Democrats Have One Job This Year. Anything Else Is Bullshit.

If you put a gun to my head, I honest-to-fuck couldn't pick Hasan Piker out of a lineup that included Grimace, that pirate thing from Backrooms, and Sadie Sink. I'd probably say, "I don't think he's big and purple, but maybe he's small and redheaded" You're having one of a couple of reactions to that petty little bit of snark. One is "How can he possibly not know about Hasan Piker, left-wing firebrand and one of the most popular Twitch streamers and podcasters? Doesn't he know that's the Joe Rogan of the Left?" And that's fair to think that I, who have wallowed in the mud pits of political commentary for far too much of this one precious life, would have more than a passing knowledge of someone who is getting so much ink and spittle spilled over some of his more indulgently pseudo-extreme statements. 

Another entirely fair reaction is "Who the hell is Hasan Piker and why should I care?" To which I would only tell you that you don't need to care. Really. No matter how many times some random Democrat is asked about Piker or some other idiot Democrat puts out a statement condemning some Piker remark about Israel or, even worse, condemning a fellow Democrat for talking to Piker, you don't have to give a dull tortoise fuck about him. 

But it seems like, for some fucked up reason, Democrats from Cory Booker and John Fetterman in the Senate to Josh Gottheimer and Debbie Dingell in the House, as well as reliably old and disconnected consultants like James Carville and David Axelrod, have all taken the bait and attacked Piker for comments about Israel that are frankly not that different than what acceptable pundits like Ezra Klein have said.  I'm not going to go into the whole issue itself, except to say that it's the mainstream of Democratic voters' beliefs to disapprove of Israel's genocide in Gaza and to want to stop arms sales to the nation. Indeed, you could say it's not just the minority view among Democrats to support murderous pricksore Benjamin Netanyahu, but with any support now at around 20% among Democrats, you could call that the extremist perspective. 

Look, Democrats, you have one fucking job to accomplish in this midterm election season, and that's to take the Congress back from Republicans so you can attempt to fuck Trump's shit up. That's it. Everything else is bullshit and a distraction and a waste of everyone's time. Donald Trump is an existential threat to the continuation of the United States as a constitutional democracy, or, hell, as a place where people can even live without fearing disease, deportation, or death. Hasan Piker and the Democratic Socialists of America and trans athletes are not, even if you combined them into one Zord of Fake Shit That Terrifies Moderate Assholes. But that's just dancing to the Republicans' tune, and if you let the GOP set the agenda for what Democrats can be questioned about, if you let the media try to push you to condemn a widely popular opinion within the party's voters, then you're fucking it up.

I get that corporate Democrats are butthurt as hell over some of their chosen candidates losing in the primaries. The people who are whining about Michigan's nominee for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, are the same ones who tell the leftist wing of the party to suck it up and vote for whatever AIPAC- and billionaire-approved centrist gets the nomination. Take your own fucking advice. Shut the fuck up and vote for El-Sayed. Let the man campaign as he sees fit. The shit people say to get elected is not the way that they legislate. El-Sayed will be one voice. If he wins or if any Democratic Socialist-aligned or sympathetic candidates win, they don't just take shit over. It's not a coup. And the corporate Democrats know this yet still are losing their shit. But they've played this game the same way for decades, and all they know is to freak the fuck out when someone slightly left of Bill Clinton gets a nomination. (I use Clinton because the most paranoid of the motherfuckers worked for him.)

Take a lesson from El-Sayed, who parlays each time some media puke tries to swing at him with his association with Piker. Take a page from his opponent in the tight primary, Haley Stevens, who immediately endorsed El-Sayed. 

The thing is that Piker doesn't have any actual power. Meanwhile, the president of the United States is threatening free speech rights, posting videos about going to war with Canada, and wantonly murdering people at sea, along with forcing the country into a useless war we've lost. The Republican Party's top donor, Elon Musk, who was once the second most powerful person in the administration, regularly agrees with genocidal racist sentiments and posts white supremacist statements, and he's meeting with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson because he's giving hundreds of millions of dollars to help the GOP in the midterms. While Republican members of Congress and candidates are occasionally asked about some fuckery Trump has committed, they are, as far as I've seen, never asked to condemn Musk or to pledge not to take any of his filthy money. 

No, some podcaster no one beyond those with terminal Twitter-and-Twitch brain has heard about is treated as more important than the DOGE-ing motherfucker who is personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths so far. That's what's fucked. Ask Republicans if they agree with horrific things that Megyn Kelly has said. Or some buffoonishly sexist or violent thing that Jesse Twatters...sorry, Watters has blurbled lately. Or get some real guts and ask where they stand on the abjectly disgusting things Charlie Kirk would say. A hundred influential conservative commentators say objectively worse things every goddamn day. A hundred conservative members of Congress, too. What fucking farce.

In other words, Democrats, when someone asks you to condemn Hasan Piker, you can kindly ask them to go fuck themselves because you have more important things to fix, like the country. And maybe the world.

America Fucked Crazy and Now Has To Deal With the Mess

As a rude young man, I was given a piece of advice that has stuck with me. It's simple in its wording, but it has helped me immensely throughout my life. Three words: "Don't fuck crazy." It means just don't bone someone who is obviously insane. It's the best way to avoid shit that could make your life miserable. Now, you might one day meet someone and think, "Okay, he seems crazy, but not so crazy. Besides, he's so hot that I gotta roll the dice." We are, after all, only human, with human urges, sometimes intense ones, and human failings, sometimes unavoidable ones. So, yeah, you go ahead.

And it's awesome because one thing about fucking crazy is that the fucking can be incredible. It can make you feel so good, make you cum so hard that you're willing to overlook a whole lot of crazy. Sure, sure, he's stealing your shit and selling it, he's told all your friends to fuck off, he's wrecking your apartment when he's not hanging his shit up all over the walls, he says the most lunatic stuff that makes everyone think you're nuts, too, and he makes you give away your cat, but, you tell the diminishing number of your pals, "His mouth is a black hole that spaghettifies my dick." You gotta ask yourself where the line is. Where is the point where he's gone too far or he's too far gone, where it doesn't matter how hard you nut in his beefy ass? You gonna wake up and see that's not enough? Or are you gonna wait until he burns your home down and kills your mom? You gonna let him tear your life to pieces just because, for a few minutes you felt orgasmic pleasure. It's fucking madness and anyone watching it happen is gonna ask you when is enough enough. If you just keep heading back to fuck crazy more, then you're a lost cause. 

America fucked crazy in 2016 and then decided it hadn't learned its lesson, so it forgot about the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths and decided to fuck crazy again in 2024. And what's happened? Crazy took over the joint. Every other country in the world can look at us and say, "Whoa, that was stupid" as the joint burns down around us all. 

And the thing about not just fucking crazy but sticking by crazy so you can fuck crazy more is that you stop having perspective on just how crazy crazy is. I mean, any objective look around us shows that we are reaching depths of crazy that should make all of us wonder how the fuck we ever recover. It's fucking insane that the President of the United States is spending, as New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman described it, 70 percent of his diminishing mental energy on renovations at the White House and around DC. It's fucking insane that the leader of the free world is more concerned about spooging gold all over statues than making life any easier for anyone. The entire Reflecting Pool episode is utterly deranged. They arrested people for touching floating shreds of the shitty lining and pretended they were terrorists. And Trump is still standing by that assessment. What the fucking fuck? 

Getting used to someone else's crazy means that you completely miss a lot of the crazy. We found out last week that Capital One shut down over 300 bank accounts belonging to Trump and the Trump Organization because they were being used for money laundering. I mean, it's been pretty clear for a long time now that building shit or franchising the use of the Trump name is just a cover, like Walter White's car wash, for laundering enormous piles of cash for...who? Russians? Saudis? Azerbaijanis? Who the fuck knows? But no one is talking about it because that's how crazy it all is, and not talking about it is crazier.

I can't even get into the true horror of the madness, the child rape and the torture of imprisoned immigrants and the families being torn apart constantly for no reason other than to bleach the country white. Or a fucking war that, at best, will not even get us back to where things were before the war started, all because Trump can't handle that anyone in the past did anything worth keeping, whether that's Obama, Biden, or, hell, even George W. Bush. Trump's actions have killed hundreds of thousands all ready, on top of his Covid death toll, and the bloodshed is just really gearing up. 

America fucked crazy. It didn't listen to the most basic of relationship advice. And the thing about fucking crazy and continuing to fuck crazy is that when you finally get over crazy, you can't just pick up your life and continue because crazy has been a goddamn tornado, laying waste to everything, your friendships, your family, your credit rating, your personal shit. If you're lucky, crazy didn't involve you directly in crimes, but, fuck, you might go to prison because crazy convinced you to commit war crimes. It'll take years to get shit back to some kind of normal. We all know this. We all feel like everything is out of control because it fucking well is.

Of course, knowing America, once a Democrat straightens things out, we'll fuck crazy again.

(Note: If you think this is a post mocking mental illness, you can fuck right off.)

The Fauci Hearing Is a Moment to Despair for How Dumb and Deranged We've Gotten

There was another way this all could have gone that I think about quite a bit. I think about the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when virtually everyone was scared to death of a new form of a virus that we knew almost nothing about and the medical community and governments were trying anything to keep us safe, like masking, like social distancing, like wiping our groceries, things that worked and things that didn't. I think about the agonizing images of overwhelmed nurses and doctors, losing more people than they could save in ICUs that were overflowing with patients whose loved ones were forced to watch them suffer from a distance. I think about that period of time when we celebrated the essential workers, from hospital workers to mail carriers, when we beat pans to let them know we knew how desperately they were all trying to keep people alive or keep the world functioning. 

And I know, I know, I fucking know that so much of that unity was an illusion, blown apart quickly by the murder of George Floyd and the explosion of protest that followed. I know that even the kindest, most generous version of this Covid fantasy would have been justifiably broken by the upheaval that occurred. 

But I think about how we could have kept that unity going, how we could have rallied and willingly sacrificed like during World War 2, how we could have celebrated the fact that we had an election during a pandemic, a safe, smooth election, an incredible accomplishment by any measure. Look at how awesome we are as a country, we could have said. Look at what we did in the worst of circumstances. Donald Trump could have taken a victory lap on that very fact had he not sought to undermine the entire electoral system. He could have said that he was the reason it all went so well, and it would have been hard to argue with him. He could have done the same with the quick development of the Covid vaccine, advocating for everyone to get it, touting its safety, and claiming responsibility for the record time in getting us the thing that would save us from the virus. It would have become an article of faith among his followers that they had to get vaccinated, and likely tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives would have been saved. 

Those two things, the 2020 election and the vaccine, would have allowed him to exit his first term with something like grace, even amidst the chaos he caused. But grace is to Donald Trump as ice cream is to the lactose intolerant: even a little would make him more uncomfortably flatulent than usual. 

Instead, we know what happened. We know that skeevy politicians, clout-seeking media whores, and exploitative hucksters all took advantage of the chaos, of the confusion, of the evolving medical advice and evolving understanding of the illness (which is what happens when, again, you have a new virus), of people's natural despair about having their lives shut down. We know that they decided to turn into villains the very people who had dedicated their lives to saving our lives. We know that, despite Trump's praise of him throughout the frightening first part of the pandemic (even using a clip of him in a campaign ad), Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was director of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases for presidents from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, has been and is and will be the focus of a nutzoid right-wing ragegasm due to lies about Covid and short-term memory loss on how the country dealt with it. 

So it was one of the most enraging, embarrassing, and dangerous hearings in a while when Senator Rand Paul, who belongs in a rubber room scrawling manifestos on the walls in his own shit, subpoenaed Fauci to appear before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and have him sit there for hours while Paul and other GOP fucknuts berated him for shit he didn't do. 

Imagine spending your entire life saving millions of lives and now Rand fucking Paul and assorted chodes, Chads, and chuds are trying to get you to fall into a perjury trap so they can jail you for the rest of whatever life you have left at 85. Imagine sitting there and listening to Sen. Rick "What it would look like if Skeletor fucked a python" Scott, who led a hospital company that committed massive Medicare fraud and who himself took the Fifth Amendment 75 times during a civil suit, call you a "villain." Imagine listening to a fucking ignorant goon like Ron Johnson still assert that the Covid vaccine kills more people than the disease and that ivermectin and other quack cures that you helped debunk are effective treatments. 

Honestly, I wish Fauci had followed up every assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights with "And based upon my rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution, I'd like to tell you to go fuck yourself." He could have even done variations, like "Based upon my rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution, I believe you should suck my saggy old man balls" and "According to the First Amendment, I'm inviting you to eat my whole ass, dickstain." I wish he had done that all 111 times. It's not like the crazies are giving him a break for staying restrained during the hearing. They're losing they're tiny fucking minds.

The whole hearing was a disgrace, including the fact that Democrats were such wimps in defending Fauci. They should have been going right at Paul and the rest, accusing them of being grandstanding pieces of shit. They at least should have put the truth on the record, with hard numbers, like the fact that unvaccinated people died at hugely higher rate than the vaccinated. 

But the dangerous part of this is that the hearing was there to degrade Fauci, undermine faith in real scientific research, and make the dumbest motherfuckers on the conspiratorial right happy. And it wasn't enough. They are looking to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. State attorneys general are going to try to charge Fauci with some crime. I mean, one member of Congress called him "Mengele Fauci," to which you can only say, "Oh, shut the fuck up." Truly, Fauci should get the hell out of the United States because these assholes won't stop until they can have a public execution and put his head on a pike outside HHS (although RFK, Jr. would probably take the head and put it in his car to bring home). 

What the fuck is wrong with us that we are so broken. Instead of that unity, instead of admitting that we suffered a mass trauma that needs to be dealt with on a mental health level, we just have been expected to move on from the death and despair of that period. Fuck any sense of a society. Fuck science. Fuck us because a future Dr. Fauci is going to look at this and think, "Maybe government service isn't for me." 

(Note: Of course, there's also a version of the pandemic fantasy where Trump dies of Covid and everyone learns a valuable lesson, but, alas.)