The Debate: Trump Give Us Filth and Fraud While Biden Actually Plans a Future for Us

I was in Mexico City with my family in the early 1980s, and our tour guide took us to see a bullfight.  My grandfather was absolutely thrilled at the idea, even if it wasn't the professional season and we were going to the smaller stadium to see the minor league matadors. In the main event, a young, confident man in the full matador regalia came out to the polite applause of the crowd, and he seemed ready for his big debut. When the bull was released, it was obvious that it had a bull's agenda. The matador danced around awkwardly and waved the cape, with the bull charging and mostly missing. A few times, the bull knocked the matador to the ground, and he got up, dirtier and wobblier each time. The picadors came out on their horses and lanced the bull, as is the custom. Finally, it was time for the big moment, when the matador would kill the bull. He was plunging banderillas, the long spikes with flags on them, into the bull, but it wouldn't slow down. The matador wasn't doing it right, and the bull was bleeding, suffering, even more than usual. The crowd realized it was watching a shit show of a bullfight, a cruel and horrific "sport" becoming even too cruel for them, and we started to boo the matador, who became even more flustered. After a long while, the bull finally had bled enough to be manageable. The matador was given a sword and essentially stabbed and hacked until the poor bull finally died. The crowd was split between outraged cries and stunned silence as the embarrassed matador took a bow. And then, it being amateur night, instead of horses coming out to ceremoniously pull the bull through the gates, the dead beast was chained to the back of a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle and dragged through the mud, into the bowels of the stadium while a tinny speaker played mariachi music.

We all felt filthy and disgusted and ashamed to have witnessed a spectacle that degraded humanity. We were all diminished by the experience. I was too young for tequila, but, goddamn, I drank tequila that night. 

You can take the story as a more direct metaphor for last night's presidential debate, but, for me, it's about the feeling that the debate gave me, the triggering of disgust and shame that I was in any way part of it, the way I know it will cast a shadow on American electoral politics for ages. Oh, we had a whole lot of great experiences on that Mexico trip, but I remember the bullfight debacle more than any other. 

When it comes to last night, no one is going to remember that Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden actually laid out plans for his presidency when he could get in more than a few words without being interrupted. Biden said what he'd do to get the nation through the pandemic and what he'd do to help businesses and schools reopen safely after we've finally gotten on the path to recovery. He said he'd get rid of Trump's tax cut for the wealthy. Biden talked about infrastructure spending and creating more jobs while moving the country to greener energy (and how that would create jobs, which is so obvious that it's maddening that this has to be explained). Biden talked about immediate steps he could take to mitigate the Godzilla of climate change that's going to wreck us. Biden talked about addressing racism and white privilege and police brutality. 

Biden was the only one of the two candidates to actually utter the word "future," as if he could see beyond his immediate animal needs, unlike President and business failure Donald Trump. 

Trump didn't offer a single idea for his second term. Not one. He said he'll have plans in the indeterminate future, but he didn't tell you one thing that he aspires to do for the country because his only aspiration is to stay in power. 

But we won't remember any of this because, as is his way, Trump was a fucking tsunami of lies and accusations and conspiracy theories. And he just wouldn't stop. It was like going to an orgy and there's one guy who has done too much cocaine after downing Viagra and he just runs around with his half-hard microdick, frantically fucking any available hole but never able to cum because even the dog is rejecting his desperate humping. Christ, will someone throw this asshole out so the rest of us can enjoy the evening?

You've heard plenty about Trump refusing to condemn white supremacists. But what's being missed is that moderating wet noodle Chris Wallace actually fed him the line he should have said. Wallace asked Trump, "Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia group and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities?" And Trump couldn't even bring himself to say that about the neo-Nazi Proud Boys, instead saying the now-infamous "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by" before immediately pivoting to attacking left-wing protesters. It was appalling but of a piece with who Trump is and who supports Trump. The Proud Boys themselves were thrilled. 

Then there was the moment that Trump dismissed Biden's son, Beau, a decorated Iraq War veteran and state Attorney General who died of cancer. Biden was using Beau's example to attack Trump's disdain for the military, yes, but Trump couldn't pause his narcissistic bullshit for one moment to offer even a second of sympathy, to say, "I'm sorry about your loss but here's what I do for veterans" or anything that a normal, relatively sane human being might do. Instead, Trump barreled over Biden, saying, "I don’t know Beau. I know Hunter. Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out dishonorably discharged." (He was administratively discharged, which is very different and also shows how Trump understands jackshit about the military.)

In one moment, Trump swept aside Biden's mourning for his deceased child and attacked his other son for a cocaine addiction. That's some evil shit right there. It's inhuman, it's amoral, it's fucked up beyond fucked up, and that's for an average person. If you were sitting in a bar and did that shit, you'd deserve to get your ass kicked and no one would help you. But that's the motherfucking president, and to react to it without that in mind is to not understand the full, debased horror of it. Honestly, I wouldn't have been all that shocked if Trump had followed up by mocking Biden's daughter and first wife who were killed in an auto accident. And Trump cared more about Hunter Biden's income than he cared about the victims of coronavirus.

Trump's purpose was to turn the left against Biden and to depress turnout. Frankly, his attacks were just fucking weird and contradictory. He kept shouting incoherently that Biden is a "socialist" and then that Biden is going to "lose his radical left supporters." Which is it? He said that the 1994 crime bill Biden sponsored put people in prison but that Biden couldn't even say "law and order." Huh? For the record, deep flaws aside, a whole lot of cops owe their careers to Biden and the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act because part of it was to hire 100,000 more police officers, something Biden should perhaps emphasize.

Trump's rant about mail-in ballots was so unhinged that it was like doom scrolling through a deranged right-wing Twitter feed. Every single allegation Trump put out there, from the nine ballots in Pennsylvania to the West Virginia ballots to "they found them in creeks," is pure conservative fuckery.  We know Trump trusts Fox "news" and Breitbart more than he trusts his own fucking intelligence and law enforcement agencies, but it will always be fucked up to me that he just makes these accusations without anyone being arrested or charged with a crime. Like with his taxes, with his mythical health plan, with everything, you have to believe him and nothing else. All reality must be viewed through him.

If Biden seemed inefficient in his counter-attacks on Trump (although he got in a number of good blows), it's because Biden's face said it all. Between bemused smiles and smirks at what a goddamn baby Trump is and the occasional look of "What the fuck is he talking about?" or "How the fuck do you respond to a flaming sow that belches lies without shame?" Biden expressed the feeling of disbelief we all have that this grotesquery, this whining worm of a man, this orange, sweaty dick is our president. Frankly, if Biden could take that from Trump without losing his shit, he can handle any dictator in the world.

Like all of us, I'll bet Biden felt filthy having to stand there and endure it. But he fucked up the right's narrative about him as a senile old man just by doing it. And they are going to be frantic to turn Trump's shitpile of a performance into a mountain of stinking gold.

There is no reason to have any more of these debates. They will tell us nothing that wasn't absolutely clear before. If you believe that Donald Trump gives a shit about you after last night, you are lost and you can go fuck yourself into oblivion. Let's just hope you don't fuck the rest of us.

What Biden Ought to Say at Tonight's Debate (Rude Version)

At the start of tonight's first presidential debate, Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden ought to look at President and failed business tool Donald Trump and say:

"Goddamn, you are pathetic. I mean, seriously, you are just pathetic. Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror and think, 'Jesus, what a pathetic piece of shit I am. Just a broke-ass bitch fronting as a tycoon'? You're a fuckin' joke. Yeah, you won the presidency because you massaged the prostate of racism in the assholes of enough stupid motherfuckers to make them jizz all over the voting booth and drag your fat ass over the Electoral College finish line, but, Jesus fucking Christ, man. You think I'm on drugs? What shit must be running through your clogged arteries to make you even able to get up in the morning without collapsing under the weight of all your failure? 

"I mean, c'mon, man, you lost all the money you took from your awful, cruel dickhead of a father. You made $400 million bucks on your bullshit TV show and you not only lost all that, but you lost another $400 mill. You're a fuckin' bum. You're worse than the guy who goes to the track and bets the mortgage payment on a long shot because he got a hot tip and then goes to a loan shark to cover him when he loses his ass so he's not thrown out in the street. That poor bastard might get his legs broken. But you? You'll have to have a fuckin' fire sale of secrets and shit to the highest Russian bidder to make it so you're not suckin' down polonium in your Diet Coke.

"What in the fuckin' universe made you think you could be president, you fuckin' mattress sales model, you shitty steak hawker, you Bernie Madoff without the class? Look at what you've done, man. Look at the fuckin' waste you've left behind. 200,000 and more dead from coronavirus, hundreds of thousands more with long-term damage to their health. And you knew. You fuckin' knew how bad this was. Barack and I even left you a step by step goddamn plan for when this happened, but you are so fucking arrogant and racist and filled with hatred for President Obama that you tossed it aside and followed your gut, even though it has led you to catastrophe every time in your worthless life. You keep promising everyone it's gonna go away and that shit's not happening. It didn't have to be like this except for the fucked-up fact that you're president.

"Meanwhile, you're not doing a goddamn thing to help the working men and women of this country as they bumblefuck around in the darkness you created to try to survive. You use Bill Barr, that walking, talking pile of shit, to fuck up anti-racist protesters while letting motherfucking Nazis parade around with their guns, all to make your animal voters hoot and honk in approval. And, on top of all that, you keep acting like the economy that was handed to you on a silver fucking platter from President Obama is your doing. Bitch, we brought unemployment down over 5 points. You brought it down 1 before you COVID-fucked the country. You just put your name on someone else's work, which is all the fuck you know how to do.

"I'd feel sorry for you if you expressed a single regret, if you said you fucked it all up royally, if you said, 'Yeah, I'm in over my head.'  And it's not that you don't have the sense that God gave a pig. It's that you know you're a fucking bullshit artist and you don't care how many people that hurts. That's what makes you the shittiest fucking human being I've ever seen in my life and I've been in a room with Muammar Gaddafi. The only way you can win this election is by cockblocking the voters, by braying like an ass about corruption that doesn't exist except where you do it, by letting Russia fuck with the voting machines, and who the hell knows what else. You want violence if you lose because you fucking get off on it like you get off on watching hookers piss and snorting Adderall until your tits bleed. 

"And, by the way, if you say one more word about any of my kids, I'll reach into the ground and rip out Roy Cohn's bones and fuck you in the ass with his femur. 

"Go tweet some bullshit, rip off some rubes, finger fuck your daughter, and leave this beat-up country alone. The rest of us have real work to do.

"How was that for someone you think has dementia, you lying motherfucker? I eagerly await your response, you sad, flaccid dick."

If Trump Was Telling the Truth About Voter Fraud, People Would Be Arrested (But He's Not)

Donald Trump is currently the president of the United States, whether we like it or not. And that's apparently his plan for the 2020 election, as he savagely sows doubt about the validity of the vote for the presidency. He keeps speaking in desperate but vague tones, with his accusations now having reached  Trumpian shorthand like "fake news" and "Russia hoax" before it. 

Now it's "the ballots." At a press briefing this week, asked again about and declining to support a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election, Trump said, "You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster...The ballots are out of control. You know it, and you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else."

And we all know what Trump's talking about now when he says it: mail-in ballots in certain states where he might lose. Not absentee ballots, mind you, which, in most states, are exactly the same as mail-in ballots but get separated out because reasons. Sometimes he narrows it to ballots that are sent to voters without them requesting one, but mostly it's generally mail-in ballots in states that he won in 2016 and is in danger of losing this time (and have Democratic officials overseeing the vote count).

He brings it up as often as he can, and he's decided that it's a massive conspiracy involving Democratic governors, Secretaries of State, and others. At one of his superspreader rallies from hell, in the midst of talking about another supposed massive conspiracy, how Democrats are keeping their economies closed out of spite for him and not because of coronavirus and how they'll open up after Election Day, Trump asserted, "Then they have these fake ballots, millions and millions of ballots. By the way, when, not if, when you see shenanigans, please report it to your authorities. Okay? The real authorities, they’re watching and the authorities are watching, but please report it."

"When" means that Trump, who, again, is the president of the United States, is saying that he knows about a crime that's been committed: a coordinated voter fraud effort. And, as a citizen of this country, as a voter, well, if this is true, then I want people charged with a crime and arrested. Wouldn't all of us want that? I mean, the president wouldn't lie to us, right?

Further, if the FBI director is saying that no crimes are being committed when thousands of crimes are, then that FBI director should be fired, if not arrested himself for covering up the conspiracy. If state officials are working in coordination with each other to steal an election, which is precisely what Trump is accusing them of, then we need to stop it. If our intelligence agencies are all talking about Russian interference in the election but that's just the Deep State covering up for the real crimes, well, my God, why are we just talking about it? The crime is happening now. As Trump said, it's afflicting early voting: "And early voting, if you didn’t know it, has already begun and watch it and watch those fake ballots, you got to go out and turn them in. If you see somebody cheating, you got to turn them in." No, we can't wait for Election Day. We have to stop this now.

And that's what reporters should be asking to show how hugely Trump is lying. Not "Where is the evidence?" but "Why don't you stop this from happening?" If GOP officials point to the lawsuits they've filed to hinder the count of mail-in votes, well, that's not about an enormous amount of premeditated voting fraud, which, again, is what they are accusing Democrats of. There are laws in every state targeting conspiracy to commit election fraud.

Of course, Trump think that the media should be exposing these crimes, not questioning him about them. To him, that's far more important than law enforcement. That's why he says to reporters, "You know it" and says that they won't report on it. Apparently, non-Fox/OAN news organizations are in on the conspiracy, too, working in tandem with Democrats, the Deep State, and, oh, hell, let's say Antifa and pedophiles.

By the way, snark aside, "conspiracy to commit fraud against the United States" is a federal crime. And if there is no conspiracy on mail-in ballots and Trump is just making it up, then he is the one committing the crime, as is every official supporting his lies. This is the real election fraud, and it's meant to undermine the very foundation of our democracy, something we've never seen a president do. That's why you're reading and hearing from people who are totally freaked out. 

Yeah, you can argue (and sometimes I do) that Trump is all talk, that he's a salesman who is always hyping whatever worthless product he's conning you into buying. But that presupposes that his idiot followers believe that, and they don't. They take him very literally, and Trump is giving them an excuse to use violence to keep him in office because of these crimes that no one is committing (except Trump). It's really damn scary.

It's also succeeding in making people paranoid, with legitimate reason. More than one person has said to me that the reason they think Trump wants people to vote on Election Day is because it's far more effective and easier to hack the software of our voting machines to change totals than it is to impersonate millions of people on mail-in ballots (or to counterfeit them, which Trump and corpulent, creepy criminal William Barr have said is also happening). 

Trump is objectively lying for the purpose of securing his reelection. Saying there is massive voter fraud is like saying the earth is flat or that Eric Trump is smart. It's simply, plainly clear that the opposite is true. That's the only way to talk about this fraud Trump is perpetrating on the American people. And that's how Joe Biden needs to frame it at the debate next week.

However, let me conclude here with a vaguely hopeful idea, one that is based in American selfishness: if you invalidate the ballots for the presidential race, you are invalidating the ballots for every race on the ballot. We're not talking just Senate or House races. We're talking state legislatures and city councils and school boards and mill taxes and initiatives. It would be anarchy at the most local levels you can imagine. No one is going to want that in their precinct.

I would also bet there are states or districts where the vote goes against Trump but in favor of other Republicans. Are those Republicans willing to sacrifice their elections to go all in on destroying the very democracy that got them elected or re-elected? No. They're gonna cover their own butts. That self-preservation, so damaging to society as a whole, may be what saves us.

The One Question for Republicans: What's Your Plan for When the ACA Is Gone?

I may just be a filthy writer with a fondness for sodomy references and scatological humor and not some fancy, overpaid media consultant, but if I were making ads for the Biden campaign or for any of the Democrats in Senate races, they'd be total tearjerkers dealing with how shit-covered Republicans want to fuck us in the ass over health insurance.

I'll give you bones for three spots. You want more? Fuckin' hire me.

1. Find someone who is 27 years-old who successfully beat cancer in their 20s. Get them to talk about how the only way they did that is because the Affordable Care Act kept them on their parent's health insurance until age 26. They can talk about how they would probably be dead if Trump and the GOP had their way, but, instead, they are happy, healthy, and have a job/family. They can also talk about how their cancer is a pre-existing condition now. And, of course, vote for Biden or the Democrat running for Senate.

2. Find a couple in a red state that expanded its Medicaid program under the ACA. Maybe in Montana or, for extra oomph, Kentucky. Get them to talk about all the medical conditions they got taken care of. Again, talk about how they might have been dead if Republicans had repealed the ACA. Instead, they're working and/or enjoying their kids/grandkids. Let them talk about how, if the Supreme Court gets rid of the ACA, shit will fall apart for them.

3. Find a family with a kid or two who had COVID-19, now suffering with the long-term impact, which we're only learning about, really. Have them talk about the struggle, how their insurance thankfully covers it, but how, if the ACA is overturned, the lung and other issues COVID leaves behind will now be pre-existing conditions that will affect those kids when they try to get insurance for the rest of their lives.

Tag line for all of them? "What's your plan for me, (insert Republican shitheel here)?"

Few things fucking freak people out more than the idea that they're gonna lose their health insurance. Republicans need to be made to own the fact that if the Supreme Court overturns the entire Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance in an instant. Everyone on the Medicaid expansion, all 12-14 million, will no longer be on it. The millions of 20somethings covered by their parents up to 26? On their own. Everyone with an Obamacare policy? Nope, that's shitcanned. You got a pre-existing condition? Fuck you. You need expensive treatments for years? Fuck you, too. Caps are back, motherfuckers. 

That shit is all on Republicans. And Democrats, who finally embraced the ACA during the 2018 midterms after years of seeming to apologize for helping people stay alive and healthy, have gotta shove that down Republicans' throats until they choke. 

And one way to do that is to ask, again and again, "What's your fuckin' plan? You keep saying you're gonna protect people with pre-existing conditions. What's the fuckin' plan?" Same thing for any time Trump flaps his sphincter lips and says that he's going to provide better insurance at a lower cost or whatever he's lying about now. You got a plan, dick? Show it. No, not in two weeks. Not in a month. Not if you're reelected. Right fucking now. Because if you can't show the fuckin' plan right fuckin' now, you don't have a fuckin' plan.

Even if they toss out there the totally bullshit high-risk pools or low-cost, low-coverage plans, it will fall far short of covering everyone the ACA covers. Essentially, Trump will be handing people with pre-existing conditions over to the insurance companies so they can have their way with them, which, really, seems par for the course for President Friend of Epstein. The real truth is they have no plan because they don't fucking care. They don't want to show that government can do good for Americans, especially for poor and middle-class Americans.

This is a winning issue for Democrats. They need to fuckin' brutalize Republicans with it and force them to weakly mew about "freedom" as they stand atop a pile of coronavirus corpses so high we can actually see it all around the country, no matter how much Trump tries to block the bodies from view.

(Lemme add one quick, vaguely optimistic thought here, though. I am leaning towards the idea that the Supreme Court, even with whatever fucked-up tool they put in to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, won't overturn the ACA. See, the last time a SCOTUS decision was made on it, the law wasn't fully implemented. Yes, it got rid of the Medicaid expansion mandate, but the rest was left in place. Even with the case being about the individual mandate penalty being zeroed out, I just don't see Roberts or, no, really, Kavanaugh voting to take health care away from tens of millions of people. I am definitely not the only one to say this. But I think it's a distinct possibility that we'd be looking at a 5-4 or even 6-3 to preserve the ACA. 

Now, Roe v. Wade is fucked, as are a whole bunch of other civil rights protections. But on this one, I hold out the barest of hopes.)

(Note 2: Yes, you are very smart and right that the ACA is inferior to Medicare for All. But Obamacare's what we've got, so Obamacare is where the fight is right now.)

Blaming 2016 Voters for the Supreme Court Is Worthless

Last night, right after I checked my phone after a joyful happy hour with friends on a rooftop bar, my buzz disappeared and I went immediately from chilled out to furnace-on-full-blast rage and gut-churning sadness about the death of Supreme Court Justice and genuine giant of American jurisprudence Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I thought about how I wanted to get on Twitter and savage anyone on the left who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I wanted to blame them for everything that will come from a Supreme Court that is firmly conservative. I wanted to go on a tear about people who didn't vote at all, as well as those who voted Green Party. I was gonna get all righteous about it, telling everyone to fuck off who blamed Hillary Clinton as a candidate. 

Then on the walk home I started to think about Trump voters and how fucking furious I was at them for being so fucking shitty and dumb. They're to blame, too, I thought, and to let them off the hook if the Affordable Care Act or Roe v. Wade or Obergfell or Brown v. Board of Education is overturned is to not treat them like the fucking shitty adults they are. Yeah, I thought. They own it. 

And then I started thinking about others that deserved blame. Yes, obviously, mob boss Mitch McConnell and the hypocritical Republican capos in the Senate, but others, like former Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is generally a dickhead conservative but swung left on a number of key issues and who retired under dubious circumstances at best, were swinging through my intensely pumping brain. Hell, what about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Senate Democrats who didn't go to war with McConnell and the GOP over blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 because they all anticipated Clinton would win and that McConnell would just play ball then, as if Republicans were ever going to allow Antonin Scalia to be replaced with a liberal justice.

But that wasn't enough. I started to get angry about all the Democratic voters who stayed home in 2014 and allowed Republicans to take over the Senate. I was pissed at those who allowed Republicans to gain seats in 2010. And, again, at Republican voters who are so filled with religious and culture war bullshit that they vote against their own good. And on and on.

By then, I remembered that 2016 didn't happen in a vacuum, that everything wasn't hunky-dory and then Susan Sarandon tweeted something mean and it ended up fucking over this country for generations to come. I will always blame Al Gore for everything that came after he punked out on fighting for his election in 2000, including Justices Alito and Roberts. I will always blame the media for allowing 25 years of Hillary Clinton hatred to become the narrative about one of the most qualified people ever to run for president. I will always blame Joe Biden for fucking up the Clarence Thomas hearings and not allowing other women to speak against that skeevy motherfucker. 

It never ends once you start this questioning. It goes back to the creation of the Senate, and the failure to amend the Constitution to deal with the fundamental unfairness that goddamn Wyoming has as much representation as California in that body. It goes back to the Electoral College, too, that brings us to the point where a president elected with a minority of the popular vote will have selected a third of the Supreme Court with the votes of senators who represent a minority of the citizens of the country. 

When I got back to my joint, I realized that I was done with 2016. Yes, it shouldn't have happened. Yes, it's enraging. But lots of shit shouldn't have happened or should have been changed, and it's fucking all enraging. Welcome to being an engaged citizen. We should learn from all of it, including, for Democrats, how to fucking fight when your opponent doesn't give a fuck about the rules of combat. But 2016 was four years ago. Fuck 2016.

So instead I tweeted about 2020, which I think you have every right to be pissed off and energized about. It's simple. If you don't vote for Biden, you have damned us. If you don't realize that, you are the problem, whether you're a Trump voter, a leftier-than-thou voter, or a non-voter. 

I don't give a fuck if you think Biden needs to earn your vote. He's earned it by being not-Trump. If you don't see that, fuck you. And I don't give a fuck if you don't like Biden. I don't fucking like Biden (see above). But I give a shit about my country. I give a shit about everyone who is gonna be fucked for good if Democrats don't completely take over. You know what the right thing is. Don't fucking delude yourself into thinking otherwise. Your vote has consequences. Act like it does.

This isn't about what you did in the past. It's about what you do now. I'm gonna vote for Biden because I don't suck. We have a shit-ton of work to do. It doesn't even get started until we get Trump out of there.

(Note: "Vote-shaming" is a bullshit phrase that people use when they don't like being told their vote is wrong. If you don't want to be challenged for your vote, don't say who you intend to vote for or not vote for.)

(Note: I do not have news alerts or Twitter alerts on my phone. It's what allows me to enjoy an evening before seeing that the shit world has turned shittier.)

Trump to Over Half of America: You're Not Americans

One reason that Donald Trump ignored the COVID-19 pandemic in the early phases was because it was primarily affecting blue states. He saw an opportunity to punish the places that didn't vote for him, and he decided to let them suffer. It's likely that he thought the rest of the country would be marginally affected, and when the virus spread in the way that every legitimate medical expert said it would spread, it was too late to close the Pandora's box he had opened. Rather than admit error and change strategies, Trump merely did the bare minimum to make it look like he wasn't the accessory to murder that he was. And is. 

Now, after saying it in one of his meaningless press briefings, Trump has made it a line in his cut-rate Nazi rallies: remove the states that didn't vote for him from the count of COVID cases and deaths, and he's saved the country. As he said in his Wisconsin speech last night, "But if you want to really see a great job, take New York and some of these other Democrat run states out of it." 

Putting aside the absurdity of the remark - as comedian Laurie Kilmartin put it, "Hurricane Sally has not flooded a single American city if you only look at the Blue States" - and putting aside that, even by that measure, the United States would still have one of the worst records when it comes to the coronavirus, think for a moment about a president saying that deaths and disease in half the country shouldn't matter as much. Think about the cruelty of it, yes, but think about the rank dismissal of even the people who voted for Trump in those states. Think about what that says about how this president, this administration, these Republicans view us. 

Essentially, Trump has been saying that we're not Americans, that we are intruders in his country, the one that worships him and believes every word he says and despises anyone who claims he's wrong and a failure. 

When Attorney General and Man Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Mound of Moldy Mashed Potatoes William Barr told a group of prosecutors to consider charging allegedly violent protesters with sedition or with plotting to overthrow the government, it was clearly an effort to squelch dissent for the left and to make protest synonymous with treason. Violent right-wingers who have moved to challenge authorities as an armed force haven't been charged in that way. In Oregon, in the midst of the fires, armed vigilantes created road blocks to stop those they thought were Antifa looters. They weren't arrested for essentially imprisoning every single person they forced to pull over at gunpoint. 

The rhetoric Trump is using toward anyone slightly left of Violently Racist is getting increasingly unhinged, frantic, and dangerous. I've been watching politicians rant about socialists and liberals taking over since at least Ronald Reagan (who, as we constantly need to remind everyone, was terrible). It's a tradition in right-wing politics to fearmonger about how leftists will force you to use the American flag as toilet paper while making your lily-white daughters breed with non-whites and give birth to mongrels while taking all your money to give to lazy poor people. In some ways, Trump is giving morons the SparkNotes version of the entire history of anti-liberal lies. "If Biden wins, the mob wins. If Biden wins, the rioters, anarchists, arsonists, and flag burners," he said last night and at other times, tossing every buzzword from the 1920s to the 1990s into the pot. Meanwhile, the people who attend his rallies are "loyal, hard-working American patriots." In other words, you can't be a patriot if you don't support him. You can't love your country unless you love him. 

Yesterday, in his culture war speech that was really straight out of the 1980s and Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, Trump said, "Whether it is the mob on the street, or the cancel culture in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their very way of life." He called an approach to learning about the nation "tyranny." He attacked the 1619 Project, Howard Zinn, and critical race theory, three things you can pretty much be guaranteed he knows nothing about. And he proclaimed that a commission would be formed to come up with a whitewashed history curriculum. In the most absurd of the many absurd parts of the speech, Trump said, "The left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools," as if school boards in Mississippi are forcing the teaching of critical race theory. 

But this is part of what Trump is attempting to do: all things must be filtered through his perspective, the one that refuses to recognize that this nation makes mistakes, sometimes huge ones, like slavery, like internment camps, like the wars against organized labor, like intentionally allowing people to die from a virus.

I have come to believe that Trump and his lackeys want us on the left, and even you in the center, dead, imprisoned, or thrown out of the country. He wants us erased and eliminated unless we get with the program of Trump-worship, which is the only thing that can show you love the United States. Let's remember that Trump has mused about issuing an executive order ending birthright citizenship and some right-wingers have approvingly said he could do that. The thing is that his supporters would love that idea, although it might make them sad that they didn't get to shoot us.

And if you don't think that's possible in a potential second term for Trump, well, I'll walk up to you at the re-education camp and say, "I told you so."

Trump in a Battle to the Death (Our Deaths, Not His) with Science

The next governor who doesn't want Donald Trump to have one of his experimental virus incubator rallies should insist that they'll allow it on one condition: Trump has to descend from the podium and greet people. No fucking mask. No fucking gloves. He has to walk among the unwashed, untested, unsafe masses and inhale their stench and, possibly, their disease. That's it. You do that, motherfucker, and you go right on and encourage your followers to play death-virus roulette.

But he won't. And one big reason for that is because he knows. He fucking well knows that that's begging for his obese, high blood pressure, mini-stroked comorbidity-ridden ass to get COVID. He knows. That's the thing that's clear from Trump's conversations with Bob Woodward: he fucking knows that the science is right, just like he fucking knew that his charity was a scam and like he fucking knew that his fake-ass university was just another way to con the yokels desperate to get some of that grifter's glow to shine on them. He knew and he pretended otherwise. Did you ever drink his vodka? I did. It tasted like it was Putin's taint sweat filtered through Trump's diaper. But he lied about it endlessly, even charged a premium for it. It didn't matter that it was objectively terrible in an ugly bottle.

And here's the other thing someone should challenge Trump on: If he doesn't think climate change is real or something that requires action now, then he should stop trying to get a sea wall built for his Ireland golf resort. See, a consulting firm for the Trump Organization, in a 2016 application for permission to, yes, build the wall, "explicitly cites global warming and its consequences — increased erosion due to rising sea levels and extreme weather this century — as a chief justification for building the structure." Just this past March, the sea wall proposal was rejected by an Irish national planning board because it would fuck up the natural dunes near the resort.

See, the filthy fucking secret all along has been that Trump and, indeed, most conservatives don't believe the anti-science bullshit. They know climate change is real and happening. What they do believe is in exploiting the yahoos in order to get power to enrich themselves and their corporate masters. And the best way to get tax cuts for the wealthy is to get the masses you've made ignorant to vote their ignorance. So, sure, Skeeter, keep your guns and fuck the masks. Just make sure you vote for Mitch McConnell before you succumb to the 'rona.

(Note: Of course, there are completely delusional elected motherfuckers, like Louie Gohmert, whose brains said, "Yeah, fuck this. I'm outta here" a long time ago. And that growing contingent is the dragon burning the Republicans' village.)

So yesterday, when Trump sat with his dullard's stare at a roundtable in California to talk about the massive wildfires, he was told by that state's Secretary for Natural Resources, Wade Crowfoot, "You may have learned that we broke a world record in the Death Valley, 130 degrees, but even in greater LA, 120-plus degrees, and we’re seeing this warming trend make our summers warmer, but also our winters warmer as well."

That seems to be what Trump was responding to when he said, "Okay. It’ll start getting cooler," as if, no shit, we know winter is real. And when Crowfoot said, "I wish science agreed with you," Trump answered like a stubborn toddler who insists that there are monsters under the bed no matter how many times Mom checks, "Well, I don’t think science knows."

Science fucking knows. Science has known for a long time. Science probably did another shot from the fifth of cheap whiskey it was downing and yelled, "What the fuck do you know, motherfucker, huh?" Science has been falling asleep in a pool of its own vomit lately. Hard to blame it.

At his endless campaign speeches during his western jaunt, Trump mocked science at every turn. He laughed at Joe Biden having social distancing at his speeches: "Do you ever see him with his little circles? The circle? You know why he puts the circles? Because he wants to be like correct with COVID." Then he said it was really because Biden can't get anyone to go to his rallies, putting aside the fact that Biden hasn't held any big, open rallies since the country shutdown because he actually gives a fuck if people die. 

But I don't wanna give Trump too much credit for merely being duplicitous, for telling the public one thing while saying something else in private. It is equally likely that Trump's fucking dumb and said the shit he said to Woodward because that's the last thing someone told him before he picked up the phone. Besides, it doesn't matter what he really thinks. It doesn't matter what any of the Republican motherfuckers really believe because their actions show that they simply don't give a happy monkey fuck about us.

Several times in the last few days, Trump made the assertion that "You go to Europe and different places in Europe, countries where they’re forest countries, and they’re very, very strong on management and they don’t have a problem" and that places like Austria have "forest cities," like they're filled with goddamn Ewoks or something. Perhaps, but Europe has had really fucking bad fires for the last few years. It just so happens not to be as bad this year. But in 2017, 2018, and 2019, things sucked. Sweden had its worst year ever in 2018. Spain had a shit time last year. I know. I was fucking there, hearing the fire warnings, watching planes dropping chemicals over the burning areas. 

Even today, Trump would not answer a direct question about whether he believes climate change is a hoax, answering, "Well, I think you have people that don't want to address China." (By the way, China's seen an increase in wildfires, too. Man, we really need more forest rakers.)

All I can think is that Trump can't acknowledge that anyone has expertise other than him. To do so would puncture the godlike status he has with his idiot hordes. If you've got people out there who are forming vigilante blockades and staying to guard their belongings because they think Antifa is going to come into their fire-fucked town to loot their houses, and if you've got people practically rioting because they think wearing masks is an enormous, anti-freedom burden, something is seriously fucking haywire. 

Which is exactly what Trump and Republicans want. 

9/11 Unity Is a Fond Remembrance from the Past That Never Happened

Look, far be it from me to shit all over your 9/11 unity circle jerk, but let's stop fucking pretending that we all held hands and sang, "Give Peace a Chance" after the terrorist attacks of that day.

At best, most of us on the left held our breath and waited to see if George W. Bush would fuck up the response. We were not optimistic that the dumb motherfucker who had spent a good chunk of his first 8 months in office praying about whether or not to allow stem cell research, passing a tax cut for the rich, and creating an office for "faith-based" programs was all of a sudden gonna put class and culture wars aside to bring us together as a nation. We were not pleasantly surprised. Once the path Bush was gonna take was clear, we knew he'd fuck it up like he had fucked up nearly every business he had ever run. Except now he had a good cover story.

Yeah, Bush paid lip service to not mistreating Muslims, but it was while at the same time his military was rounding up random Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan and shipping them to be tortured in black ops sites until finally opening up our own torture center at Guantanamo Bay. And it didn't stop law enforcement in different areas of the country, especially up here in the NYC area, from randomly arresting Muslims and subjecting them to interrogations and beatings. It didn't stop a range of assholes from firebombing mosques and attacking Muslims and discriminating against them, the Islamophobia taking over mass culture and the news media.

Oh, no, but we were all together, we're told. President Bush had a 250% approval rating or some such shit, as if people who are hurting aren't going to cling to each other. But if I'm telling the truth here, when Bush gave his speech down in the pit in NYC and announced that the world was going to hear from us, I felt embarrassed because of how overwrought it was, and I felt afraid because the attack was a crime, a massive one to be sure, and I knew we were gonna treat it like an act of war, with everything that would follow. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, we didn't go into battle with right-wing fucknuts. The same approach should have been taken with the religious fucknuts involved in the 9/11 attacks. 

We were unified, yes, in one thing: in remembering the dead. We could hold vigils to honor them. Hell, I put together a concert/fundraiser at my college that had everything from the local orchestra to punk rock to poetry readings. We recorded our stories of 9/11 and sent them to the Library of Congress. That was the glue that could bind us, the remnants of the burned and dissolved and exploded bodies, the way we all watched them die.

We were not unified on politicizing the dead. Democrats were degraded and bullied into becoming co-conspirators in the War on Terror. Look at the way in which, for years after, any slight deviation from an absolutist mindset on war and torture was treated as seditious and exploited by vile conservative cockheads like the now-revered Rick Wilson to destroy Democrats who dared to say, "Wait, maybe we should think about what we're doing here." Republicans claimed 9/11 for themselves because it helped cover up that it happened on the watch of a president from their party, and they sure as fuck weren't going to let Democrats get away with blaming him for his utter failure to stop it, even though he had been warned.

What is this unity they're talking about? Republicans took unity and fed it to the pigs, forcing through the Department of Homeland Security so we could have mass surveillance of Americans, calling anyone a traitor who wasn't onboard with the march to two worthless, endless wars, and allowing and encouraging the Bush administration to take steps that increased terrorism and hatred of the United States throughout the world, all while spending us and tax cutting us into oblivion.

Don't fucking talk to me about unity when voices who tried to tell us that what we were doing in response was bullshit were silenced in all but the leftiest of media. Don't fucking tell me how everyone cared for each other. We mourned, yes, as people do when someone dies. But as soon as the funerals were over, Republicans decided that unity only meant doing what they said and fuck you if you try to stop them.

That's what I remember about the post-9/11 United States: a feeling of isolation as my country descended into a madness that it has never recovered from. 

The President Is Our Mass Murderer

Sometimes, oh, my sweet, weary people of Donald Trump's America, it feels like we're sailing in skiffs on a sea of shit and some of us believe we can get across the shit sea to shore and some of us believe that we're gonna sink but we all know we're damned to keep sailing as wave after wave of shit keeps hitting us, and every time we dare to hope that we've seen the worst shit wave, that perhaps we'll get a break and just sail as smoothly as possible through a shit sea, a fucking massive turd wave in a shit storm appears on the horizon and we've gotta batten down the hatches and ride this one out, even though we know that in the best possible circumstances, we'll get over or through but still coated in shit.

What does it change that we now have Trump on audio telling reporter Bob Woodward that he knew back in early February that COVID-19 was airborne and dangerous, far worse, in his own words, than a "strenuous flu"? What does it change that we now can hear Trump say that he downplayed the virus to the public on purpose? In some ways, obviously, it changes nothing. It doesn't bring back the dead. It doesn't rebuild the lives shattered by the shutdown economy. It doesn't really make us understand Trump any more than we already did. We know that he is the motherfuckingest motherfucker anyone has ever met. We know that he was deliberately avoiding action on coronavirus until the mounting death toll and hospitalizations forced him to do something.

But what has changed today is that we know without a doubt that Trump wasn't just spitballing and gambling that the virus wouldn't be bad, despite experts outside of the federal government telling us it would be. He knew. He fucking knew. He knew it and could articulate how dangerous the situation was going to get. And he chose to pretend otherwise and lie to the nation, forcing others to lie, too. After telling Woodward it was worse than the flu, he tweeted the exact opposite, mocking the idea that it's worse than the flu. After telling Woodward that "young people" are susceptible to it, he said that children are "almost immune" to the virus. And no matter how many ways Trump and his ass remoras attempt to spin this as nobly trying not to panic people, there's a fucking world of difference between yelling, "Fire" in a crowded theatre and telling everyone to just sit still while the fire burns out.  This is not fine. 

Every single person who knew should have spoken. They should have given Trump the finger and told us, including Bob fucking Woodward. Because how the fuck do we trust anything now? Most of us didn't trust Trump, but we thought we could look at others, look at the CDC or Anthony Fauci and find the truth. But they all decided to stay silent, out of either blind or craven loyalty to Trump or the misguided hope they could mitigate the damage by staying quiet, the pathetic error that so many tainted public servants have made. 

And now we're supposed to listen when this lying son of a bitch whose face looks like a one-nut pig scrotum and who speaks in barks like a brain-damaged beagle bitch tells us to get an untested vaccine? Fuck off all the way to Moscow.

This is personal, too. I remember wondering all through February and into March whether or not I should wear a mask. I was reading articles about whether or not masks are effective, with many telling us not to worry about it, that the slim supply of masks had to go to health care workers. It gnawed at me until I finally decided, "Fuck it, I'm wearing one" about a week before the CDC changed course and said we should. The thing is that by that point I already had gotten COVID. I didn't get sick until a few days after I started mask-wearing, which means I was doing my part then. As I've said before, I had very mild symptoms, just a low-grade fever, some fatigue, and a bit of a cough. Sure, it could have been far worse, and I'm pissed at Trump about getting sick. But most of the time, you have the goddamn virus before your symptoms show up. I should have been wearing a mask all along. I don't fucking know who I might have spread it to. And that bullshit weighs on me, and that's on Trump and everyone who stayed quiet. 

We knew Trump was busily corrupting every part of the government he could get his shit-stained fingers on. We knew that he was too fucking lazy to really take the action that he needed to take, as simple as that may have been. We knew that we needed to amp up production of masks and gloves and fucking tests. We knew that it was goddamn weird that it didn't happen. We knew that the only thing that matters to Trump is re-election, something that Fauci is quoted as saying in Woodward's book. Fuck, we knew that Trump was actually, actively evil and not just stupidly so. The cockscab wants violence in the streets (which is something that makes his claim of trying to prevent panic utterly laughable). 

I'm not really shocked by what we've learned. I'm frankly only shocked that Trump went on the record with it. Which means that he thinks he was right to lie to Americans. He said that today, like he's some fuckin' hero for shutting down the information we needed to save our fucking lives. And by so willingly talking to Woodward, it also means that, even though he should be forced out of office and arrested, Trump believes he will suffer no consequences for his evil. And every single time, that has been proven correct. Even now, when he's killed people in the middle of every avenue, the president as our mass murderer. And that, dear Americans, is something we haven't seen in a long damn time.

Sometimes it feels like the sails on our skiffs are broken, and so we are just drifting on the shit sea, buffeted by the waves, wondering if we'll float to land before we die of exposure.

A Poem for the Laborers

"Calling Him Back from Layoff" 
by Bob Hicok

I called a man today. After he said
hello and I said hello came a pause
during which it would have been
 
confusing to say hello again so I said
how are you doing and guess what, he said
fine and wondered aloud how I was
 
and it turns out I’m OK. He
was on the couch watching cars
painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars
 
painted with ads for Tide around an oval
that’s a metaphor for life because
most of us run out of gas and settle
 
for getting drunk in the stands
and shouting at someone in a t-shirt
we want kraut on our dog. I said
 
he could have his job back and during
the pause that followed his whiskers
scrubbed the mouthpiece clean
 
and his breath passed in and out
in the tidal fashion popular
with mammals until he broke through
 
with the words how soon thank you
ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove
through the wires on the backs of ions
 
as one long word as one hard prayer
of relief meant to be heard
by the sky. When he began to cry I tried
 
with the shape of my silence to say
I understood but each confession
of fear and poverty was more awkward
 
than what you learn in the shower.
After he hung up I went outside and sat
with one hand in the bower of the other
 
and thought if I turn my head to the left
it changes the song of the oriole
and if I give a job to one stomach other
 
forks are naked and if tonight a steak
sizzles in his kitchen do the seven
other people staring at their phones
 
hear?

What Did That Dumb Orange Motherfucker Say Now? (Laura Ingraham Interview Edition)

Yeah, you've heard some of the appalling shit that Donald Trump squeezed out of his mouth hole while being interviewed by Lauren "Fuck You, Tucker, I'm the Craziest Motherfucker on This Bullshit Network" Ingraham on Fox "news." You heard him talk about how rich people from the "dark shadows" really control Joe Biden. You heard him say how anarchists in black clothes were flying to protests. You heard him compare a cop shooting an unarmed black man to a golfer choking on a putt. 

But did you hear his opinion of Black Lives Matter? No? He said that, upon hearing the phrase, "I said, 'That’s a terrible name. It’s so discriminatory.' It’s bad for black people." 

And what about this completely nutzoid batshittery: "Black Lives Matter came into existence, walking down the street, screaming, 'Pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.' And that was about police officers. That was representing police. They were pigs, pigs in a blanket, like the sausages or hot dogs, fry them like bacon." 

First off, no one affiliated with Black Lives Matter said that when it was chanted in Minnesota in 2015. Second, what the fuck with the free association of pork products? Trump brings up this 30-second chant from 5 years ago constantly to discredit the entire Black Lives Matter movement. It's almost as if he's someone who has said a ton of awful shit that should completely discredit him.

Trump wasn't done shitting on protesters who don't fly Trump flags. When Frau Ingraham reminded him that Oregon's governor said that "no one is safe in Trump's America," he responded, "That’s a violent person, frankly. That’s violent. They stick up for the violence. The people that are getting hurt, they don’t care about. They don’t care about these people. It’s a weird thing. It’s like warped minds." And he added, "If it weren’t Donald Trump’s America, to just use the expression as I’m president, you would have riots like you’ve never seen." You got that bullshit? Yeah, there are riots now, but if Joe Biden is elected or if Hillary Clinton had been elected, well, then there would have been real riots. In other words, he's claiming that he's keeping us safe because the violence isn't as bad as he thinks it would be. It would be like if someone shot you outside Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment and said, "Yeah, I know you're bleeding to death, but at least you're not gonna get skull-fucked by a cannibal."

This was followed by whatever the fuck this is regarding protesters: "It is an ideology for the people that are paying them. And the funny thing is, and the strange thing is, the people that are paying them and all this money, because somebody’s doing it. The people paying them, those people will be overthrown. Their lives will be taken away. Their lives will be endangered. They’re all going to be gone. They’re just stupid foolish people that made a lot of money." From what I can make out, apparently, someone (Soros, no doubt) is paying protesters who will then over throw that someone (Soros, no doubt) when the protesters win. That's some next-level conspiracy fuckery.

But there's more about this sinister "they": "If Biden gets in, they will have won. He’s a weak person. He’s controlled like a puppet. So it’s not going to be calm things down. It’s going to be, they will have won. They will have taken over your cities. It’s a revolution. You understand that, it’s a revolution. And the people of this country will not stand for that. They’re not going to stand for that." He's promising more violence. That's what he's doing. He's saying, with almost no obfuscation, that there will be a civil war if Biden is elected. Trump isn't the 45th president of the United States. He's the second president of the Confederacy.

This could obviously go on and on. A Trump interview is like a chocolate fountain filled with shit. You can just dip in and you'll get stained and stinky. 

Here's his view of the history of riots when Obama was president: "Look at all of what happened with Brown and this one and that one." Yes, that's Michael Brown who he's naming dismissively. He had just mentioned Ferguson.

Here he is on Biden's plans, using it as an occasion to rag on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the most patronizing way: "He’s going to do things that are going to cost so much on the Green New Deal, which is done by a child. Okay? That’s the mind of a child."

Here he is completely inflating an accomplishment (funding for HBCUs) like it's the amount of his supposed fortune: "I saved the historically black colleges and universities."

Here he is saying Biden said something that Hillary Clinton said about criminals in the 1990: "He called them super predators." 

And, finally, there's this almost comical take on police officers and the violence they commit: "The vast, not only the vast majority, thousands and thousands of great acts, and one bad one, and you make the evening news for weeks." The vast majorities of members of just about every group go about their lives without doing horrible shit. That's why... you know what? Fuck it. That's falling into his web of fucking moronic nonsense masked as "thoughts."

I can't even laugh at this shit anymore. We are heading into dark, uncharted territory, motherfuckers. We are without a fucking map now. We just have to press ahead, hoping that whoever we're following doesn't lead us off a goddamn cliff. Or that we don't die before we get across these mountains in front of us.

MAGA Terrorism Is Too Familiar

There's a murder that's been on my mind for a few weeks now. It happened in Peshawar, Pakistan, a large city in the northwest of that country. An American man, Tahir Naseem, from Chicago was in a courtroom there on charges of blasphemy, which means that certain Muslims didn't like the way that Naseem had talked about Islam and Muhammad. Yes, that really is a crime in Pakistan, one that is punishable by life in prison or death. 

In this case, Naseem, who had lived in the U.S. since 1978, had chatted on Facebook with some supposed students, who invited him to Pakistan to debate his beliefs. But, instead, in 2018, Naseem was arrested for calling himself a new prophet, and his trial was being held, finally, on July 29 of this year. That's when Faisal Khan walked up to Naseem in the courtroom and shot him repeatedly, killing Naseem right in front of the judge and lawyers. 

There are lots of reasons why this case has been bugging me. First there's the absurdity of the law itself, which has come under a great deal of criticism in recent years but still remains on the books. Then there's the brazenness of the crime. And then there's the fact that this was an American whose imprisonment we heard almost nothing about until this happened. I'll bet you've heard nothing about it until now, although there was a great NPR piece featuring an interview with Naseem's grown daughter. 

But more details in this horrific act are terribly relevant. For instance, Khan is a teenager (between 15 and 19), and the fact that he was able to get through the supposedly tight security at the courthouse shows that he had the cops on his side. Khan said of Naseem, "“He is an enemy of Islam. He is an enemy of Pakistan," and he claimed that Muhammad came to him in a dream and told him to commit murder.

Khan has been hailed as a hero by a large number of people in Pakistan. There was a march of thousands of Muslims in Peshawar in support of his actions, and there continues to be rallies calling for Khan's release. He was hailed as a hero and a "holy warrior," with lawyers lining up to take his case and defend him.  They all believe that the murder was justified to defend their faith. When Khan was arrested, the police took selfies with him, all smiling. Politicians have gone to his family to "congratulate" them. The Taliban in Pakistan support him. 

I don't know if anyone has set up a GoFundMe for Khan, but you can bet that if they could, they would.

Obviously, we see echoes of Faisal Khan in 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who gunned down three people in Kenosha,Wisconsin, killing two. Rittenhouse was also deluded by a kind of faith. Khan saw himself as a defender of Islam. Rittenhouse saw himself as a defender of Trumpism. The Illinois teenager (huh - same state the Naseem was from) had heard from President Donald Trump, among others, that the Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha in the wake of the attempted murder of Jacob Blake by a police officer were a threat to a certain kind of American way of life. He decided that he had to act as a holy warrior for his MAGA faith. And he got a chance to murder some infidels, with the cops essentially on his side.

Obviously, the aftermath of Rittenhouse's murders is frighteningly like the reaction to Khan in Pakistan. Conservative commentators rushed to defend him. Sniveling hate worm Tucker Carlson said, "How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?" Sentient genital wart Ann Coulter tweeted that Rittenhouse should run for president. He's got some of the skeeviest lawyers around defending him, and one of them called him the equivalent of the Minutemen, the citizen soldiers who actually trained as militias during the Revolutionary War. Yeah, the Minutemen were well-regulated bearers of arms. Trump himself essentially approved of Rittenhouse's actions today. Meanwhile, instead of rallies (although you can see that coming), Rittenhouse has groups raising money for his defense, including those that are Republican, Christian, and/or pro-gun. All this is for a terrorist. That's what Rittenhouse is. That's the purpose of wandering the streets of Kenosha with his gun visible: intimidation and violence to suppress a political view you dislike.

I mean, it's not a stretch at this point to say that Trumpism is our Taliban. Trump supporters seek to turn back the clock to a time when rights for many people were limited, they expect blind obedience to their leader, and they will use violence to get their way. They consider everyone else infidels. And most people were shocked that they took over and aren't sure how to get rid of them. 

Frankly, at this point, the MAGA terrorists are so much like Muslim terrorists that we should ask everyone who supports Trump if they condemn the violence done in Trump's name. Otherwise, we may as well assume that every member of MAGA nation is a terrorist or a terrorist supporter.

That's the way this works, right? 

(Note: At this point, "right-wing extremist terrorism" and "MAGA terrorism" are the same thing. We need not pretend they're not.)

RNC Night 4: "I Alone Can Fuck It All Up"

One of President Donald Trump's ultimate tells is the phrase "as you know." Whenever Trump says something and follows it with "as you know," it's got one of two purposes. The first is flattery, as in, "I know that you are privy to this incredible insight that I have, too." The second is conspiratorial, making you complicit in his lies. If he says something absurdly false and adds "as you know," barring anyone shouting out, "No, I don't fucking know," he's essentially acting as if you have assented to the lies.

For the idiot hordes of his voters, it doesn't matter. For the rest of us, it should be alarming. Trump could say, "I strangle hobos with Ivanka's panties and lean in to kiss them as they take their last breath because it's the only thing that makes me ejaculate, as you know."  We might raise a hand and say, "I'm sorry. Could you go back to that strangling part? We didn't really know that." Trump voters would nod and say, "Yes, of course, we know about the hobogasm.  Do continue," and then, when Democrats started to complain about the president jizzing on hobo corpses, they'd get outraged and tell us, "Look, we all know that's who he is. We don't care."

Last night, on the fourth night of the GOP's Convention of Horror and Doom, Trump gave his weary, practically mumbled speech accepting the nomination of his party, essentially just doing his stump speech mostly without his usual riffing. But he did manage to deploy one "as you know" in service of one of his most-repeated and most-obvious lies: "We have spent nearly $2.5 trillion on completely rebuilding our military, which was very badly depleted when I took office, as you know." No, motherfucker, we don't know that because it wasn't "very badly depleted," and the only people who know it are liars. 

Lies were legion throughout the RNC. Every single speech by a politician there and most of the ones by "real people" contained lies. If lies were currency, Trump is truly as rich as he says. Practically every single thing said about the coronavirus was false, starting with the ban on travel from China, which was a bullshit action that did almost nothing, and going all the way to the vaccine that is definitely not going to be available before the election except to murder people. But the lies weren't the only fuckery. Perhaps worse were the contradictions between the present and the projected.

The contradictions in the speech and what we used to refer to as "reality" were so ridiculous and clear that the only excuses were Trump's contempt for everyone watching and an expectation that his voters would gobble up whatever he shit out.  Just a sample:

- Trump grunted, "We must always have law and order. All federal crimes are being investigated, prosecuted, and punished to the fullest extent of the law" while he was committing a federal crime, violating the Hatch Act, by forcing employees of the federal government to participate in a political campaign, which also meant that every federal employee there, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, was breaking federal law, too. They will not, one imagines, be punished to even the least extent of the law. (And no one there gave a damn about the abuse of the White House for campaign shits and giggles.)

- Trump talked about how Democrats will allow the federal government to take over your life while he's saying, "We will take care of your problem in a matter of hours. Just call. We have to wait for the call. It is too bad we have to, but we have to wait for the call." In other words, he wants the federal government to take over cities because they are run by Democrats. (Funny how troops aren't sent to Lubbock, Texas, where protests have been ongoing.)

- Trump said of the coronavirus, "To save as many lives as possible, we are focusing on the science, the facts, and the data. We are aggressively sheltering those at highest risk, especially the elderly," while speaking before a mostly unmasked audience that was crowded together, with many elderly people there, like Wilbur "I'm Not Even Sure If I'm Alive" Ross.

- Trump talked about prison reform but fundamentally doesn't understand the justice system, when he said that Biden wants to do away with cash bail and that would end up "immediately releasing 400,000 criminals onto the streets and into your neighborhoods." Except bail is for the accused, not the convicted, as I'm sure he fucking knows, considering all the people around him who have had to put up bail.

- Under Biden, Trump said, cities will essentially be filled with rising murder rates, riots, looting, and more. Like is happening now under Trump. Like right now.

- Under Biden, Trump said, we will "surrender" to the coronavirus as over 1000 people died of COVID-19 nearly every day of the RNC.

- Under Biden, Trump said, the economy will never recover while every week a million more people file for unemployment and more businesses are closing, again, right fucking now.

- Joe Biden is a "Trojan horse for socialism" and a puppet to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Trump said, and he's also an extremist who said he wants to defund police and open the borders, which would mean he very specifically is neither a Trojan horse nor a puppet. (Side note: I'm confused by the idea that providing some of the things that they have in, say, Germany and France will turn the country into the Soviet Union.) 

The lawless, violent, depressed dystopia is here, now. Trump said in 2016, "I alone can fix it" when the truth is, no matter how much they try to paper it over with lies, he fucked it all up. And he fucked it up worse than Republicans usually fuck things up. 

And the promise that he made last night is that he will continue to fuck it up. That's it. That's the platform. "You like how shitty things are? Well, this shitstorm in a shithole can continue for four more years."

What's frightening is how many people will fall for Trump's frankly retro invocation of socialism and crime in the streets (even as overall crime continues to be at incredibly low rates in most of the country).  Fear of non-white people invading the pure white spaces is the driving force behind the Republican Party, as it has been for over 40 years.

But, see, it's not just through crime that they fear Black and brown people. Despite all the useful idiots protesting that Trump is not racist or the GOP does include them, what they really fear is the undermining of whiteness's central power role in the United States. That is the real crime. And for them, this loathsome, sweaty cretin who whines out his grievances is their last, best hope. All roads lead to him and all things are about him and only him. You must thank him, you must honor him, you must obey him.

It was a terrible speech, delivered badly, to an audience of assholes while shitting all over the White House and the law. It was the rhetorical nadir of a movement whose only motivation is hatred of the Other. 

And, frankly, the violent, angry way in which everyone spoke about the left makes me wonder what they have planned for us if they eke out, cheat, and steal a victory. It won't be peaceful. As you know.

Melania Trump's Shitty RNC Speech

Hey, all you legit pundits out there, don't fuckin' waste anyone's time trying to fuck the corpse of decent oratory back to life. The Republican National Convention has effectively murdered it dead, and just because it let out one last rigor mortis fart during First Lady Melania Trump's attempt at speaking what we might generously call "English," let's not dance like crazed religious fanatics and call it a resurrection. 

Melania Trump was speaking about an entirely different being than the bloated ogre who cages children and laughs as multitudes die in his festering wake that she's damned herself to be married to. She spoke of fantasy Donald Trump, one who could be "humbled by the incredible support" in 2016, despite braying like a donkey with a broom stuck up its ass about his victory every chance he's had in 4 years. She spoke of a tireless Trump, who "will not rest until he has done all he can to take care of everyone impacted by this terrible pandemic," despite constantly golfing and tweeting about the hours and hours of TV he was watching, evidence of a someone who couldn't manage to burp out a plan after downing a bucket of Diet Coke and a slop bin of Big Macs. 

Donald Trump isn't "inspired by the millions of Americans who wake up each day with a simple, yet courageous goal of providing for their families and keeping them safe." He isn't "here fighting for you." He isn't "grateful that you have trusted him to be your President." Melania said that he "will not stop fighting for you and your families," but he never even started. He fights for himself and his family, and I'm pretty sure he barely fights for them. Donald Trump is a miserable flea on the filthy anus of a failing body, and nothing more and probably much less.

But, sure, yeah, for the first time at the RNC, someone met the bar of "somewhat civilized" in their speech. Sure, Melania actually acknowledged that people died from COVID. Sure, she brought up opioid addiction and racial unrest. Jesus Christ, is that all we need to praise her? That she recognized that reality exists?

She was graded on the idiot curve, where you know someone isn't capable of doing something but you cheer them when they do the most basic shit with their few unremarkable skills. I get that when I play basketball with friends. If I hit a basket, it's like "Oh, hey, he didn't slam his head into the pole" and everyone's thrilled. But if they started telling me how awesome a player I am, I'd punch 'em in the tit for lying. 

It was a shitty speech on a basic level. Putting aside the lies about her cretinous husband and putting aside that she was no doubt doing this as part of her contract with Trump and putting aside that she's a liar and a birther, the language she used was like she was a fucking third-grader. "I always heard about an amazing place called America, a land that stood for freedom and opportunity," she said, talking about her childhood in Slovenia. That's dumb. That's dumb shit that only dumb people fall for. It's dumb like the phrase "Be Best," which is what dumbasses think is wisdom. 

Einstein visa? Eat my whole ass.

What the speech was really about was providing cover for assholes to vote for Donald Trump. Despite what his wife says, he is not "an authentic person who loves this country and its people, and wants to continue to make it better." He doesn't want "to keep your family safe" or "to help your family succeed." He doesn't give a shit about you unless your organs can keep his degenerating body alive longer.

I kept thinking about the song "A New Argentina" from Evita, where Eva Peron gets her fascist husband elected by lying about his devotion to the working class and offering her love as testimony for his worthiness. And then Juan Peron cracked down on any dissent, tortured and murdered his opposition, and enriched himself on the backs of those he purported to help. 

But, hey, Melania said people should be nice to each other, so let's all give her a round of applause.

Random Observations on the RNC Orgy and Klan Rally (Night 1: That Was Some Weird Shit)

1. The theme of the Republican National Convention, which started last night from various locations in Hell, was "All glory to Trump." There was no attempt to reach out, even in the smallest way, to people who might live in what we colloquially call "reality." Nope. You either rode the MAGA express straight to the Trump Pole where Trump would bestow upon you all the toys you could ever want, or you were a miserable leftist fuck who only deserved Marxist lumps of coal. Honestly, every single speaker could have gotten up there and talked about how great it was to give enthusiastic blow jobs to Trump and it really wouldn't have made one bit of difference. If Steve Scalise had sauntered up to the mic while wiping cum off the corner of his mouth, I'd've thought, "Yeah, I assumed."

2. There wasn't a word of sympathy for the 200,000 people in this country who have died of COVID-19, as if that never happened. In fact, in the telling of the RNC, some sneaky Chinaman defiled our virginal American shores and infected us with coronavirus, probably on purpose. And while all those evil Democrats ran around saying that it wasn't a threat, one man knew right away what to do, and that man was Donald Trump, and Donald Trump allowed the United States to suckle from his orange breast, his milk filled with the medicine that would heal us. This wasn't spin. We're used to spin, where you take the facts and make them look good in a context of your choosing. No, this was a complete, Soviet-level revision of recent history, where Trump never said it would go away, never said there would only be 1 or 15 or 60,000 deaths, never claimed there were cures and treatments that didn't exist, never accused governors desperately trying to get PPE and ventilators of just trying to make him look bad, never demeaned the scientists working on saving us, never politicized every fucking aspect of the pandemic. It has become an article of faith among the delusional MAGA hordes that Trump saved millions of lives by doing something, never allowing the corollaries, that the only way millions of people would have died is if he did absolutely nothing and prevented anyone else from doing anything and that, if he'd done more, we wouldn't have this ridiculous, ongoing death rate, to enter their empty minds. It's a madness that is so complete, so all-engulfing that they couldn't even pause for a second to acknowledge the piles of dead bodies that their bullshit convention was stepping on.

3. I don't get this strategy that the world is fucked and we need to re-elect Donald Trump to unfuck it. We were treated to videos of protests that turned violent and unemployment porn. We heard from coked-out morons like Donald Trump, Jr., saying shit like "Anarchists have been flooding our streets and Democrat mayors are ordering the police to stand down. Small businesses across America, many of them minority owned, are being torched by mobs." Or the repulsive St. Louis couple who, when not destroying a synagogue's beehives (no, really), pointed guns at peaceful protesters who walked past their home. From their mansion they said, "They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single family home zoning." Does it need to be said that these rich cuntmites sued to prevent a gay couple from moving into their 'hood? (No, really.) So the country is on fire, protesters are in the streets, coronavirus is rampaging, the economy is in tatters, and Republicans' message is "You see how shitty everything is? We need the guy who made it shitty to fix it." Sure, sure, if a mad bomber has planted bombs all over the city and half of them have gone off, you want the bomber to tell you where the rest of 'em are. But then you fucking lock the bomber away forever. And at least everyone would agree that bombs are real.

4. The racist dog whistles were loud last night from the very beginning. Alien with a wig Charlie Kirk declared that "Trump is the bodyguard of Western civilization" and "the defender of Western Civilization," which is such a thinly-veiled code for "white" that it's pretty much Saran Wrap. Rejected Muppet Matt Gaetz said of Democrats, "They’ll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door," a sentence that is racist and makes no sense. Every mention of the border or "take away your guns" was code for "the dark people are coming and you need to be able to shoot them." Then there was Sen. Tim "Useful Idiot" Scott, who got in some anti-Semitic jams by saying that Democrats "want to take more money from your pocket and give it to Manhattan elites and Hollywood moguls." Most absurd was former governor and UN ambassador and future failed GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who is Indian-American. A couple of seconds after saying, "In much of the Democratic party, it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country," she talked about she and her family "faced discrimination and hardship." Yeah, motherfucker, because of the racism.

5. So much of what they speakers celebrated was because of Democrats. Angry meat loaf Sean Parnell talked about how "In a century, we went from ground bound dreamers gazing to the stars, to doers who created the means to reach them," which was, you know, the doing primarily of JFK and LBJ. Teary Castro-hater Maxiom Alvarez talked about how he came to America during Operation Pedro Pan in 1961, when, you know, JFK was president. Ill-informed nurse Amy Ford talked about the expansion of telehealth services, which exist primarily because of the Affordable Care Act and Republicans at the state and federal level blocked it being paid for Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP. 

6. Holy shit, Kimberly Guilfoyle must have done bath salts before heading out to yell at an empty auditorium like she had lost out on the part of Evita at the East Hampton Community Theater. I would not have been surprised if she had chewed the face off a kitten.

7. Joe Biden stories are about him forming relationships with ordinary people across the country. Donald Trump stories are about how he occasionally acknowledged that other people exist.

8. The news networks talked repeatedly about how the RNC was like reality TV. They're right because, see, reality TV is all bullshit. It's fake. It's a bunch of manipulated situations where people are prompted to act like their shittiest selves in order to fool stupid people into thinking that this is reality. So...well-done, RNC. You set the bar below ground level and managed to reach it.

Biden and Harris Believe You Deserve Sanity in Your Daily Lives

Everyone is talking about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's speeches at the Democratic National Convention this past week as being a return of empathy or decency, but I'd go one further with another overarching theme: "Remember sanity?" It was truly like watching a funhouse mirror version of our reality, except it took the warped world around us and made it look natural again. It was honestly like you could exhale and not just wonder what insane shit might follow after the last round of insane shit.

That was what Biden and Harris imparted: a sense that we could possibly exist in a normal nation, one that wasn't constantly on the brink of exploding in violence or just collapsing into itself, unable to bear the weight of one man's insatiable ego. Harris vividly described our national anxiety: "We're at an inflection point. The constant chaos leaves us adrift. The incompetence makes us feel afraid. The callousness makes us feel alone. It's a lot." Then she went full inspirational speaker: "And here's the thing: We can do better and deserve so much more."

For his part, Biden told us the things that we deserve in a newly-sane America, like a national plan to deal with the coronavirus (although it's likely at least another 100,000 of us will die before we even get to January 20, 2021). And he laid out the choice in terms that Joseph Campbell's ghost would approve of: "We can choose the path of becoming angrier, less hopeful and more divided. A path of shadow and suspicion. Or we can choose a different path, and together, take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light."

Both the speeches were solid and inspirational enough. They called on our better angels that have been repressed for four years to make an appearance. They vaguely promised on much of their agenda, but the main point, made again and again, was that shit's gone crazy and that's no way for people to live. 

Both spoke about Donald Trump in terms that turned his incompetence into a tragedy, while avoiding ascribing evil intent to his actions. That was a bit of a disappointment, sort of like saying, "The arsonist didn't know how big the fire would be." In what was probably his best line, Biden gave Trump the employee annual review he's needed for decades: "Our current president has failed in his most basic duty to this nation. He failed to protect us. He failed to protect America. And, my fellow Americans, that is unforgivable." It's honestly the most coldly logical assessment of Trump's fuckery as you could get. You could almost picture Trump being dragged off in cuffs like at the end of a Scooby-Doo episode, calling back, "And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that meddling virus!" Because COVID-19 deaths cannot be happy-talked into non-existence. Because long-term damage to the victims and to the economy will not go away "like a miracle." We are an open wound right now. Biden wants us to heal. 

And I loved how Harris took back the notion of family from the formerly "Family Values" party. Family isn't just your parents and siblings, she said. "Family is my best friend, my nieces and my godchildren. Family is my uncles, my aunts—my chitthis. Family is Mrs. Shelton—my second mother who lived two doors down and helped raise me. Family is my beloved Alpha Kappa Alpha...our Divine 9...and my HBCU brothers and sisters. Family is the friends I turned to when my mother—the most important person in my life—passed away from cancer." That expansive definition of families, one not held to the narrow, isolating, alienating world view that conservatives propagate. If your family includes all of those people, then you're gonna give a fuck when they are hurting, too.

When Republicans and the right-wing commentariat declared that Biden and Harris and the whole DNC were "angry" or presenting a "dark" perspective on the nation, it's bullshit because they weren't angry at the United States. They were angry at how dark Trump and the GOP have made the country. It would be ludicrous not to be angry, and the whole thing could have been 100 times angrier and still not approached the level of anger that the bastards deserve.

Because the implication of the showing of empathy is that Trump treats us with antipathy, the implication of the fostering of decency is that Trump is indecent, and the implication of the return of sanity is that Trump is insane. 

Essentially, Biden and Harris are promising that we can take one fucking terrible thing off the table: the thought that our government is actively, intentionally harming us just for shits and giggles. And then we can work to actually make things better. At this point, goddamn, that's enough.

Obama Tells Us We're in Danger and We Better Fucking Act Like We Are

(I'm gonna talk about Kamala Harris's speech tomorrow, along with Joe Biden's.)

One thing I've appreciated about the Democratic National Convention this year is that the party has essentially stopped begging for the votes of white working class idiots who voted for Trump. Sure, sure, there have been the (retired) Republican politicians endorsing Joe Biden and the Republican voters who won't vote for Trump. But those have been more along the lines of how they're like us, not how we're like them. In other words, you gotta get on board with the gun control and the LGBTQ rights and fair treatment of immigrants and being pro-choice and dealing with climate change and providing health care. No one is crawling to appeal to the shitheels, fucknuts, and ignoramuses who are going to vote for Trump.

Instead, the real appeal has been to those who are thinking of not voting at all (whether for ideological or other reasons). We heard again and again last night, from Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, that sitting on the sidelines is a bullshit position. "Vote like our lives and livelihoods are on the line, because they are," Clinton said, and if it's not for your life, vote for the lives of people who will suffer under more Trump.

And most forcefully, and most shockingly, we heard from Barack Obama how fucked up shit is under Trump and how much more fucked up shit will get if Trump is re-elected. Like Michelle Obama scaring the shit out of us on Monday, the fact that President Cool Guy, Mister Hope and Change himself, is saying things like "This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes for them to win" is downright terrifying. All I can think about is the access he has to information that we don't know and the shit he must have seen, even beyond the distressing daily fuckery, to make him break an unspoken protocol in modern times that ex-presidents don't flat-out attack sitting presidents. 

But more than any previous president, Obama deserves the right to come at Trump. President Fucko the Buffoon lies on a daily basis about Obama's accomplishments, whether it's shitting on the smooth-running economy that Trump inherited (and claims was in shambles, which is demonstrably, factually false) or taking credit for the passage of the Veterans Choice Program (which was signed into law in 2014, when Trump was conspicuously not president) or making up a fictional tale about Obama ordering "spying" on the Trump campaign (when it was the Justice Department concerned because Paul Manafort and others...you know what? Fuck it. Either you know it or you don't). 

So Obama put it out there, talking to us like he's still president, saying that we're in fucking danger and we better fucking well act like we are. "Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t, and the consequences of that failure are severe," he said. "170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs, gone, while those at the top taking more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before." And that's now. Imagine the devolution of the nation in another four years. Fuck, I can't even imagine there will be a nation as we know it in another four years if we have another Trumpering.

To show how bugfuck insane things have gotten, Obama rattled off what Biden and Harris believe in, like the right to vote, the president isn't above the law, the press is necessary, and "our ability to work together to solve big problems like a pandemic depend on a fidelity to facts and science and logic and not just making stuff up." This is basic, everyday shit that we used to all at least have a tacit agreement on, but now that's thrown out the window, along with empathy and decency, the return of which is the overarching theme of this DNC. It had to be hard as hell not to give in to despair and fear for Obama. 

It's not just that there was real fear in Obama's eyes and real concern in his voice. There was a barely contained rage, as if he was saying, "Don't be stupid. Don't be lazy or discouraged. Don't crawl up your own ass because you didn't get the candidate you want. Don't be selfish dicks. And don't let the motherfuckers prevent you from voting." That message, the power of the vote, is one that he returned to again and again, telling us about GOP efforts to suppress the vote, "That is how they win. That is how they get to keep making decisions that affect your life and the lives of the people you love. That’s how the economy will keep getting skewed to the wealthy and well-connected. How our health systems will let more people fall through the cracks. That’s how a democracy withers until it’s no democracy at all." And, goddamn, he knows that from the utter failure of Democrats to show up for the 2010 and 2014 midterms so that the warped and racist Tea Party narrative could have such power. 

Look, I've been watching and writing about politics since Reagan. I have never seen a president tell us in such stark terms that we're hanging by a thread. And that it came from the man we used to call "No-Drama Obama"? That should punch all of us in the gut. Gird yer loins and vote for your life, for all our lives, motherfuckers. Shit's gonna get crazy.