Are We Really That Fucked After Last Night's Debate?

Yeah, I'll get to Biden, but the thing that needs to be hammered over and over is how much Donald Trump flat-out, blatantly, willfully, unapologetically lied every time he opened his filthy fucking mouth at last night's first presidential debate. He lied about the economy, he lied about Covid, he lied about immigration, he lied about abortion, he lied about January 6, he lied about his legal cases, he lied about NATO, he lied and he lied and then he lied some more. He lied as if lies were air and water and food. He lied as if lies were pussies out there for the grabbing. He lied as if his dick was made of lies and he could fuck the truth to death. He lied like lies were his name that he could plaster over anything and claim it was his. It was almost breathtaking to behold someone for whom the truth and reality are mere inconveniences to be washed away by his torrent of lies and then to think that he has a very real shot of becoming president. Even worse, he has a real shot at becoming president again. Trump is a fraud, a disgrace, and a motherfucker of unquenchable appetites, but goddamn if he doesn't know that there are plenty of voters who want to hear a lie told arrogantly, with braggadocio and bluster, than hear the truth told quietly. 

Why would anyone who does live in a world of observable and demonstrable facts trust a single word Trump says? Imagine being a US ally and hearing Trump repeat all these lies again and again. You'd be a fool to take him at his word on anything. You'd be a fool to put the safety of your nation and the world in his hands. I don't have to imagine being an American and knowing that my president is lying so copiously that it makes all the other lying presidents look like goddamn angels. It strips away any sense of security and stability. And, sorry, that's way more fucking frightening than Biden's age.

And I know, I know, I fucking know that both sides agreed to the rules for the debate, and one of those rules was no fact-checking. But CNN did a disservice to the nation by not once insisting that the candidates, especially Trump, stay in the realm of what's real. Traditional fact-checking would be "You said the United States has spent $200 billion on Ukraine. The real number is $110 billion." That's straightforward and, sure, it's the kind of shit that can wait until after the debate. But Trump was up there accusing Biden of taking money from China. He still insisted that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Those are big picture kinds of things that deserve some fucking slap down from the moderators. You're allowed to say, "Mr. Trump, you're factually wrong that you won the last presidential race." You're allowed to say, "No one is allowed to murder a baby after it's been born." That's not "fact-checking." That's "reality-affirming." 

Jake Tapper and Dana Bash are actual, honest-to-god journalists. To have them play the role of talk show host is worthless. Moderators keep shit on track. They don't just ask something and then say, "Fuck it," stay silent, and let the response chips fall where they may. When they asked a question and Trump used all his time to talk about something completely off-topic, they should have shut him the fuck down and insisted he answer. When they asked him about the January 6 insurrection and he diverted to immigration again (as he did with every fucking thing he was asked), they should have cut him off and made him answer and not let him ramble on until a pause where they could ask again, which they did several times. 

Yeah, President Joe Biden fucked it. He came across as fucking ancient, with a weakened voice and occasionally incomprehensible mumble. Even if he did have a cold, as his campaign insisted he did a little while in to the debate, that doesn't explain his rambling and his losing the thread of what he was talking about. And while Biden's answers were based in reality and while he mostly answered the actual questions, he failed again and again to counter Trump's lies and accusations and, frankly, stupidity. I kept thinking as I watched that Biden should have had an answer ready for the abortion lie I mentioned above. He didn't even have a strong answer for when Trump started attacking his son, Hunter. Both times, he could have revealed that compassionate side he's known for. He should have been able to jump on Trump's astounding assertion that Vladimir Putin would release Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich only if he's president. He should have talked directly to young people when Trump proved that he would do fuck-all to mitigate climate change. But he didn't. And perhaps he couldn't. Any decent debater would have destroyed Trump. Kamala Harris or Gretchen Whitmer would have reduced him to even more of a babbling rage balloon than he already is. 

So how fucked are we? Should Biden drop out and allow for another Democrat to take over the nomination, as so many in the punditocracy and more than a few Democratic operatives are saying? One reason I didn't write a hot take last night is that I didn't want my pants-shitting emotions that I expressed in the moment on Threads to rule what I said. As I did write last night, I now completely understand the people who have been calling on Biden to walk away from the race. And I do think Biden is too old to be president, but I also think Trump is too old, too. Neither of them should be running. 

I keep thinking how it plays out if Biden says he's done. If the nominee isn't Kamala Harris, it could cause a hell of a schism in the Democratic Party along racial and, perhaps, gender lines (if the nominee were Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro, both solid choices, by the way). But if it is Harris, I don't know how that goes, even if she wipes the floor with Trump in a debate because, and this is very important, for the most part, no one really gives a shit about debates except those of us who are damned to be so fucking plugged into the political bullshit machine for the ludicrous length of time that our presidential campaigns last. So I'm not taking a final position on Biden dropping out because I think it's a waste of time and energy that can be spent making sure everyone knows what a fucktastrophe a second Trump presidency would be. But if Biden's going out, it's gotta happen right fucking now. One upside to Biden walking away is that a younger candidate taking over would jolt this race to life and get a whole bunch of interest from people who have tuned out because of the sameness of it all. 

What I do know is that I'll support Biden if he stays because, whether he's with it or not, his administration has done some fantastic things (even if I completely disagree with them on Israel and a few other areas).  I want that administration to continue. Whether or not Biden drops out, I'll support whoever the nominee is because I'm not a fucking idiot who wants to see Trump and his idiot horde of nation destroyers go on a rampage of Christian nationalism and unhinged greed and brainless isolationism. I mean, it's fucking June. One good viral moment for Joe and all is forgiven about the debate. That's how dumb contemporary media is. 

Look, Biden had a terrible night. The rasping, the confused answers, the inability to respond clearly. It was a disaster, and we don't need to sugarcoat that. But the whole thing was a disaster. It was honestly depressing that we have to contemplate Trump being reelected. What kind of stupid fucking country would elect a convicted felon with up to three trials and at least two appeals coming up? The stupidest kind, that's who. And Trump calling Biden a criminal was fucking absurd. Trump was allowed to be at the debate because he's fucking out on fucking bail. And all that criminality got almost no mention except for a single question, as if the moderators were ignoring those facts, including that Trump's a fucking rapist. How come no one is pressuring Republicans to get the convicted felon and rapist who's out on bail to drop out? We should be constantly appalled by the idea that Trump is running and he has so much support, despite his crimes. 

Frankly, that's the most degrading part of this whole fucking race, not Biden acting his age.

Louisiana Wants to Put a Sign About Fucking in Kindergarten Classrooms

The state of Louisiana, with its overwhelmingly batshit insane Republican legislature and its even more bugfuck insane Republican governor, have passed a law that requires all public-funded schools, including universities, to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. In case you don't know, the Ten Commandments are from the fictional book known as "The Bible." In that epic novel, a character named Moses is given stone tablets by the character God containing ten pretty simplistic, common sense ideas, the kind of shit that fiction writers make seem way more meaningful than it actually is. I mean, c'mon, "thou shalt not kill"? No shit. Ooh, look at the big brain on God. Any fuckin' idiot knows not to kill or steal. But, sure, let's all pretend like this is some huge fuckin' revelation. Oh, and only Christians and Jews give a flying fuck about what's in this Bible thing. All other faiths and atheists can fuck off, but give us your tax money to spend on all this. 

The law itself is completely fucking mad. This is an actual quote from the law: "At a minimum, the Ten Commandments shall be displayed on a poster or framed document that is at least eleven inches by fourteen inches. The text of the Ten Commandments shall be the central focus of the poster or framed document and shall be printed in a large, easily readable font." There aren't enough jacking-off gestures to make at that. 

It gives the exact language that must be used on the Ten Commandments posters that, again, are supposed to be in every public school classroom. And it's some old school King James shit, as in "Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee" and "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." That is really in a real law passed by real adults in the real 21st-century in a real state in this increasingly unreal country. 

And, interestingly, it includes, "Thou shalt not commit adultery." According to every religious scholar I bothered to read for this, that commandment is about fucking. Don't fuck someone else's spouse. Or, conversely, if you're married, don't fuck anyone not your spouse. You can say it's about other things, too, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the Seventh Commandment is clearly and intentionally about intercourse. The act of sex. Fucking. 

The state of Louisiana has said that "Each public school governing authority and the governing authority of each nonpublic school that receives state funds shall display the Ten Commandments in each building it uses and classroom in each school under its jurisdiction." So it has to go up, with this required language, in the classrooms of pre-K kids, kindergarteners, and first graders. Which means that "Thou shalt not commit adultery" will be right there in front of thousands of Louisiana's small children. 

Lemme state this as clearly as possible: the Republican governor and the Republican legislature of Louisiana are forcing kids as young as four years-old to be faced, every single day they are in school, with a poster-sized list of rules that includes no fucking outside of marriage. 

Children being children, I think they might have questions about this whole "adultery" thing. How will those questions be answered? Will the teacher be allowed to say, "According to God, your mommy shouldn't have sex with your best friend's mommy or daddy"? Will they explain sex? Will they be allowed to explain sex? Louisiana law says that you can't teach about fucking until 7th grade (unless you live in New Orleans, where it's third grade. No, really). The teacher couldn't hand a child a book about adultery, like, say, the works of Louisiana writer Kate Chopin. That would likely run afoul of other laws that prevent children from having access to reading material that contains anything that's sexually explicit. Except, I guess, "Don't fuck around on your spouse" being on the wall in your 5 year-old's music classroom. Let alone "manservant" and "maidservant." 

The stupidest part of this whole thing is that Louisiana is almost always on the bottom of the nation when it comes to education, and this is the the shit that the politicians wasted their time on. It's also the kind of shit that happens when you no longer have a Democratic governor to occasionally say, "Knock it off, right-wing fuckers." This was done to please a core constituency of Christian zealots and to keep them donating to support their dickhole legislators who probably break half of the commandments before lunch. 

And part of that little performance is to make sure that the ACLU sues so the dickholes can act like they are standing up to the big city liberals. Of course, the ACLU is suing, along with other organizations, because this is a blatant establishment of religion by a government using public funds. So instead of spending the money to make their children a little smarter than their parents, millions of dollars will be wasted on years of litigation in the hopes that the Supreme Court will be deluded and Jesus-humping enough to allow this fuckery to happen. 

As someone from Louisiana, who went to public schools in Louisiana, who was a student when Louisiana had its teaching of creationism shot down by the Supreme Court, this is just fucking embarrassing, like the red states have to compete with each other to show that they are the most evangelical fucknuts in the whole Christian nationalist asylum and Louisiana just pulled ahead in the moron race.

One thing I look forward to is that if the Ten Commandments posters are ever installed in every classroom, they will have dicks drawn on them inside 2 days of being put up. I believe in the children. 

It Wasn't Just Sharks. The Rest of That Trump Speech Was Batshit, Too.

When rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump spoke at a heat stroke-inducing rally in Las Vegas on Sunday, his teleprompter was fucking up and he was forced to go almost totally off the cuff. A wiser man might have read from a prepared speech, a printout of which was no doubt available to him. But Donald Trump is not a wise man. He's a goddamned idiot who thinks that every word he pisses out is like a fuckin' sermon from Jesus himself. And his followers are willing to go to the hospital to get sprayed with his incoherent streams and declare them showers of gold. 

Surely, you have heard about how Trump told some fake fuckin' story about asking an obviously confused boat maker about electrocution by boat battery in the ocean or getting eaten by sharks, as if that's something that anyone has ever had to decide ever or ever would have to decide. In the non-Trumpian, real world, that would be enough to have him led back to a home for the elderly and have him sat in front of a TV playing Fox "news" and giving him a double scoop of ice cream filled with Xanax to keep him calm. 

You've heard the story discussed as more evidence of his decline into gibberish. But you haven't really heard about the rest of the speech. And that's a shame because it's equally deranged, ranging from What-the-fucking-fuck moments to utter dickishness to tangents upon tangents within tangents that demonstrate an inability to coherently keep to a point. Lemme give you a few examples.

Early on, Trump declared that President Biden's shift on immigration is "bullshit," which made the idiot horde of 6900 overheated MAGA blobs chant, "Bullshit!" over and over. Trump responded, "Wow, that’s turning out to be like deplorable. Remember deplorable, when Hillary said deplorable? She said deplorable. And that was not good. That was not a good word to use. This word seems to be catching on a little bit, but in a much more positive way than deplorable. That was not good. She actually said deplorable and irredeemable. Do you remember? And I heard it, and I said, 'Wow, that irredeemable is really a bad word,' and it didn’t catch on. What caught on was deplorable. So what the hell do I know about politics, right?" Hillary Clinton was invoked at least four times in the speech, like a hit song that he had to play, even though she has nothing to do with this current presidential cycle. 

Trump is obsessed with degrading Biden's physicality because it's just so obvious that Biden's in better shape than whatever amorphous gelatin sack he is under his terrible-fitting suits. I mean, this is some jealous bitch shit: "If this guy just, you know he goes to the beach all the time. Somebody thinks he looks good in a bathing suit; I don’t think so. And he has that little chair that weighs about seven ounces. It’s meant so children can lift it and very old people can lift it."

He kept bringing up how fucking hot it was, and he was just an asshole about it: "And now, by the way, it’s 110, but it doesn’t feel it to me, right? So we’ll stay out here for a little while. If anybody gets tired, you’ll let me know. And if anybody goes down, if you start going down, we have people, they’ll pick you up right away. They’ll throw water. They were so worried. Everybody was so worried yesterday about you, and they never mentioned me. I’m up here sweating like a dog. The Secret Service said, 'We have to make sure everyone’s safe.' I said, What about me? 'Oh, we never thought of that.' They don’t think about me. I’m working my ass off. I’m working hard. This is hard work." No, motherfucker. Talking for an hour when you could have fucking canceled the whole event isn't hard work. It's being a narcissistic prick who couldn't stand to not have a chance to prance around a stage in front of fawning fucknuts, even if it's miserable out. 

Here's a new Trump fact, which means "fucking lie" to most of us: "Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that? 100%. And these people, are so bad they will correct me when I say 100%. 100% of the new jobs have gone to illegal aliens. Can you believe it? And that’s where we are." I have no clue where he got this other than from his infected ass. Suffice to say, if this were the case, wages would not be rising, among other real world implications. It's just a fucked thing to assert.  

Okay, see if you can follow this train of thought. This is not edited at all. I mean, kudos for returning to the subject at hand - immigration - but what the fuck, man? "That border is so meaningless. They just walk right through. They go right through the so-called border states, and they end up in Iowa. They end up in Idaho. Remember when Joe said it’s great to be in Idaho? And he was in Iowa. He always does that. If I ever did that, it would be over. They’d say that’s the end of his political career. He’s cognitively impaired. Oh, no, no. I had a second test. I aced it. I aced both of them. Not easy to ace. Biden should have a cognitive test, number one. They say it’s unconstitutional. That’s a good excuse. He should have a cognitive test. And before the debate in two weeks, he should take a drug test because I’m willing to take one. So Nevada’s being turned into a dumping ground, and you are." That's not even the worst of his flights of insanity. 

He also called Special Counsel Jack Smith a "dumb son of a bitch" and said that the first thing he'd do in office is eliminate the tax on tips for service industry workers and that the first thing he'd do in office is close the border. In one incredibly incoherent ramble, Trump started on electric cars, then veered into Roger Penske's success at the Indianapolis 500, then veered into his generals and his "defeat" of ISIS, then veered into bitching about the teleprompter and how people accuse him of not paying people, then veered into the "stolen" 2020 election, then veered into how much he gets in campaign donations, then veered into his indictments, then veered into how dumb he thinks Biden is and how Biden supposedly stole more records than he did, then veered into the whole electric boats and sharks thing, then veered into trans women in women's sports, then veered into more about the border, then veered back to the difference between electric and hybrid cars, then veered into how China executes drug dealers (and maybe users - the policy in his telling was unclear), then veered into being upset that he's mocked for how he walks on stairs before mocking Joe Biden's age, then veered into...

I'm not making this up. And apparently this oblivious, incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness is how he talked to congressional Republicans today, where not a one said an on-the-record negative word.

Again, it needs to be said that, yes, Joe Biden is an old man. But he is not completely disassociated from reality like Trump so obviously is. And that point needs to be hammered again and again. It's not just that Trump's a danger because he'll become a dictator. It's that he's dangerous because he's too out of it to be a real dictator and the competent fascists will be running the joint. 

Conservative Plans for a Next Trump Presidency Are Dumb and Frightening

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The nutzoid right-wing Heritage Foundation (motto: "Putting 'White' before 'Heritage' would be too obvious") has this thing called Project 2025, which is a bunch of extremist lunatics saying that a next Trump presidency would be a "unique opportunity for conservatives to start undoing the damage the Left has wrought and build a better country for all Americans in 2025." In other words, rawdogging democracy and freedom until they're festering with fascist syph. 

They've created an 887-page (no, really) guidebook of the MAGA hell that they want to ensue if the Retrumpening comes to fruition. Titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it's nothing less than a complete tearing down of the modern government and rebuilding it in the image of the worst motherfuckers who appear on Steve Bannon's shitty podcast of doom. It's filled with all kinds of fuckery, from firing long-term civil servants and replacing them with MAGA-certified drones to fucking up the climate even more to destroying anyone who even breathes about diversity to way more. Again, it's 887 pages of this shit. 

And some of it gets downright weird. 

For instance, I don't know why pornography shows up in this at all. But it fucking well does: "Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."

Putting aside that transgender porn is still a fairly small niche category compared to, say, cis het cream pies, the obvious questions are what is porn and who gets to decide. Right now, actual adults are screaming about a bare ass in a kid's book and calling it "porn," which definitely says more about the accuser than it does about the author or librarian. But if a town decides that naked butt cheeks in Dr. Seuss is the same as a 69ing rim job, then the school librarian would have to be considered the same as a rapist or a public masturbator, which is really what all this is anyways. And what about Matt Gaetz going around and showing nude photos of women he's fucking? That seems porn-y, too. He took the photos, so he has to go to prison, which, well, okay, I'm actually good with that. But only for Matt Gaetz. It's just a fucking weird thing to have in your encyclopedic manifesto of how repressive you want shit to be when the presumed leader of this fucked, you know, porn stars.

I promise you that I haven't read the whole thing because it's just deranged. It's like a teen incel's attempt at political shitposting: "The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity ('SOGI'), diversity, equity, and inclusion ('DEI'), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists." What the ever-fucking fuck? The word "gender" deprives people of their First Amendment rights? These pricks are just angry that they got Bs in their freshman sociology classes.

It's all there, all the bullshit they've been spouting for years, decades even, like the wishlist of a deranged monster built from parts of Reagan, W, and Trump. Get rid of the Department of Education. Close the border. Fire anyone who even smells like DEI or ESG. Ban abortion. And on and on.

If any left-wing organization put out something like this, it would become the evillest thing every written in the history of forever, the Green New Deal crossed with the Communist Manifesto times The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It would be the only thing talked about on Fox "news" and its devolved descendant networks. They'd call it "P25" or something that sounds sinister and Deep State-ish, like a cabal of blood drinkers and child fuckers are creating a wormhole to a nightmare plain of existence. Every single Republican would be bringing it up every chance they had, and the febrile media, desperate to remain relevant, would ask every Democrat where they stand on P25. 

And what I don't fucking get is why Democrats don't do that right now to Republicans. Why don't they quote shit like "Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method" and use that to say how Republicans want to come after women for getting abortions in other states? Why don't they quote how NOAA is "a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity" and "The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded"? 

It's all fucking nuts, and it's all there in an unwieldy dream journal of future fascists of America. We should make it the new CRT. Whenever people hear "P25," they should cringe. And, as ever, we have the benefit of telling the truth about this insanity, unlike the abject liars we're attacking.

(Seriously, come sign up for the Patreon. I dive into speeches and court cases and other documents. I explore the fuckery of right-wing online groups, as well as members of Congress. And sometimes I just wanna tell a goddamn story. It's extra rudeness every week.)