failure to offer definite support for Palestinians and condemn Israel's genocide in Gaza. They'll say that that failure suppressed the Arab-American and Muslim vote, as well as turning off Gen Z, tuned into the slaughter on TikTok, and lefties who wanted an excuse to pretend to be edgy by not voting or voting third-party. 

They'll blame Harris's support for supposedly "woke" ideas like support for diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. They'll say that she was too left.

They'll blame Harris reaching out to Republicans, even campaigning with objectively awful people like Liz Cheney just because they, too, hate Trump. They'll say that she was too far right.

They'll say Harris embraced President Joe Biden too much. They'll say she embraced him too little. They'll say she didn't do enough to cater to this or that Democratic group or constituency. They'll wonder if she should have picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz. They'll say should have done Joe Rogan's show. Every single decision by the campaign will be questioned and criticized and torn apart. 

They'll say that Joe Biden should have remained the candidate, even though that would have meant another three months of Biden-is-too-old stores that were already turning the electorate against him. Or they'll say Biden should haven't run at all and allowed Democrats to nominate someone after a bruising primary fight, but there's no guarantee that would have changed a vote.

They'll call out Russian interference on Election Day, with bomb threats called into multiple locations in Black-majority districts. They'll say that disinformation, like fake Haitian voters, was spread by malicious nations and eager clout-seekers online. They might even blame third-party candidates, although that math doesn't add up.

And on and on and on. They will find a way to blame everyone and everything except those who deserve the blame. 

At the end of the day, a majority of Americans wanted Donald Trump to be president, and they didn't give a damn about anything else. They hate what he hates. They want to see retribution agains the imagined foes he's conjured. They did this even with everything they knew about him and his extravagant criminality and treason. They simply didn't believe it or they liked it. His voters might have been misinformed about a lot of things, but they know who Trump is, and they're completely fine with it. Where we see a rapist and a felon and a coup leader, they see a Tony Soprano-like antihero. Where we saw a competent and accomplished Democratic candidate, they saw a communist harridan who will force schools to give sex changes to children and let Venezuelans take over towns out west. You laugh, but they hold this as true. God, they want to punish immigrants and women and trans people so fucking badly they can taste it. They want their tears and blood and screams to bathe them. 

There are things we know for sure. The Latino vote, especially men, tilted dramatically to Trump. White people, especially white men, voted for him. College-age men voted for Trump in much larger numbers than anticipated. And my generation, Gen X, betrayed everything that we were raised to believe about fakes and frauds in authority and went for Trump. All of them, us, deserve blame. America has a men problem, and it's scary as hell. 

But one thing above all other ruled the day, and, frankly, makes me embarrassed to live on this floating island of garbage we pretend is a country. And let me do this as an address to Trump's voters:

You are so fucking stupid, just the stupidest motherfuckers who ever were allowed to breathe. You're so stupid that you won't even realize how badly you've fucked everything up. Your stupidity is so deep, so ingrained, so far up your deranged asses that you won't even realize it when you become the victim of your own stupid decisions, when prices go up because of tariffs and the lack of workers for farms, when you're fucking drowning in your shitbox homes because nobody did anything to stop climate change, when your town's tax base has been deported, when your factories die because there aren't enough workers, when your daughters and wives die because of no access to the medical care they need, when the rank stupidity you force others to adopt ends up making all of you worthless shit lumps in a ditch, just vessels for algorithm-fed hate lessons on social media on your screens, masturbating into oblivion over the pain of others while ignoring the cries of everyone around you while the world burns. I'd tell you to go fuck yourselves, but you already have and you don't even know it.

Jesus fuck, you voted to protect abortion rights in Missouri and Montana while still voting for Trump and other Republicans who will pass a national ban, negating the amendments to your state constitutions. That is, in the most basic way, blindingly fucking stupid, demonstrating a complete ignorance of any way that our elections or government functions. And if you're in one of the many groups that Trump has explicitly promised to harm and you voted for him, you're a fucking joke.

And if I sound angry and disgusted, it's because at least in 2016 we could say that Trump didn't win the popular vote, that the country at large was still hanging in there. But not this time. This is who we are. None of it was enough, not the crimes, not the blatantly unAmerican policies, not the weirdness and obvious mental decline, not the shitshow that surrounds him. None of it. Trump increased his margins of victory across the nation, including in states like New Jersey and New York. That's so frightening.

And all those blames and excuses up there? Here's the coldest comfort I can offer: none of it would have mattered. I don't know what would have made a difference. This is who we are. This. This is who we are in the damned 21st-century. It's who we've always been. We're a nation founded on genocide and racism, enforced misogyny and absurd delusions of our superiority. It's in our DNA. And now we get to live out the natural and horrific extension of that.

You want me to end this by saying we should fight, by saying we need to regroup and defend those who will need defending (god, there are so many), by saying we're in this together. And maybe I'll get there. But right now, today, all I'm wondering is what, exactly, is worth fighting for. 

Donald Trump Will Want to Kill Us If He's Elected (and He Can Do It)

Kamala Harris has been very clear about the threat that a second Donald Trump presidency will pose to many people. She is never more passionate than when she's talking about how Trump's anti-abortion Supreme Court justices and Republicans across the country have caused deaths and harm to women. She said in her speech on the Ellipse last week that Trump "has an enemies list of people he intends to prosecute. He says that one of his highest priorities is to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers on January 6. Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him, people he calls, quote, 'the enemy from within America.'" She regularly asks her crowds to imagine Trump "without guardrails," meaning that he can act with the immunity and impunity granted to presidents by that same corrupt, anti-American, anti-democratic Supreme Court majority in Trump v. United States, a case name that has more meaning than it ought to. 

And all of this is great and necessary, but when it comes to the power that Trump will wield as president (or Harris, but she's not fucking insane and senile), I think that specificity is necessary. In other words, I don't think voters really understand what could potentially be unleashed here. It's gotta be made plain and personal. For instance, during arguments on the January 6 immunity case, I really wanted the government to tell the justices that, under what Trump was proposing, a president would have the right to have them killed if they thought the justices were a danger to the country. No, I don't think it would have changed the outcome, but make motherfuckers have to consider their own mortality.

The same goes with a Trump restoration. As the Brennan Center for Justice said about the garbage ruling and the garbage court, "It threatens to free presidents from the constraints of law and democracy. And it paves the way for future presidents to try to make good on the most antidemocratic of all propositions: might makes right." Yeah, no guardrails and no moral compass will make for a nightmare. 

I try to avoid hysterical statements about shit, but when generals are warning that Trump is a fascist and unfit to be president, when people who were slobbering supporters are telling us that Trump is a danger to the nation, it's time to fucking listen because people who don't traffic in hyperbole aren't being hyperbolic. They are telling you what shit is. So let's pretend that Trump comes in and decides to take these dictatorial powers to their fullest extent. He clearly thinks that the Constitution is easily tossed aside if the president thinks it should be. If we go down authoritarian highway, we're fucked. 

We all understand pretty clearly that Trump's enemies, especially Republicans who opposed him, including everyone who warned about him, are doomed if he's back in office. And Democrats like Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and, well, most elected Democrats will be in that group, too. In fact, some of them know that. They will be rounded up. They will be arrested. Some of them will be executed without trial. Trump loves the idea of military tribunals, perhaps even televised so he can get the ratings. And Trump will justify this as making the country safer, under the power that Supreme Court has given him. He's already declared them all enemies and "scum" and dangerous. If you don't think that Trump is that petty, vindictive, vengeful, and demented, you have been asleep for the last few years. 

Remember, according to the Supreme Court, the only way that he can be stopped is if he's impeached and removed from office for these acts. And I guarantee there's at least a third of the Senate who wouldn't vote to remove (you need two-thirds to do it). 

Let's keep gaming this out, going to some extremes for the sake of argument. Trump's gotta maintain the fiction about the corruption of elections, so any officials who he sees are responsible for his loss in 2020 would be rounded up. Any election workers who were in, say, Detroit or Philadelphia or Atlanta. Former Georgia and Arizona officials are as good as gone. He'll have to take care of the media pretty quickly, too, to make sure that he's the only source of information and "facts." He'll also go after any very rich people who opposed him and who haven't gotten the fuck out of the country (which many of them will). And you'd think at that moment that maybe it would be enough, that he could do what he wants to make life miserable for the rest of us under emergency powers that he's declared because of the "invasion" at the border or whatever other fake crisis he can conjure. 

Except then there's the other fictions that need to be maintained, all those bullshit, anti-science, ahistorical ideas that he's run on. His administration will come after or let states come after anyone who teaches that climate change is real or that racism is a thing or that trans people exist. Purging intellectuals who are against the dear leader is par for the totalitarian course. This is when it starts to hit home for more people: "Shit, my wife was just teaching the fact that seas are rising and temperatures have gone up and now she's been sent to work in the radioactive flood zones of Florida." It's where I get worried for my tenured ass. 

And if you read your Project 2025, private businesses will be affected, too. You'll see a massive brain drain and a shifting of financial centers away from the United States because investors have to live in reality, but Trump doesn't. He'll come after companies that have diversity policies or who have made adjustments for living in a world that is fucked by the climate crisis. Workers in those industries will be arrested because they believe in facts and observable reality. Here's what Project 2025 says on page 42, dripping with hatred, "Those who run our so-called American corporations have bent to the will of the woke agenda and care more for their foreign investors and organizations than their American workers and customers. Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas." Yeah, they're gonna wanna kill some "socialists."

And Trump's already promising a new ban on Muslims coming into the country. And he can go from there to deport people who are here legally. He wants to get rid of birthright citizenship for migrant families. We'll have the camps set up for his mass deportation of millions of migrants in this country. Hell, his troops will have experience rounding up large numbers of people, tearing families apart, clearing out entire neighborhoods. Filling those camps again wouldn't be a problem. Christian nationalists will demand that kind of purity, as well as an implementation of bible-based policies. 

What about anyone who supports Palestine? Or anyone who might protest something he does? Any protest will be squelched and those involved will be rounded up. That means college kids and younger will be subject to arrest, detention, or worse. 

We know that Trump wants more executions, and he loves the idea of killing people. He wants shoplifters shot without due process. He thinks there needs to be a violent day to end crime. He wants drug dealers killed. Again, nothing short of removal from office prevents him doing any of this. 

Now you might think that there's no way that people in the government will allow this, that they'll balk at being so terrible. But one of the first things Trump's gonna do is get rid of civil service protections for government workers. He'll fire tens of thousands of them and install only loyalists, people ready to carry out these policies, people who believe in this shit. Look out at any MAGA Nazi rally. They're filled with people begging to do this shit. They won't even care that Trump will end up tanking the economy and ruining their daily lives. They'll blame the few remaining libs for that.

To take it even further, Trump could fire any military officers who don't want to carry out his demands. It doesn't take much imagination to see what that leads to. 

And if you think I'm being hysterical here, well, I'd rather be hysterical about this than deluded that a fucked-in-the-head Trump, surrounded by people like Bannon and Stephen Miller and every Putin-humper and Orban-fellater and Jesus-sodomizer he can find, wouldn't try to remake the nation in his mad image. And, by the way, Trump is likely worse than Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban or even Xi Jinping. They at least have some beliefs, shitty as they may be, that go beyond greed and racism (and all at least still provide health care for their citizens). Trump is more like Kim Jong-Un of North Korea, a dumpy little manbaby who likes playing dress-up, watching things go boom, and forcing people to love him. 

If he's so awful and such a threat to the very existence of the country as an alleged "beacon of freedom," you might wonder why he's allowed to even be a free man. Going beyond the usual, obvious answers of "because he's rich" and "because Merrick Garland is a feckless bitch," there's a good chance that, for the good of some kind of stability, those in power who are opposed to Trump want him to lose the election. Except that's what Democrats did in 2016 and how did that work out?

Lemme take this one step further: I think that the most dangerous time in recent U.S. history will be the period between election and inauguration. It's gonna be nuts if Trump loses, but we know what's coming (to an extent). But if Trump wins, it could be dangerous for a different reason. Because, see, Joe Biden does have those exact same Supreme Court-granted superpowers now, and if he and the people around him really think a Trump presidency could lead to the end of the United States and world instability, well, wouldn't they have a responsibility to act? And then what would happen?

To bring this back to this election, you need to understand that electing Harris is the only way to stop this or something even close to this from happening to you, to all of us. One of the things that Harris is running on is to make sure this shit doesn't happen and hopefully make it so that it can't happen with anyone in the future. We not only have to fill holes in the law that let a president go full Hitler, but we have to get the Supreme Court under control. One reason I voted for her already and want her to win is because we need a sane adult to make us sane once more after nearly a decade of madness. I'm hoping that a Harris administration will understand that the only way to end this is to put some motherfuckers in prison for good. (Sorry. I don't believe in the death penalty. And in this case, we don't need martyrs.)

Yeah, it's important to get inflation under control and expand housing and deal with whatever the "crisis" is at the border, but a potential Harris administration needs to get our shit together as a country or we're gonna be back in this bullshit spot, teetering at the edge of a cliff like we're all in a bus that's half on and half off, again. 

We Need to Be Done With Donald Trump

One of the most stunning things about the last near-decade now is how much the country has been contorted by one man. We're in this fucked beyond fucked moment, teetering on the brink of totally and irrevocably fucked, because of Donald Trump. Yes, it's also everyone who voted for him, everyone who elevated him, everyone who kowtowed to him, and everyone who wipes his ass so that he keeps going. But, in the end, it comes down to one goddamned man. It's perfect example of what happens when your nice little democracy relies too much on basic human decency and when the decent ignore or elide the acts of the indecent.

The seeds for Donald Trump's ascendancy were planted over 40 years ago, with the rise of the Moral Majority and Reagan's openness to a portion of the craziest motherfuckers on the right, allowing the evangelicals and the John Birch Society leftovers a place at the political table. It continued, with the odious Pat Buchanan's nativist campaign, openly saying shit that Republicans had been implying for years. I'm not going to summarize the entire history of the ascension of the modern bugfuck insane conservative movement (besides, Geoffrey Kabaservice has done it far better than I could), but it's a straight line from the 2000 election fuckery to the enforced patriotism of the post-9/11 era to the Imperial Presidency idea of Dick fuckin' Cheney to the Tea Party to Trump, with lots of other events and ideas in-between. 

Trump is the vessel this evolving right-wing oligarchical threat was waiting for. Imperfect, for sure, but a populist who ran for office with a built-in audience that would sustain any efforts he made? That just makes the whole effort that much easier. If you get a skilled carnival barker to get the rubes to drop their hard-earned cash so they can enter the tent, that's half the battle. The other half is convincing them to suspend all reason and logic so that they'll believe it when a woman is sawed in half or rabbit appears out of a hat. They won't believe it's a trick at all, no matter how much someone tries to convince them it was sleight of hand or forced perspective. A skillful barker will get the rubes to not only believe in magic, but to insist that anyone who tells them it isn't magic is a fool: "Goddamnit, that woman levitated, and you can't tell me she didn't."

Metaphors aside, we find ourselves in this extraordinarily dangerous moment, yes, because of that entire history, but primarily because of Donald Trump. Without him, this effort to completely undermine the electoral process of the United States wouldn't have gotten any momentum. How do I know that? Because it didn't get any momentum after 2000, when George W. Bush actually lost but no one did a goddamn thing, and after 2004, when there were allegations of shenanigans involving voting machines in Ohio. No one exploited that to discredit voting all around the country. Hell, John Kerry didn't even challenge the results. 

But Trump challenged results even when he won in 2016 because his fragile little ego couldn't handle that he lost the popular vote. He insisted that he lost California only because of non-citizens voting, which was absolute hogshit. It didn't happen. It's never happened that more than a statistically insignificant number of non-citizens has voted and virtually all of those were mistakes, not malice. Instead of accepting victory with some measure of decency and perhaps humility because of the popular vote loss, Trump barreled ahead with the brazen assertion that he really won the popular vote and anyone who said otherwise was lying. 

And it fucking worked. It became an article of faith among his MAGA idiot hordes that Trump was robbed of full victory. It's magic, and the reality of the trick didn't matter. That set the stage for the 2020 election and all the violence and violent rhetoric that came from one man's refusal to accept the outcome. You might have forgotten or suppressed it, but between Election Day 2020 and January 6, 2021, it was one long howl of false outrage and lies, including unnecessary recounts, dozens of failed court cases, and, finally, attacks on the people who take on the job of making sure our democracy functions like a democracy when it comes to voting. Trump called any election officials or state officials who dared to say he lost "enemies of the people" and he and his goons ruined the lives of ordinary Americans earning a paycheck. (Although some have gotten gratifying revenge on these abject cockmites.) The kick in the nuts of the whole pathetic exercise is how many millions of people believed and still believe him. It's like mass fucking hypnosis. 

To put it simply, Donald Trump had no problem completely undermining one of the foundations of this country, and he had no issues with making a significant number of Americans lose faith in how their states and the nation run elections. It didn't matter that the 2020 election was a goddamn miracle because it took place in the middle of a fucking pandemic and should have been one of the great moments of communal triumph in our history. No, we couldn't have that because Trump, who was expected to lose, lost. And now just 28% of Republicans are confident that the votes in the 2024 election will be accurately counted. It's fucking madness, and one man is responsible for that plunge from 55% in 2016. 

It's not that big a leap to say that if Trump can so easily throw aside the integrity of our elections which, 2000 aside, has been pretty fucking decent for a couple of generations, for his own ends, then he can just as easily throw out even more norms and foundational aspects and, well, fuck, laws. He'll keep plodding along, with a Supreme Court decision that lets him basically do whatever the fuck he wants, until none of us recognize the country anymore. It's already fading away in the MAGA haze that can't be penetrated, in a fog of racism and hatred and a desire for the blood of perceived enemies to be spilled. It's not that it can't happen here. It's that it is very much already happening. 

If you feel like I do, like we're existing in a panic attack wrapped in an fever dream covered in a secret sauce of anxiety, then understand this: the only way it ends is to be done with Donald Trump. We need it to fucking stop, so he needs to lose and then we need to go through whatever avalanche of bullshit Trump is going to subject us to as he flails about in his last gasps of electoral relevance, aided by Elon Musk's billions and supported by the MAGA drones who would lay down their lives for their right to continue to be racist and dunk on the libs and beat up trans kids and tear apart migrant families. We need to go through it and come out the other side and see what's left and build it back to some kind of normal again. 

I don't think all of this (gestures at everything) continues as it is once we're done with Trump. There is no one who scratches the celebrity itch and gets the stupidest people to vote. All those wannabe successors are worthless, and even the famous MAGA suck-ups don't have Trump's P.T. Barnum-like ability to corral the rubes and get them to give their money and their freedom to protect him. Unless Trump himself anoints a successor, which he would only do if he won this election. Otherwise, he'll try to insist that he can run again in 2028, and that'll just be sad. 

We can be done. Really. This can be over. Think about how that would feel, how we wouldn't have to hear his slurring, sloppy voice or read his idiot brain droppings and pretend that they matter. Think of the feeling of liberation and the sense that maybe there is a future where we make things better. We need this. 

It's one fucking guy. For fuck's sake, we should be able to step over his ass and move ahead. 

It Really Matters That We Don't Know a Great Deal About Donald Trump

The louche punditocracy of the corporate media made a huge deal about "what we know" when President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and was replaced with Vice President Kamala Harris. Story after story was all about how voters didn't "know" Harris and how that would impact her election chances. And it never really stopped. Hell, at the beginning of this month, Fox "news" was still blaring, "Some Biden 2020 voters say they don't know enough about Kamala Harris," with an article that included such insightful words from supposedly undecided voters like "She has been the vice president for the past four years and not really implemented anything," which means they've probably only been watching Fox "news." 

But there's a fuck of a lot we don't know about Donald Trump and it's some pretty basic, life-or-death shit. I mean, think about what we do know. It's a fact that he's a rapist. It's a fact that he's a 34 times convicted felon. It's a fact that he stole money from a charity. It's a fact that he defrauded people with Trump University. It's a fact that he is currently out of jail on bail. All these are Things We Know.

In the category of Things We Don't Know? You can start with his health. We got a detailed look at Harris's current fitness for the job of president, including that she is up-to-date on her colonoscopies and mammograms. And when you see her on the campaign trail, she is active, ebullient, and engaged, while in interviews, she answers the questions clearly. You might not like the answers, but they are always in the ball park of what was asked. 

Donald Trump's health is, to put it politely, fucking alarming. He's sweaty and exhausted, and his speech is slurred and listless. He can't respond directly to a question, getting so caught up in his repeated lies and bullshit that he leaps from subject to subject like Benjy Compson in the first part of The Sound and the Fury...Sorry, sometimes the literary scholar in me rears its ugly head...how about: "jumping around like a jackrabbit on meth that's been swatted in the nuts"? He's obviously declined mentally, and he was in pretty sorry shape back in 2015, and he's obviously reaching some kind of expiration date on many of the things a body existing on Big Macs and Diet Cokes and no exercise can do. 

But we don't know a goddamn thing about his health beyond what the disgraced and drunk Ronny Jackson said and two paragraphs from some doctor that offered no details at all. And that goes for the assassination attempt, too. We never heard from the medical personnel who treated him in Pennsylvania, only a report from Jackson who visited Trump in New Jersey after he was released. As PBS's Newshour commented, "After a would-be assassin shot and gravely wounded President Ronald Reagan in 1981, the Washington, D.C., hospital where he was treated gave regular, detailed public updates about his condition and treatment."

I'm not saying there's any conspiracy here except one of silence. And maybe voters need to know whether or not they're really voting for JD Vance presidency. 

Then there's Trump's criminal trials. It goes without saying that Attorney General Merrick Garland fucked up by not immediately pursuing investigations and charges against Trump in 2021. But the wanton fuckery of Trump's lawyers and his self-appointed lackey judges has prevented some really important information from reaching voters: Is he guilty? We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of trying to overthrow the government and steal the election. We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of stealing government secrets (or, you know, mishandling documents). We don't know if he's guilty, according to a jury, of trying to overturn the vote in Georgia (or, you know, get others to do it). 

We know he's a criminal, but we don't know the extent of his criminality. And, yeah, I know, I know, I fucking know, that most people with eyes who aren't fully up the ass of the MAGA monster or have a financial interest in Trump being free know for sure that Trump is goddamned traitor who should have been arrested the second Joe Biden was sworn in. On top of the trials, he's supposed to be sentenced on November 26 for his 34 convictions in the New York hush money laundering. We don't know what that's going to be. 

Trump claims that it would be "election interference" for the public to know whether or not one of the two candidates is guilty of dozens of crimes directly related to his fitness for office. But, then again, Trump thinks that if a TV network edits an interview in a way he doesn't like, it's election interference. In her decision allowing the release of an appendix of evidence in the January 6 case, Judge Tanya Chutkan smacked down that bullshit: "If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute — or appear to be — election interference. The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests." Yeah, that's the correct framing: more information is better than ignorance. Of course, more information is like salt to the slugs of the right. 

And more: He's never released his tax returns. We really don't know the extent of Trump's financial entanglement with other nations. We honestly don't have a single detailed plan from him, beyond the Republican platform and Project 2025, which barely mentions tariffs at all, the apparent alpha and omega of his economic plan. 

This shit matters. All of it. But, instead, we hear that voters "know" Trump but not Harris, who has been very clear about what she wants to do and has now done a fuckton of interviews while Trump is practically heading into hibernation because his brain is two cups short of a full pack of pudding. 

Besides, voters should fucking know what Trump did in his first term, but they've apparently forgotten that it was a clusterfuck of terrible policies and attempts to grab the golden ring of fascism, but just missing. We hear very little about all that, too. Our lack of knowledge about some pretty basic shit involving Trump is just a huge, bright warning sign before we go off the election cliff. 

Unfucking What You Can: A Case for Voting for Harris Even If You're Pissed About Israel

I'm going to try to be as clear as possible here in where I'm coming from.

I'm not going to make this about Israel's war with Gaza and Lebanon except to say that I stand with the large number of Israelis and Palestinians and the Lebanese people who want a ceasefire and the hostages and prisoners brought home. Nor am I going to talk about the Biden/Harris administration's continued policy of arming Israel. I've been pretty clear that I oppose the blank check on weapons the United States has given Israel and that conditions need not only to be met but enforced when it comes to massacring civilians. I want the mass killing of children to end. Dismiss me if you want because of that.

This is really about voting for Kamala Harris for president despite her response to a grave and horrific situation in the Middle East. I understand the impulse to withhold your vote because of this. I don't agree with it, but I understand it. As I've said before, I went through it with Bill Clinton's reelection in 1996 (I was pissed at him for his inaction on the Rwandan genocide and welfare reform), although I ultimately voted for Clinton because I didn't want Bob Dole picking Supreme Court justices or other federal judges. 

But I haven't had the same impulse with Harris. It's not that I'm deluding myself into thinking that Harris is going to completely change US policy towards Israel once she gets into office. See, I have a few things I believe about this whole situation when it comes to the politics of this fucked situation. I think that Biden’s treatment of Benjamin Netanyahu has been ludicrously naive and ineffective and based in a fear about an electoral backlash to any hint of opposition to Israel, a fear based in the politics of 30 years ago. I think that the refusal to condemn the actions of Israel and to hold them to international law lessens the credibility of the US in holding bad actors to account. 

However, Harris is still a part of the Biden administration. She cannot state a policy completely at odds with the policy of the president, and I think that Biden has unintentionally screwed over Harris by letting Netanyahu roll him so completely. Harris is showing some tiny signs of shifting away from Biden's position, as when she was asked about supporting Netanyahu on 60 Minutes and she responded, "I think, with all due respect, the better question is, do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people. And the answer to that question is yes." If this means something, it's hard to say, but the right people are freaked out by what she said. It feels like she's testing the waters. 

Again, I don't believe that Harris will all of a sudden take a stand on limiting or stopping weapons flowing to Israel. She might, but I won't hold my breath. But it's pretty clear that Trump will be worse, aiding and abetting whatever extensive war crimes Netanyahu wants to commit, with the added bonus of threatening to deport anti-Israel protesters from the United States and reinstating his ban on people from Muslim countries. I also believe that Netanyahu is, at least partially, prosecuting this war in a way specifically meant to interfere in the US presidential election in Trump's favor.

It's a fucked situation, one of many fucked situations going on right now. My vote can't unfuck everything that's fucked. Even if the most perfect candidate in the world were nominated, it still wouldn't unfuck it all. I will disagree with something; I will still see something as fucked. But I have a responsibility to unfuck what I can unfuck in whatever way I can unfuck it. Frankly, we all do.

If I vote for Harris, I accept that I am probably not doing anything to unfuck the current situation in the Middle East. But I also accept that I am doing something to unfuck so many other things and preventing many more from becoming fucked (or further fucked). I know that if Harris isn't elected, the parade of what's fucked will be grotesque and long, from the suffering of women over abortion restrictions to the suffering of families over mass deportation and threatened denaturalization to the suffering of everyone over the reversal of policies trying to mitigate climate change to the suffering of children in this country over the mad proliferation of guns. I know that rights will be taken away from queer and trans kids and adults. I know that Ukraine will be handed over to Russia and that an emboldened Putin is gonna fuck things up a great deal more. I know that people all over the world will be harmed by the United States moving into an isolationist and racist posture, with the potential for more wars. I know that free speech rights will be trampled by right-wing courts, workers' rights will be crushed by the elimination of regulations, and civil rights will be beaten and shot by the police. And the Supreme Court will be lost for the next generation, at least. That's just scratching the surface of fuckery that Trump and his more effective MAGA apparatchiks are planning to do, along with a huge helping of Christian nationalism. 

I'm not trying to minimize the suffering caused by Israel's decimation of Gaza and its threat of decimating Lebanon. I get the raging anger over it. I'm not even going to pretend I understand your feelings if you're from one of the countries involved or have family there. But not voting for Harris isn't going to solve it at all. That never fucking works. 

Whatever you thought about Hillary Clinton in 2016, you didn't make things better by not voting for her. Whatever you thought about Al Gore in 2000, you didn't make things better by voting for Ralph Nader or not voting at all. The losses in those elections didn't bring about some lesson for Democrats or some great ideological shift that wouldn't have happened otherwise. But we know what they did bring about, and it was fucked. We know that factually and demonstrably. You didn't make anything better. You didn't save a single person. You made yourself feel better, and maybe that's enough for you. (And, by the way, I'm including myself here. I voted for Nader, albeit in a state that was going for Bush anyways.)

So I'm gonna vote for Harris not because I agree with her on everything. I disagree with her on quite a bit. But I know she's the only candidate in a position to unfuck things I want unfucked or at least stop them from being fucked more. And that's a trade off that I'm at peace with. 

Three Things That Matter from Last Night's Vice-Presidential Polite-Off

My quick take on the vice-presidential debate last night between Peter Thiel's gimp and Governor Care Bear is that it doesn't matter who "won." If you give a shit about reality, Walz won. If you prefer your political leaders to be smooth-talking sociopaths spewing bullshit, Vance won. Otherwise, beyond a surprise line or two (like Walz saying that his son witnessed a shooting), it was a disappointingly normal debate where the Democrat was overly deferential and polite and the Republican was a merry liar.

But three things stand out for me. 

First, to that liar point, the most important moment in the evening was when the moderators corrected Senator JD Vance. Talking his usual fuckery about immigration, Vance said, "In Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes." After Walz spoke, quoting the Bible, moderator Margaret Brennan added, "And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status." And that's absolutely, completely true. Vance tried to lump legal immigrants in with undocumented ones. 

And that led to Vance whining, plaintively, "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check" and then his mic was cut off when he tried to explain how something legal is actually illegal, which it isn't. TPS was established by the Immigration Act of 1990, which was passed on a bipartisan basis by wide margins. It's the fucking law, upheld against court challenges up to the Supreme Court. You can't just say you don't like the law and therefore actions using it are illegal. It would be like saying, "I don't give a shit if your stupid laws tell me to pay people. I say it's illegal to force me to do so." You're just an asshole if you try to do that. (Yeah, I know who I'm referencing.)

Even more importantly, when Vance got pissy about fact-checking, he was saying, really, "I was told I could lie and get away with it and now you're telling everyone I'm lying. How dare you." He tipped his hand. He showed his cards. He did other gambling metaphors that show how every fucking word out of his smarmy, bitch mouth is a lie. If you fear fact-checking, you fear being found out. And that ought to be the headline: "Vance admits he's a fucking lying piece of shit" or however you wanna couch it. (Yeah, I know what I did there.)

The other significant moment was when Vance couldn't bring himself to fully lie. It was the end when Vance climbed to the top of fuckery mountain and planted a flag, saying that Donald Trump proved he's no threat to democracy "when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th." Yeah, but that's like saying the rhino that was just charging your jeep is a peaceful creature after you've hit him with the tranq darts. Walz challenged Vance's bullshit head on, in his strongest moment of the evening: "This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?" Vance started babbling some conspiracy theory nonsense about Harris censoring people over Covid and then Walz interrupted to say, "That is a damning. That is a damning non-answer." Vance wouldn't say Trump lost. He couldn't bring himself to say the one thing that would alienate the fucking animals on the MAGA side. And he couldn't bring himself to say Trump won, which would have discredited him immediately with future voters he's trying to sucker into supporting his cruel ass after Trump dies or collapses into an amorphous pile of raging orange goo. It was a moment of utter cowardice that should tell you everything you need to know about this amoral, squamous rich fuck. 

One more thing is worth noting. Throughout the debate, Walz kept talking about what Harris would do as president. Vance kept talking about what Trump would do. Neither of them talked about what they themselves would do as vice-president because what they want to do doesn't fucking matter. It's not the job. As I've said, sure, they can offer advice, but ultimately, they are there to preside over the Senate or replace the president, both on an as-needed basis. Vance and Trump keep attacking Harris as if she is the president, saying that Harris has had four years to do shit. That's another goddamn lie. She's had four years to carry out the policies of Joe Biden that he wants her to carry out. But the policies come from him. (And let's not even get into the "Border Czar" lie.)

The thing that annoyed me most about the whole fucking thing, which I really do think Walz won on points and on likability, is that, with a frustrating assist from Walz, Vance was allowed to seem kind of normal, which he most definitely is not and would not be if in power. Vance is Ted Bundy to Trump's Vlad the Impaler. Trump's slaughtering people left and right. Vance is gonna try to charm you so you don't see the crowbar behind his back. 

The Climate Crisis Should Be a Bigger Issue in 2024

I was finally able to reach my friends in Boone, North Carolina and Damascus, Virginia by text today. They said that they are physically fine, but they have no power, no internet, no water, scant cell service, and no way out, really, right now. Both towns are flooded, mud-covered, devastated. One texted that he's "emotionally wrecked" as he waited in a line to get a shower at a truck stop. Because he's my friend, of course he added, "Just found out I didn't have to blow the attendant." We went back and forth a bit on this lucky truck stop employee before I figured I should let him go for the sake of his battery. He probably had more important things to take care of, like getting the tree off his car. I didn't get to ask him how his dogs did. 

Hurricane Helene was going to be a motherfucker of a storm. Forecasters saw that from the moment it formed, and they predicted the storm surge and the wind damage that would hit Florida, which was, in context, pretty fortunate that Helene didn't turn slightly more east and directly hit Tampa/St. Petersburg. The area that was hit is not densely populated, but it badly fucked up towns in the Big Bend coast, like Cedar Key and Steinhatchee, wiping a couple off the map. 

Helene was a fast storm, which not only meant a significant storm surge, but also that its wind and rains would last as it headed inland. So, yeah, parts of Georgia, NC, SC, Virginia, and Tennessee got drowned. Appalachia was hit ridiculously hard; a good chunk of the tourist town of Chimney Rock in NC is just gone. Weather experts predicted flash floods, landslides, and death, and that's exactly what happened, with roads, bridges, and highways just slammed, making getting supplies in that much harder. This is a catastrophe that will change regions of the country.

And it was made significantly worse by the climate crisis that we've been warned about widely for a couple of generations. If you wanna read the science about how warming waters and seas rising has made things worse for Helene and other recent storms, you can do much better than me summarizing smarter people. 

The climate crisis is the most significant issue facing the world. Period. It's more important than immigration (although it's tied to migration because of how climate change is rendering places unlivable). It's more important than the wars going on or crime or inflation. How can that be? Because you can end wars in a heartbeat if the people at war want to. You can arrest criminals. You can do shit that has an immediate impact on almost anything. But not the climate crisis. You're not shooting your way out of a typhoon. We're a few decades behind where we should be in doing anything, and even if we go full force into mitigating the things that cause climate change now, we're a few decades, at least, from preventing shit from getting worse, let alone better. It's possible (see the ozone layer, which is healing but is about 40 years from finally being whole again). 

But before we get anywhere close, we are going to have to deal with the clusterfuck of awfulness that's going to tumble down on us like a Jenga game we couldn't help but play until the end. That means more weather events - floods, fires, droughts, and more - and it means dealing with the massive refugee crisis that is going to play out as areas of South Asia and elsewhere become too hot for human habitation. 

So you'd think that we might want to hear more about their plans to deal with the climate crisis from our presidential candidates. Well, I mean, really, we should hear more from Democrat Kamala Harris because Donald Trump and his Republican death cult have just decided, "Fuck it. Burn it all. We don't fucking care." 

Trump has stopped calling the climate crisis a "hoax" because someone finally told him it didn't poll well (Trump has no problem sounding like a fucking moron if people applaud the moronic statements). Instead, we get snide obnoxiousness. His brain ever stuck in the 1980s, Trump likes to say, as he did in Michigan this month, that the real global warming is the possibility of nuclear war, "not that the ocean’s going to rise in 400 years and eighth of an inch, and you’ll have more seafront property if that happens. I said, is that good or bad? I said, isn’t that a good thing? If I have a little property on the ocean, I have a little bit more property. I have a little bit more ocean." It's all so obviously false that it's shameful to have to fact check it. Otherwise, all Trump says is "Drill, baby, drill" (which is a line he stole from Michael Steele, who coined the phrase in 2008) and both he and Project 2025 talk about eliminating any restrictions on oil, gas, and coal and just basically letting the earth die as rich fucks get ready to leave for Mars in Elon's rockets or what the fuck ever. In other words, more "Fuck it."

It's a perfect opening for the Harris campaign, perhaps another way to appeal to young people, and Hurricane Helene provides the opportunity to bring up how Trump wants to kill any effort to shift to greener energy. Yes, oil production is higher under Joe Biden than under any other president, but Biden is also lighting a fire under the green economy, using the climate crisis as a way to develop new industries and more jobs. Trump would cancel all of that. It's a perfect foundation for Harris.

On her campaign website, here's the entirety of what it says about the climate crisis: "As President, she will unite Americans to tackle the climate crisis as she builds on this historic work, advances environmental justice, protects public lands and public health, increases resilience to climate disasters, lowers household energy costs, creates millions of new jobs, and continues to hold polluters accountable to secure clean air and water for all. As the Vice President said at the international climate conference, COP28, she knows that meeting this global challenge will require global cooperation and she is committed to continuing and building upon the United States’ international climate leadership. She and Governor Walz will always fight for the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis." Her economic plan only mentions it in terms of those jobs. It's honestly a little more vague than it should be.

At the presidential debate, asked directly about it, Harris said, "Well, the former president had said that climate change is a hoax. And what we know is that it is very real. You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences, who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up. You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go. We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue." And then she said, "And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels" before using that to pivot to manufacturing and autoworker jobs in a clean energy economy. 

That's all well and good. I mean, hey, jobs that might help are awesome. And, obviously, when it comes to climate policy, Harris is not just head and shoulders above Trump. In terms of relatively giving a damn, she's a goddamn superhero while he's a dried up turd. And I get that campaigns have to respond to the issues that people say they care about, but mostly they care about those because politicans (and right-wing media) are lying to them, hyping things that aren't real. There is no crime problem. There is no immigration problem (other than the need to fund so many pieces of the immigration system better, from courts to caring for migrants). And, yes, there was an inflation problem, but the rate has slowed tremendously.

The climate crisis is very real. People are far more likely to be victims of a weather-related event than they are ever going to be victims of violent crime or get their throats cut by migrants (which Trump actually said yesterday). Voters deserve to hear how fucked things are and how fucked things are getting and they deserve to know Harris is going to work to unfuck it and Trump is going to ensure that they are fucked even more. 

It's more than just oil vs. wind or coal jobs vs. battery plant jobs. It's about communities and lives being wiped away.