Ron DeSantis Is Not Your New Trump, But He Is a...

Cunt. He's a cunt. If I put that in the title, someone would report it somewhere, but we're all presumably adult(ish) here, so I'll say it clearly: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a total, irredeemable cunt and every word out of his cunty mouth is filled with cuntishness. Sure, sure, you can have a delicate sensibility and call him a "dick" or "prick" or "asshole." But those insults don't capture the feeling of seeing and listening to Ron DeSantis quite as viscerally as "cunt." 

Honestly, there would be no reason to discuss the nature of DeSantis's cuntery were it not for all the talk about him being the most viable non-Trump candidate for the Republican nominee for president in 2024, with some seeing him as even more viable than Trump because he's not (yet) tainted by the scandals and barrage of lying and braying egotism that Trump has hanging over him. I'll get to why that's bullshit in a few. But let's just explore some of DeSantis's recent words and actions in order to get the full measure of his cuntocity. 

Like, for instance, the "speech" (if by "speech," you mean, "ranting culture war nonsense that exists only to give the yahoos a semi-chub for a couple of pathetic minutes") he delivered while rallying for despicable hate-humpers J.D. "Man, I really tricked you assholes with that shitty book" Vance in Ohio and Doug "Chew My Own Ballsack Crazy" Mastriano in Pennsylvania. Check this cunty bullshit: "We must fight the woke in our schools. We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology. And I’ll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die." 

"The woke" are also known as "people who give a fuck about people other than themselves," and we scare the shit out of cunts like DeSantis because we want them to, you know, give a fuck about people other than themselves. If you're a cunt, that's not even in the same universe you live in. It doesn't even occur to you. In fact, it so doesn't occur to DeSantis and the like-minded cunts in the Florida legislature that they passed a law that made it illegal to, well, pretty much talk at all about race or gender or real history or anything that might make cis het white people upset at schools or in businesses. Yeah, a judge blocked it, saying, in essence, "That shit's unconstitutional, you cunts." It's named, no, really, the "Stop WOKE Act," as in "Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act" because they couldn't think of anything cuntier. 

You can throw in the "Don't Say 'Gay'" law DeSantis signed that regulates how sexuality can be discussed at all grade levels, not just in early elementary schools, as its supporters like to pretend. It has so freaked out teachers that they wonder if it's okay to wear rainbow stickers in the classroom. We could talk about what a gobsmacking cunt DeSantis has been to Disney, one of the largest employers in the state and one of the centers of the entire tax base there through tourism bucks. We could talk about the racial gerrymandering of the state he supports, or the decimation of the ranks of teachers because of his cuntish attacks on them, with his absolutely garbage plan to replace teachers with untrained, "retired law-enforcement officers, emergency-medical technicians, paramedics, and firefighters." At least they need to have bachelor's degrees. The military veterans DeSantis thinks can saunter into a middle school and teach algebra don't even need that. It's utterly degrading and demoralizing to educators, just like a cunt would do.

But for sheer, uncut culture war cuntistry, there's the new law that established a "Victims of Communism Day," something that is such a blow job to the Cuban community in Florida that DeSantis won't need to smoke cigars for all the cocks that are in his mouth. Check this shit out: "high school students enrolled in the United States Government class...must receive at least 45 minutes of instruction on 'Victims of Communism Day' to include topics such as Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet System, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and Nicolás Maduro and the Chavismo movement, and how victims suffered under these regimes through poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech."

Putting aside that it's fucking rich that none of this teaches anything about, you know, the theories of Marx, which might highlight how far from "communism" most of those regimes were, it's the height of smarmy, fuck-you cuntliness to required discussion about how all those dictators suppressed speech when you've signed laws that specifically suppress speech. But that's how cunts roll. They don't give a single, solitary fuck about hypocrisy.

Here's the difference between DeSantis and Donald Trump, and the reason why saying that he's the new Trump (even as he desperately wants to be the new Trump - seriously, motherfucker is trying to look like Trump) is fucking dumb: Try as he might, DeSantis can't hide his cuntiness. Yeah, Trump's a cunt, but Trump's also a goddamn showman. He enjoys playing the role of the raconteur and professional roaster, a con artist supreme, doing his double-handjob dance for the delight of the rubes. For people who believe the same savage things that he does, Trump's got charm to spare. Add to that the number of fucking idiots who really think Trump's some brilliant business tycoon and the even greater idiots who think "He TV man, must vote for TV man because on TV," and Trump was able to coat his cunty ways in a slick lube of celebrity. DeSantis is just a cunt, an angry, petty, whining cunt who appeals to a narrow bunch of shut-ins and maniacs and wealthy fuckfaces who all happen to congregate in Florida. No one else is gonna give a solitary fuck about him if he tries to run for president.

And Republicans know this. They know that, on a national level, their only hope right now is Trump. If DeSantis had a chance, more Republicans would be leaping off the Trump train before it goes over the scandal cliff. They know DeSantis is a cunt, cuntier than most of them, who are definitely also cunts. But a cunt with nothing to distract from being a cunt is just a cunt.

(Note: Your problems with the word "cunt" are noted.)

What About Those of Us Who Want Donald Trump Prosecuted? Talk to Us, Media

If there's one thing that runs through most political coverage of just about anything, it's that something is only good if Republicans believe it's good. Whenever some dullard pundit smirks pure bullshit about "bipartisanship," it inevitably means, "Here's a Democratic idea that is worthless unless Republicans buy into it." But a Republican idea never needs the approval of Democrats. I'm not talking votes alone. I'm talking how issues are covered. 

During Trump's presidency, we got a nonstop stream of yokel safaris, where some reporter from, generally, the New York Times, although they were certainly not alone here, goes to a stronghold of Trump support like Sisterfuck, Ohio, and interview the Sisterfuckians about how much they love Trump and what he was doing, which was always "a lot." You had to struggle to find articles on what Democratic voters thought. And then, with the election of Joe Biden, the media still ventured out to Sisterfuck, Cousinream, and Blowagoat to get their oh-so-American opinions on how much they hate Biden and what he's doing, which is always "a lot," with an added "and the election was stolen."

This is reaching its peak with the people decrying the FBI's search of Donald Trump's garish nightmare country club and home, Mar-a-Lago. As Michelle Goldberg points out (yes, in the New York Times), there is a strain of "centrist" thought that the search was out of bounds because it will divide the nation further, that it will "deepen" the country's "civic wounds," as Damon Linker wrote. Linker goes on to say that the high probability of violence in response to a Trump prosecution means that prosecution should be avoided: "I simply don’t agree with those who insist that not going after Trump will be even more dangerous than pursuing his prosecution." 

Certainly, voices on the right are screaming this, with politicians coming just up to the line of threats of violence (although certainly Republicans in Congress are threatening the FBI and the Justice Department, not to mention Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray personally, with investigation and defunding). And, yeah, the fucknut squad is doing what it's been jonesing to do, which means some of them are starting to die for the lies that Donald Trump keeps telling. But those dumb shitheads were just itching to try out their ARs and their YouTube military training on a government building. Most of them will just rant into the TikTok void for likes and subscribes, the currency of our moronic present. Of course, it takes only one getting a bomb next to or in a building or a few guns into an office to fuck things up for a whole lot of people. So I'll keep the mocking of these ignorant, delusional prickmites to a simmering minimum. 

The point here is not just that, obviously, prosecution shouldn't be based on how much upheaval it will cause to numbskulls who have smeared a viscous coating of lies on their naked flesh and are pretending it's armor. But media coverage is focusing only on the violent fucknuts. It ignores the much, much larger portion of the population who want to see that orange motherfucker behind bars for crimes he flaunted in our flustered faces.

Yeah, what about those of us who want Donald Trump indicted and prosecuted? We deserve to be heard, too. Prosecuting Trump is not merely for some abstract concept like adherence to "the rule of law." That has meaning. We have seen powerful people get away with crimes time and again. We needed George W. Bush and his crew of war criminals prosecuted. We needed the motherfuckers who almost blew up the economy of the world in 2008 to face justice. And we got nothing. We got the false promise that forgiveness would temper their behavior, only to see that forgiveness shit on and tossed back at those who did the forgiving, using it as a ticket to go further and act with impunity to wreck shit even more. 

We have to know that there is a limit. We have to know that in a nation that incarcerates more (mostly poor) people than any other, in a nation that tolerates mass murder on a daily basis, in a nation that does nothing to stop the unending harassment and threats that stream through our social media, in a nation that allows for lies to become policy, whether with climate change (until last week) or the election or abortion rights or education, in a nation as fucked as this nation is, something fucking matters, and that something has to be the very foundational idea that a president isn't above the law. The Obama administration, including Joe Biden, dropped the ball big-time with the Bush criminal enterprise. It can't happen again, so soon, because all faith in this delicate web we call "democracy" will fucking collapse. That's way more dangerous than Skeeter pretending he's Rambo and trying to take out an FBI office. We can stop the Skeeters, even if they do cause harm. We can't stop a web from collapsing once the threads are plucked free.

Jesus fuck, at least Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and the rest had the good sense to realize they had gotten away with it and went the fuck away. I sincerely believe that if Trump had accepted the results of the election and let everything go ahead peacefully, he would have gotten away with it, too. Instead, he's fucking daring anyone to stop his criminality. Trump is fostering this violence now. He could stop it, like he could have stopped the January 6 insurrection. But he won't. So he must be stopped by legal action.

Interview us, CNN and MSNBC and, yeah, even fuckin' Fox "news." Talk to those of us who need this prosecution to happen. What we have to say is far more important than what a bunch of lunatics ranting about civil war on The Donald think.

Note on Democratic Groups Helping Trump Republicans Win Primaries: So?

In one of the great "tut-tut" pieces in a while, the Editorial Board of the New York Times (motto: "We're partly responsible for the Iraq War and Trump's election, but you'll still subscribe") wrote that it was appalled by the idea that "Democratic Party groups have been elevating Big Lie proponents over their moderate Republican opponents all year." They take great umbrage - umbrage, I say - that Democrats would dare attempt to give subversive support to the fucknuts and grifters who make coin and get votes by saying that Donald Trump really won the 2020 election and that a conspiracy involving at least a few hundred thousand people worked to keep him out of office. The idea, of course, is that in a general election, those fucknuts and grifters (and, to be fair, the fucknut grifters) will be easily defeated by a Democrat. And what's the big strategy here? Reminding voters who is endorsed by Trump because to some idiot voters, that's like getting oral from Jesus.

But the Times's reasoning is this: electing "moderate Republicans" is a good thing. And what makes you a "moderate" Republican these days? Pretty much if you're not hooting racism into a tin can because an internet ghost told you it will bring about the Great Googamoogle or something. 

One example the Times gives of a Big Lie-loving, Trump-endorsed fucknut is Maryland's Dan Cox. It should be pointed out at all times that his campaign website is "Cox for Freedom." No, I'm not lying. Anyways, yeah, Cox is huffing deeply of the fumes from Trump's taint, but in just about every other way, he's your average fucking mad Republican. He supports guns for babies (or something close - you really can't tell anymore), is a nutzoid on abortion, and hates him some critical race theory in schools.  You know who else supports all those things except is a little more distant from Trump's grundle stink? Cox's opponent, Kelly Schulz. Oh, and groups like the Democratic Governors' Association bought ads saying that Cox was endorsed by Trump. 

Here's the thing, though. No one forced those voters to go for Cox. They were adults making adult decisions. 

Look at the even more bugfuck mad Kari Lake in Arizona. She campaigned on shitting in the dried up Lake Mead and laughing while she did it. Yet she won her primary. So, clearly, Republican voters in Arizona are good with attacks on wokeness and anti-choice madness (by the way, one interesting thing about Lake? She's for making almost all birth control available over-the counter and having the government pay for it. Hmm). But other than her support of the Big Lie and her vows to change Arizona voting laws so that this thing that never happened never happens again, her defeated opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson believes pretty much the same damn thing. Again, the key difference is that Lake got the help of Democratic groups because they hope crazy will lose.

But the key point here is that they're all fucking crazy; nearly every Republican is nuts. And even the ones who aren't explicitly saying that the 2020 election was stolen are calling for election "reform" or support gerrymandering and other shit that will hinder voting and help the GOP undo democracy.  So maybe we need a little less garment-rending over the idea that Democrats' bet that the general election voters won't give a nod to the crazies will fail and a little more over the fact that it simply doesn't fucking matter which Republicans are elected. 

And also let's not pretend that the right doesn't do this shit all the time. As Judd Legum and Kyle Tharp reported, a Republican-linked group is attempting to influence liberal members of Congress to vote against the climate change legislation by pretending to be a liberal group. The motherfuckery is deep in our politics.

I Haven't Disappeared

I know shit's been non-existent the last couple of weeks, but I've been in the UK (and continue to be) for some personal time. I'll have something up in the next day or two. 

Until then, enjoy this Liverpool road warning.

An Observation on the Nature of Extremist Fucknuts at the January 6 Committee Hearing

One thing that jumped out at me while watching Tuesday's televised hearing from the January 6 Committee into the insurrection of fucking idiots, which came closer than we want to believe to actually working, is how the extremists coming to DC on that cold day didn't emerge from a vacuum. No, in fact, it was the action, or, really, the inaction of the federal government on another uprising that gave the idiot hordes the confidence to go full overthrow. Jason Van Tatenhove, former member of the Oath Keepers (motto: "If this whole beach was completely covered in dicks, and somebody said I had to eat every dick until the beach was clean for liberty, I would say, 'No problemo!'"), pointed very clearly to an event from 2014 that helped inspire motherfuckers to start fucking more mothers all the way to the Capitol. 

Van Tatenhove said, "My time with the Oath Keepers began back at Bundy Ranch with that first standoff when I went to cover them as an independent journalist." He was talking about the ludicrous standoff between a Nevada rancher, Cliven Bundy, and the federal government over grazing fees on federal land that Bundy refused to pay for his cattle. So the government seized his cattle, and, with an assist from uber-fucknut Alex Jones, the Oath Keepers and hundreds, maybe thousands, of other armed dickheads showed up to "defend" Bundy.  

As things went on, "The standoff grew increasingly volatile over several days, with federal agents deploying dogs and stun guns, and rifle-carrying militia members taking sniper-like positions on an overpass overlooking the area. Fearing a bloodbath, federal authorities ultimately backed down and released the cattle." They also pulled out of the whole conflict, preferring to try to get the money from him through every fucking way they had already tried. 

That backing down gave these dickheads delusions of grandeur. In a press conference after, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, not wearing an eye patch, said, that the standoff was "a significant watershed moment" and praised the militias and the Bundy clan for an "armed effort" to face off against the federal government. The Oath Keepers released a video that said the standoff was "the first time in our country's recent history that good Americans stood up and said, 'We're not going to let this happen on our watch.'"

Elaborating on a statement about the country being "lucky" shit hasn't gotten more violent, Van Tatenhove told the congressional committee and the rest of the country, "I think as far as the luck goes, we've had the potential from Bundy Ranch on, I mean, being boots on the ground at these standoffs and they were standoffs where there were firearms pointed across lines at federal law enforcement agencies, you know, whatever it may be with that particular standoff. But I do -- I think we've gotten exceedingly lucky that more bloodshed did not happen because the potential has been there from the start." 

Bundy and his shitty family and the assorted extremist dickheads refused to recognize the authority of the Bureau of Land Management and the federal government. He owed the country a million bucks in unpaid fees and penalties. When the BLM decided to say, "Fuck this shit," they let, as then-Nevada Senator Harry Reid said, "domestic terrorists" off the hook. "They had sniper rifles on the freeway. They had assault weapons. They had automatic weapons," Reid said, all in service of someone who didn't wanna pay for his shit. They were ready to murder BLM agents and others. They should have all been rounded up and dragged off to jail. But it was fear of violence and escalation that caused the retreat by the BLM. And the end result of that retreat was more violence and escalation, including at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge two years later. One could also argue that the failure to arrest the violent thugs in Nevada led directly to the Las Vegas mass shooting a month later. The shooter had been at Bundy's ranch, inspired by the way the dickheads faced down the feds and won. And, obviously, January 6 can be tied to the sense of empowerment the Bundy ranch "victory" gave the dickheads.

Tattooed, denim jacket and Descendants t-shirt-wearing Van Tatenhove said he fully believes that there will be violence in 2024: "I do fear for this next election cycle because who knows what that might bring if a president that's willing to try to instill and encourage to whip up a Civil War amongst his followers using lies and deceit and snake oil, regardless of the human impact, what else is he going to do if he gets elected again. All bets are off at that point. And that's a scary notion." Of course, he's talking about armed dickheads, but he's also talking about Trump and other leaders of this extremist bullshit. He offered clear advice: "I have three daughters. I have a granddaughter, and I fear for the world that they will inherit if we do not start holding these people to account."

When motherfuckers wanna fuck mothers, you gotta shut that shit down or motherfuckers will just think they can keep fucking mothers without consequences. They'll fuck more mothers because there is no price to pay for motherfucking. You don't coddle insurrectionists. 

We are long past time where those in charge need to be punished. We're running out of time to be able to do that. Don't walk away from the goddamn standoff again.

This Fucking Shirt (Updated)

I wanna talk about this fucking shirt I saw today. I was at the Jersey Shore (yeah, your jokes are right and wrong, depending on the beach) for a little sunshine and wandered into a local diner for lunch. Sitting at the counter was a dude in this fucking shirt: 

First off, fuck this guy. I don't know a goddamn thing about him except he was wearing this shirt and camo shorts. He might be a hero firefighter. He might be a saint to dogs and children. I don't fucking care. Fuck. This. Guy. Besides, he ended up talking to another guy who had an unlit big cock-sized cigar in his stupid round face. So I'm pretty sure they're both just wretched human beings. And even if not, fuck this guy. 

But I gotta talk about this fucking shirt. Look at it in detail there. Sure, you notice the words instantly: "I will not comply," obviously meaning, "I'll fight you if you try to take muh guns." What a pussy-ass thing to say because it's pretty fucking clear that no one is going to take away his guns. That's like saying, "I will drive-thru McDonald's" like you're defying God and the universe to stop you. No, motherfucker. No one is hindering you unless you fucking drive into the front door of the McDonald's. Then you might be shit out of luck on nuggets. Might be.

So, yeah, the words are bullshit. But it's the picture that pisses me off. That's a fucking skeleton version of the Statue of Liberty, one of the most non-violent symbols in this entire shabby, savage country. And not only that, but Liberty's eye sockets have sights or gun barrels coming out of them.

The fuck does that even mean? Does Skeleton Liberty scream in horrific pain whenever she fires eyeball bullets from the sockets? Jesus fuck, that's a nightmare. 

And then she's holding an assault rifle (fuck you, I don't care what the definition is) in her bone fingers. Is she gonna stone cold murder the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses, yearning to be free? Because it sure as shit seems like she is, and that means that the people who made this fucking shirt and the people who wear this fucking shirt know fuck-all about the Statue of Liberty or American history.

Wait, here's a better view:

It's from a company of cockscabs known as Shield Republic, and those cockscabs sell lots of merch so you can get your January 6 on all fuckin' year.  There's antivax shit, "Let's Go Brandon" shit, own-the-libs shit, and more gun-related shit than you can jack off to for the rest of the decade. 

But fuck all that. I want to talk about this fucking shirt. And the fucking tools who wear this fucking shirt, like our fucknut up top. What gets me is how fucking stupid they are. I could design a t-shirt with Jesus reaming his own ass with a crucifix made of dildos while jizzing on an American flag and have it say, "Your fake god can go fuck himself," but why? 

I'll say this: Jizzing dildo Jesus is a hell of a lot smarter image than this dumbfuckery. Skull Gunface is just goddamn stupid, to be sure. But on the left, we wouldn't bother with this kind of idiocy because it's just so masturbatory and worthless. It's so fucking smug, rubbing people's faces with something that you think is edgy but is really simply demonstrating that you probably gave a ton of your hard-earned money to alleged billionaire Donald Trump, and that makes you a complete dumb fuck. 

I mean, seriously, they put "Death List" on top of their death list. Was that so they wouldn't confuse it with the groceries? "Hmm, do I kill Nancy Pelosi or Rice Krispies?" It's embarrassing that these morons are actually a threat to the nation. We deserve a better quality of nemesis.

Mainly, though, fuck that fucking guy in this fucking shirt.

Not very important update/correction: Several people have pointed out those aren't gun barrels on Death Liberty. It's the optical tubes on night vision goggles (that apparently cost $40k to law enforcement agencies because freedom). As one reader tweets, "So, she's not only shooting the huddled masses...she's hunting them at night for sport," adding, correctly, "Fuck that guy."

The Supreme Court Tells the 21st Century to Go Fuck Itself

This session, the newly-ripened conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court of the United States decided it was time to lift up their robes and piss on the 21st century and reality. The half-dozen justices, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, looked out at a nation, no, a world that demands progress, that demands care, that demands a government that can act to help people, and said, "Nah. Fuck that." And their reasoning essentially came down to, in every case, "Because we can."

We have a gun crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that the only thing that mattered was that more people have easier access to guns. We have a policing crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that it's more important to protect cops from being sued or charged with crimes and that you don't need to worry about being told your Miranda rights anymore. We have an ongoing pandemic that has killed over a million people in this country. The Supreme Court said that public safety takes a back seat to whatever stupid bullshit makes people decide not to get a vaccine. We have an electoral crisis in this country. The Supreme Court said that gerrymandering away fair representation is a-okay. 

And then the Court decided, in two cases, that the whole separation of church and state wasn't real because Christians need to have group prayers at school and schools that discriminate against LGBT people need to get our tax dollars. The former one there is where Gorsuch, lying about the facts of the case, told students who feel pressured into praying to suck it up, which would probably get him a cane up his ass from Benjamin Franklin, which would be some actual originalism.

And then the Court decided that a fetus has more rights than the woman it's attached to, and so fuck 50 years of Roe v. Wade. It's time to turn that motherfucking clock back to the 1950s. Alito insisted that Roe was the cause of chaos because anti-choicers were sad about it, and he used as an excuse, among others, that states had anti-abortion laws 150 years ago, which is so fucking dumb that it boggles the goddamn mind. It didn't matter that the Court, in throwing it back to the states, created two different legal statuses for women and girls in the country. It didn't matter that the Court created two different countries, essentially, if not 50 different ones. "We can do this, so we will," they said, "because fuck you, liberals." Which, to be fair, makes more sense than anything in the goddamn decision.

And then the Court decided that, despite a climate emergency that will wreck the earth, the Environmental Protection Agency really can't protect the environment, even though the statue that established it said that it explicitly could. In the case over setting standards for systems to reduce emissions at power plants and elsewhere, Roberts wrote, "Yeah, I don't like that so here's a thing I made up to overturn it and eat shit because these other five crazy pricks will go along with me. Just be grateful we didn't completely outlaw the EPA." So, yeah, enjoy that "air" and "water" while you can.

Hell, I haven't even mentioned the fucking over of tribal sovereignty for indigenous people or the cases that fucked over habeas rights. And this isn't getting into the fact that the Court has decided to hear a case that will essentially give state legislatures the right to overturn elections if they feel like it. In other words, yeah, you should totally vote to change things, but the Supreme Court is gonna make sure that your vote only matters if you're conservative, because, clearly, those are the only real Americans.

A lawyer friend of mine said to me after the Dobbs decision on abortion rights, "I'm fucking scared to death because those justices decided that precedent doesn't matter anymore. And if once you decide that, you can do whatever you want and justify it in whatever bullshit way you want." Which is as accurate a way to describe the damage that has been done. 

I have this image in my head that I can't get rid of. It's when the first woman dies because she attempted to give herself an abortion in one of the states that outlawed it, like Louisiana, and caused massive internal bleeding. I picture the corpse being delivered to the Supreme Court, to the chambers of Samuel Alito. When the corpse arrives, Alito invites the other four justices who voted with him on Dobbs to join him. And then they take turns fucking the corpse in front of each other, Alito first because he wrote the majority opinion and then Thomas because he wants to use this woman's corpse as a way to undermine the rest of modernity and then Gorsuch because he got onto the Court only through Mitch McConnell telling fairness and comity to get the fuck out of the Senate and then Kavanaugh gets sloppy fourths because he's still just a beer-drinking asshole who lied to senators faces about what he really believed about Roe. Finally, they all gather round and cheer on Barrett as she fucks the corpse's face until she orgasms, high-fiving one another when she's done. They're not ashamed of what they did, but they know they have to head to church to confess and be absolved of their sins, like good Catholics and pseudo-Catholics. And on the way out, Thomas places a single one of his pubic hairs on the woman's forehead.

That's really fucked up, yeah, but so is the nation that the Supreme Court wants us to live in. And Democrats need to recognize how much worse things are getting. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren have been leading on this by calling out the Court and not pretending that it is above political attack. That's the direction to go in. Make reforming the Court, whether through more justices or more regulations (which the Constitution allows Congress to do). Congress should act like it's co-equal.

Now is not the time for rational, calm responses that consider all sides. Fuck that. This is a five-alarm freakout because the cruelest states are already teeing up laws to prevent women from traveling to another state for an abortion, as well as outlawing abortion-inducing prescription drugs. They're even coming up with ways to make information about getting an abortion elsewhere illegal. And if you think for one fucking second that the Christian Taliban (which, yes, is a good messaging phrase) justices who shitcanned the Establishment Clause will all of a sudden uphold the First Amendment, you need to fucking get out of the political arena. 

This Court has put it all on the table, all that it wants to undermine in this country. We're heading into an Independence Day that feels sarcastically named in the no-longer United States. The time for fake moderation is over. The majority of the nation backs all the things the supposed "extreme left" wants (because it's not extreme at all). Now, Democrats need to back it fully, and with full voice, as we head towards the midterms with a desperate hope we can stop the country from being murdered by the right.

The Supreme Court vs. the United States, Part 1: Alito Loves Fetuses, Hates Women

You will never love anything as much as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito loves fetuses. That skeevy, creepy motherfucker is all about the fetuses; he loves fetuses so much that he doesn't give a fuck how many women must die in order for fetuses to live and become babies that he can then ignore and strip away their rights. Seriously, that savage cockscab must jack it to ultrasounds. You think I'm being hyperbolic? You think I'm just trying to be extra cruel to this ratcunt because he authored the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that specifically overturned Roe v. Wade and the guarantee of the right to an abortion in the entire country? You think it's because I fucking hate him and Thomas and Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett for ensuring that women in some of our biggest cities, like Houston, Dallas, Nashville, and New Orleans, with Indianapolis and Atlanta no doubt not far behind, can't get an abortion and women from small communities can't travel to those cities and that all the women in these savage states will have to travel hundreds, if not a thousand miles (no, really) to reach a state where abortion is legal and that if they can't, many of them will resort to methods that will harm if not kill them? 

Yeah, all that. But also because Alito can't fucking get enough of fetuses. Check out the decision. Seriously, this part will make your head fucking explode: "The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life." You got that? Hey, little ladies, your burdens, all your health effects, all your difficulties are important, says big white male Alito, but, really, a clump of cells that can't survive on its own is just as important as you. 

By the way, 93% of all abortions are in the first trimester. Yeah, it's a fucking clump of cells for most of that and still completely nonviable towards the end of 12 weeks.

That clump of cells is given far more rights than women by Alito as he considers the notion of "viability," as defined by the Roe and Casey decisions: "According to the dissent, the Constitution requires the States to regard a fetus as lacking even the most basic human right—to live—at least until an arbitrary point in a pregnancy has passed...If, as Roe held, a State’s interest in protecting prenatal life is compelling 'after viability,' why isn’t that interest 'equally compelling before viability'?" In other words, if a state thinks you should stay pregnant, bitch, you're staying pregnant. That fetus controls you. You only exist to protect the rights of the fetus. Your rights don't matter if you have a fetus.

Alito goes on, dickishly, "Due to the development of new equipment and improved practices, the viability line has changed over the years. In the 19th century, a fetus may not have been viable until the 32d or 33d week of pregnancy or even later. When Roe was decided, viability was gauged at roughly 28 weeks. Today, respondents draw the line at 23 or 24 weeks. So, according to Roe’s logic, States now have a compelling interest in protecting a fetus with a gestational age of, say, 26 weeks, but in 1973 States did not have an interest in protecting an identical fetus. How can that be?" Yes, it's so weird how things change with medical advances. C'mon, this is just making shit up to justify an obviously bullshit opinion. Or, you know, the conservative way.

You think that's mindbogglingly fucked up? Wait: "Viability also depends on the 'quality of the available medical facilities.' Thus, a 24-week-old fetus may be viable if a woman gives birth in a city with hospitals that provide advanced care for very premature babies, but if the woman travels to a remote area far from any such hospital, the fetus may no longer be viable. On what ground could the constitutional status of a fetus depend on the pregnant woman’s location? And if viability is meant to mark a line having universal moral significance, can it be that a fetus that is viable in a big city in the United States has a privileged moral status not enjoyed by an identical fetus in a remote area of a poor country?" Fuck Alito in every fucking hole he has and in a few that don't exist yet.

Alito and the rest of a cruel quintet who overruled Roe and Casey are quite literally splitting the country in two so that the quality of health care a woman receives will be dependent on which state she lives in. But that doesn't matter. What does matter is that a fetus might live outside the womb if born prematurely a couple of weeks earlier in a city than in a village in the mountains of Ecuador? About 1% of all abortions happen after 21 weeks. How does that in any way justify a decision that will allow states to outlaw the 99% of abortions that clearly occur before the fetus can live on its own? Even John Roberts thought that was fucked. It's a fucking game to the majority. It's absolutely nonsensical, so much that it only makes sense if you say that Alito loves fetuses and hates women, which is part and parcel with a Christian extremist view of the sexes.

Because that's what this is, you know. It is a cabal of Christian extremists, radical Catholics and nutzoid fundamentalists, deciding that women have had enough freedom and those whores deserve whatever hell they have to go through. They are imposing their radical, extremist doctrine on the rest of us and pretending that it's freedom.

In my home state of Louisiana, the anti-choice Democratic governor signed an update to the state's trigger law on Monday that said abortion would be outlawed in the state the second Roe was overturned. And so it was. The three remaining clinics in the state, in Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans, stopped performing abortions. While the morning after pill remains legal, other drug-induced abortions are also outlawed, and there are no exceptions for pregnancies for rape and incest. With Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi also banning abortions, the closest place for a safe, legal abortion right now is in Pensacola, Florida, and who knows how long that will last with Ron DeSantis fascisting up the joint. Then women in Louisiana would have to travel to North Carolina or Illinois. Madness. And then states might pass laws that say you can't travel through them to get an abortion because of course they will.

Sorry. I'm not thinking completely rationally today. We've known this day was coming for a long time. We've been waiting for it since at least the 1990s, probably since Clarence Thomas was confirmed. Many of us have been waving our arms and screaming that this was coming, to stop trusting any motherfuckers who said not to worry, to stop pretending that anyone on the right was honorable. We knew it would happen. 

But that expectation doesn't make it hurt less. It doesn't reduce the feeling of panic. It doesn't mitigate the despair for what a fucked beyond fucked nation we've become, what backwater we've turned into. We're not a shining city on a hill. We're a teetering shack on a pile of shit.

Mostly, though, it doesn't make me feel less sorrowful for women, from the preteen rape victim to the mother who doesn't want another child to any woman or girl who fucking wants to choose when she has children. If my nieces get pregnant, I will fly them anywhere they want to go if they want to get rid of the fetus. Fuck that fetus.

We failed. We fucked up and we failed. We let the worst fucking people keep winning. We can't let that keep happening. There's going to be a pile of women's corpses to remind us of that. 

The vile Christian pricks have tasted blood. They are completely unleashed, and they are heading for a feeding frenzy. We better be ready. It's about to get genuinely frightening out there. 

More on that coming up.

Call It What It Was: An Assassination Attempt on Mike Pence

I have despised Mike Pence longer than most of you, even before he was that fuckin' conservative prick in Congress from 2001-2012, even before he was that motherfucking governor who refused to allow a needle exchange program in a town with a high rate of HIV (until he prayed and partially gave in). Yeah, see, I was damned to live in Indiana in the late-1990s when Pence was a right-wing radio twatmite, advocating for laws against adultery and railing against the cartoon Mulan for daring to say that women could be in the military with men and hating on LGBT people with a fervor that could only be described as protesting way, way too much. When I say, "Fuck him in every hole from ass to eye," I mean it. 

So if I say anything that is perceived as a kind word about him, just know that I really think he's lower than worm shit. 

That said, yeah, Pence did one good thing with his sad, homophobic, nutzoid Christian life. He stood firm against a wave of spittle and being called a "pussy" and "wimp" from Donald Trump, as well as Trump's caricature of a mob boss threat that "I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this," and ratified the electoral count in the 2020 presidential election. I don't think he did that for honorable reasons. He consulted with, among others, former Vice President Dan Quayle, who told him, "I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That’s all you do. You have no power" when Pence sought his blessing in overturning a clean election, which would have thrown the country into dictatorship. Pence had spent the last five years being Trump's most loyal lickspittle, a remora suctioned onto Trump's ass so tightly that he may as well have been Trump's vestigial tail. Pence wasn't strong. Pence certainly wasn't a goddamn hero. He was scared that he'd break the law and end up in prison if it all went sideways. He didn't want to commit a crime. He didn't do the right thing so much as he didn't do the wrong thing. So, fuck it, may as well act like the great defender of the Constitution.

And what did Pence get for his trouble? As his chief of staff Marc Short told the January 6 committee, he was so worried "that the president would lash out in some way" over Pence's disloyalty that Short contacted the head of Pence's Secret Service detail to make sure they were ready in case shit went south. And south it went.

Let's stop beating around the goddamn bush with this shit. The January 6 attack on the Capitol was, among other things, a coordinated assassination attempt on Mike Pence, one that was cheered on, if not directed, by the President of the United States, who really was Donald Trump. 

In front of a mob that was there specifically to stage a coup (which is what it's called when a group tries to use force to throw out the results of a legal election and install their own people, whether that's as electors or president), Trump kept expressing how Pence "is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn't, that will be a sad day for our country." Trump didn't stop there, coming right up to the line of threat: "And Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you're not, I'm going to be very disappointed in you, I will tell you right now." 

Of course, Trump didn't have to threaten. He had a horde of cretins who were slobbering all over each other to do his bidding. I mean, did no one remember what happened at Trump's Nazi rallies when he verbally attacked protesters and cheered on and encouraged physical violence against them? People fucking did it. They got violent on his order. Trump fucking well knew the powder keg was right in front of him, and that narcissistic cockscab wanted to see what would happen if he lit the fuse.  And when Trump had a chance to calm shit down, he threw fuel on the fuse by tweeting that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done." That's insanity.

So what did Pence get to hear from the hooting cretins who were heading towards and into the Capitol? Chants of "Hang Mike Pence!" and "Bring out Pence!" His Secret Service team brought him to a secure location in the building, coming within 40 feet of Trump's zombie army that he could hear rampaging around, calling for murder of him and anyone who would betray their orange idol. And Pence refused to leave in a Secret Service vehicle, fearing, at the very least, that the president would order him driven away and kept away from the count. That is fucking insanity. That is fear of assassination by the mob, ordered or at least ordered-by-implication by Donald Trump.

You can say that Pence bravely stuck to ratifying the electoral vote count, but that fear of prison hung over him hard. And I think fear is why Pence will not testify before the January 6 Committee. Sure, I know he's delusional and craven enough to think that he might have a chance at a future in politics that will be shitcanned if he puts a stake in Trump's desiccated heart, not realizing his career is dead already, and I know that Liz Cheney and the committee are doing their damnedest to spin things as if there are decent Republicans, even if Pence helped the country get to the point where a goddamned coup was attempted by vigorously bobbing on Trump's knob for the entire term. 

But Trump's army is still out there. And they're armed. And they are violent and insane. And they want blood, specifically Pence's blood, for his betrayal. And you know that life has been one nonstop death threat for Pence and his family because that's how these motherfuckers roll. If we can call the non-attempt on Brett Kavanaugh's life an "assassination attempt," then this is an ongoing assassination plot to kill the former vice president.

So I'm gonna say the possibly kind words about Pence here: If this fear of being killed is figuring into Pence's silence and it's not just false hopes of a political future, I sympathize. That means he's capable of feeling trauma, as any normal person would, and it means he wants to protect his family. Again, he's despicable in every other way and, mostly, I don't give a shit if he lives or dies now, but I get it and it makes sense. 

But that also means he can't be a hero in this story. He's just the guy in the horror movie who walked away after the monster seemed to be defeated, not making sure that fucker can't rise again and kill even more people in the sequel.

(Note: I do hope the 1/6 Committee is going to look into the other assassination attempts on Nancy Pelosi and Democrats, and not just leave it at Pence.)

Liz Cheney Is Trying to Save the House She and Her Father Built and Other Observations on the 1/6 Hearing

On Thursday night, the Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol finally, after far too long, frankly, made its case to the American people and the world. The committee wasn't talking to you and me, we who are damned to spend far too much of our time elbow-deep in the clogged sinks of political shit. The committee wasn't talking to the scores of MAGA drones who are joyfully face-fucked by dildos of misinformation, disinformation, and lies and will never return to what we like to think of as "reality." They were clearly talking to other entities, including, as many have noted, Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose Justice Department is moving at a pace that might be best described as "nearly still" when it comes to charging top officials with crimes related to the attack. To my weary (and currently Covid-addled) mind, the hearings had another target: Americans who checked out after Donald Trump's second impeachment and haven't followed the evolving story. For them, much of what was said on Thursday was new, and let's just fucking hope that at least a few of them watched. 

As strong as committee chair Bennie Thompson's opening statement was, with its clear and almost immediate assertion that "Donald Trump lost the presidential election in 2020. The American people voted him out of office," as well as clearly placing Trump as the central figure in a conspiracy to overturn the election, it was Republican Rep. Liz Cheney who truly brought the wood chipper to shred the MAGA right and, most especially, Trump himself.

Cheney's purpose was also clear: to separate the good Republicans from the Trumpist Republicans, and to give those supposedly good ones a chance to come clean by warning them about what's coming. In essence, Cheney was trying to save the party that her father built, one that she worked on, too. The MAGA right has turned away from the beliefs and projects of Cheney and daddy Dick, the former Vice President, Secretary of Defense, and member of Congress. Among other things, that GOP was pro-business no matter what (none of this bullshit condemning a corporation for an internal policy) and pro-intelligence community. Cheney constructed a GOP that was for a strong interventionist military, especially with the goal of "spreading democracy" at the end of a gun, which was incredible for profits for companies aligned (mostly but not exclusively) with the GOP. Trump mocked that and turned the party more isolationist, and he attacked IC for its perceived disloyalty to him. You might not remember, but a decade ago, Liz Cheney and your new Twitter buddy William Kristol led an organization called "Keep America Safe," which was all about attacking Democrats for being soft on Muslims. They went after anyone who supported the "Ground Zero Mosque," and they attacked lawyers who defended detainees at the Guantanamo Naval Base, calling them the "Al Qaeda Seven," questioning their loyalty to the country. She's just the fucking worst. 

In her truly great presentation on the evidence against Trump and his despicable co-conspirators, like a compelling opening statement in a huge trial, one thread that ran under it was that you could be an honorable Republican or a dishonorable one, and she was pretty fuckin' clear about who she thought was on the side of honor. She showed a clip of Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr, who was also AG when Dick Cheney was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, declaring that the allegations of voter fraud were "nonsense" and "it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that, and it was doing a great grave disservice to the country," even backing up the opinion of Barr with video of Ivanka Trump saying, "I respect Attorney General Barr. So, I accepted what he was saying." Mike Pence is also praised by inference, playing a clip of him saying, "President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election," along with video of Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley saying that Pence was giving orders about securing the Capitol and not Trump. "Look at these loyal Republicans," Cheney was saying, "this is who this party is supposed to be."

It's worth noting that not a single clip of a Democrat reacting to the attack or condemning the attack was played. Just Republicans.

So let's be clear: Yes, obviously, her running at Donald Trump with a dagger to cut his throat and dance in the arterial spray is awesome. At this point, we'll take anyone who will actually help turn this ship around before it plunges off the edge of the world. I'm totally fucking here for Cheney burning down the house of Trump. But Cheney is doing it to preserve an already corrupt and harmful party. Jesus fuck, Trump wasn't president when Mitch McConnell blocked the consideration of Garland for the Supreme Court. Trump didn't force Cheney to vote against voting rights legislation. She has done exactly one thing to try to save the country before she goes back to destroying it under her terms.

It sucks, but we'll take it because while we may all be circumspect about what will come, what we know is that we were almost fucked in January 2021. One or two factors could have fucked it all, from Pence deciding to throw in with Trump to the violent shitbirds succeeding in murdering some legislators. We were so close to fucked that we need to ally with those who we would otherwise want to defeat. And we need to save ourselves from what is the inevitable next phase of this coup and from Donald fucking Trump, who comes across not as a buffoon in the evidence presented so far, but as an angry hippopotamus, ready to use his girth to wreck anything that pisses him off, not giving a shit what gets destroyed as long as he ends up getting his way at the end.

Liz Cheney may be a plague, but Trump is a poison. Stop the thing that acts faster before going after a cure for the other.

(Note: I couldn't work him into this piece, but, man, fuck Jared Kushner in every fucking hole he has in his soft, patrician body, and even in a few holes that aren't there. What a goddamn worm.)

Uvalde, the Southern Baptist Church, and the Murderous, Traumatizing Failure of Conservative Ideology

What do you do when your belief system allows for the murder and rape of children? What do you do when the things that the leaders you trust have said to you, messages their media figures have inundated you with, when the outcome of that is the destruction of kids? A sane person would want to repent, get out, try to change. But we are a nation filled with incoherent rage and fuck-everyone-but-me-and-mine madness. Lemme explain.

In Texas, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District has a police department. According to its webpage, "The primary goal for the Uvalde CISD Police Department is to maintain a safe and secure environment for our future leaders to learn and our current leaders to educate while forming partnerships with students, teachers, parents, and the community while enforcing laws and reducing fears." Do you understand that? Like many places around the country, the schools have their own cops. And, in nearly every case of a school shooting, the cops or security officers failed to even hinder the shooter. 

Like so many things about Uvalde, it demonstrates the utter failure of all the ludicrous bullshit that conservatives throw at us. The Uvalde cops were shit-scared, even with the military equipment they had, pictured looking so goddamned tough, just more security theatre, which is about 75% of American policing, all screaming and tasers and shooting unarmed people. But the truth is that the fucking guns, man, the fucking guns are too much for them. They pissed themselves rather than risk their lives. It's disgraceful and disgusting and all of the cops who stood outside the classroom or sat in their cars should be fired. If they have any self-respect left at all, they should quit first. 

Also, look at the Preventive Security Measures document for the UCISD. Robb Elementary "has fencing that encloses the campus [and] is designed to limit and/or restrict access to individuals without a need to be on the campus." It advises, "Teachers are instructed to keep their classroom doors closed and locked at all times." Do you understand that part? 

They fucking were supposed to do it all, all those things that conservatives say schools need in order to be secure in our fucked beyond fucked post-Columbine, post-Newtown nation. Good guys with guns. Extra security. It was all there and it didn't fucking matter because the one factor that got those 19 kids and two teachers slaughtered was the guns, and we have a crazed minority in this country with a fuckton of cash that prevents anything from being done about the goddamn guns when most of the country knows that it's the guns, even most of those who say it's not the guns know it's the fuckin' guns.

Every cop organization in the country should be agitating for military-style rifles to be banned and that there should be more laws restricting gun ownership. If not, you're saying that you don't give a shit that your officers are gonna get killed, too. Or that they shouldn't try to stop an armed fucknut from slaughtering kids.

The United States has failed its children. We have decided that it’s better to be armed than worry about the occasional massacre. We have decided that it’s better that the seas rise and the temperatures soar and the droughts and fires wreak destruction than to actually do the work of moving off fossil fuels. And how many churches need to cover up massive sex crimes against children before we start treating them like a criminal enterprise, like the Mafia with an omerta against ratting out child rapists. What more do you want to do to kids? 

And what of this conservative ideology that is supposed to be about protecting children within the bounds of traditional family, within a traditional public education system, within the churches that are supposed to inculcate traditional values? If that ideology has led to piles of murdered children inside classrooms, if it has led to thousands of children being raped by leaders in the Southern Baptist Church, the very heart of the evangelical movement that has so poisoned this country and whose leaders are treated like sages instead of pariahs, then that ideology is corrupt and profane and debased. It needs to be burned to the ground, degraded to the point where all who so much as whisper its tenets are seen as fools who need to be banished to the political and social hinterlands until and unless they scourge themselves clean. 

You right-wing motherfuckers spent time banning books about gender identity and banning lessons in the cruel history of the United States, a savage heritage that you are doing nothing to counter. You decided it was more important to get gay and lesbian teachers out of schools than it was to keep weapons of war out of people’s hands. You should be forced to live in a classroom with the ripped apart bodies of 19 children rotting in front of you. You goddamned ghouls should never get a moment’s peace or happiness the rest of your miserable, cocksucking lives.

And if you believe that a kid saying she’s transgender is worse than a school shooting, you should never be allowed to comment in public again. I mean, Jesus fuck, the kids from Robb Elementary are turning to GoFundMe to pay for the therapy they'll need. It's trauma and cruelty on top of trauma and cruelty. Anyone who thinks that's okay should never be allowed near children, let alone writing policy that affects them. 

I have written so much about guns, so much about Christian fundamentalism, and I don’t know if I’m repeating myself anymore. Post-Reagan conservatism is, at its heart, at its base, a death wish because of the insane adherence to fundamentalist Christianity, which sees our time on earth as a way station before the bliss of the grave when your soul can join Jesus. Of course the guns don’t matter. Of course the deaths of children don’t matter. Why, those kids are lucky that they get to be with Christ so soon and not suffer all the awful sins of existing as a physical being. If you’re bathed in the blood of Christ, then what does it matter if your blood bathes the walls of the elementary school. It's madness, and it should be treated as madness.

Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of talking about what complete, breathtakingly fucked hypocrites Republicans are. They call us “groomers”? Please, SBC. They call us baby killers? They call themselves “pro-life”? It’s a fucking joke. They’re a fucking joke. Go after guns. Go after evangelicals. And stop trying to say there are any "good" Republicans. Just because Liz Cheney hates Donald Trump doesn't mean that she's a motherfucking hero. She's gonna vote for more guns and fewer voting rights and more abortion restrictions and bans. Fuck her. Destroy the word "Republican." Wreck "conservative." Make it poisonous because it is. We have thousands of dead and traumatized children to prove it.

One day, perhaps, in a future that I’m not sure is going to happen, historians will hopefully look back on this era and write new textbooks for kids at school. Those textbooks will hopefully talk about how a cabal of wealthy fucks tried to hide the past from its children while at the same time allowing those same children to live in a nation that requires them to learn how to attempt to survive being massacred in their classroom. Those historians will hopefully teach the kids of the future the cruelty of the leaders who thought a book about being gay was more obscene than children's bodies being shredded by bullets. And those historians will hopefully say that this was just a continuation of the very violence and hatred at the core of America's story, that what those terrible people were trying to hide was themselves. 

If we don't do better, if we don't take this anger we have right now, this despair, this sorrow and turn it into action, then we deserve to be a footnote in that history. And that footnote will say that we knew that an ideology of hatred and violence was ruining another generation, yet we still failed to do everything we could to stop it. We failed to save ourselves or our kids.

Let's not be like the Uvalde cops. 

A Poem for Memorial Day

Lists and Scales

by Chantelle Bateman

I hate being alone with him again

Even in my mind

Trapped in his looney bin of an office

Suffocated by these four walls

Padded in frames full of bullshit

His accolades for a job well done

From people who don't know how to do their damn jobs

I can feel him staring at me

Counting my tics, fidgets, and sweat beads

Sizing me up to see if I’m a good fit for crazy

Talking to me very slowly

With small words

About things bigger than he understands

Asking me questions

And only listening for answers from his lists

That tell him how far up I am

On the “About to lose her shit” scale

We begin down the list

“Do you know why you’re here today?”

Because I'm fucked up

Because I want help

And I'm here today of all days

Because I couldn't get here any sooner

5 years of wandering

3 years of darkness

And 18 months of trying to get this stupid red tape to feed through your system properly

18 months of waiting for someone to say they are ready and willing to hear my story

"Yeah," I shrug "I lost my marbles somewhere between here and Iraq."

He moves me up the scale

Down the list

“Do you think about hurting yourself?”

I think about how I hurt myself with each piece of my humanity I gave away

Avoiding eye contact with people who look like my kin

Believing in enemies

Provoking and consuming fear

The pain of remembering is far greater than any I could inflict upon myself

I cut myself to find relief

“I think about stopping the pain”

Up the scale

Down the list

“What about angry? Do you feel angry?”

THE FUCK KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT ANYWAY?!?

Do happy people come here?

Of course I'm fucking angry

I'm angry about your stupid questions

I'm angry that no one seems to notice people are dying in war

While everyone else agonizes, over which brand of bottled water to choose

And I'm pissed that I can't just go back to not giving a fuck about any of it “Yes, usually.”

Up the scale

Down the list

"Were you ever raped or sexually assaulted?"

Rape is sexual assault douche bag

And your question is reminiscent of the act

Penetrating and touching me without my consent

Whatever I tell you won't matter

I know you aren't here to help me find justice or peace

Where is the question that asks "have you sexually assaulted anyone"

How many crazy points is that worth?

"Yes"

Up the scale

Down the list

"How many times a day do you think about your triggers?"

I roll my eyes into the far corners of my mind

Into the memories that landed me in this chair

They appear sporadically throughout my day

When my bathroom suddenly becomes a port-o-john shaped death trap

A helicopter overhead converts my backyard into a flight line

Or the 4th of July turns the whole world into place rated for hazardous duty pay

But my memories aren't on his list

His questions are too one size fits all for that

"A lot I guess."

Up the scale

Down the list he continues

In an effort to get to know me

And ascertain how much less like myself I have become

How strange is it to get to know someone

whom you intend to forget

At the end

I feel at the top of his scale

The whole experience

A deployment déjà vu

Of unpacking and re-packing sea bags of crap

Just to make sure you've still got it

His questions forced me to open up my whole box of awful

And inventory its contents

But no one tells you what to do with what's inside

I guess I will just pack it all up

Haul it back home

And try not put any of it in the wrong place

(This poem comes from Warrior Writers, a non-profit organization that teaches and gives space for veterans to write and create art about their experiences. You can donate here.)

America's Mass Hysteria: Can We Please Talk About Crazy Motherfuckers Like They're Crazy Motherfuckers?

I've been trying to articulate for the last week this feeling of things spinning off their axis. I'm in the UK right now, a place I now end up spending about a month a year, and I was talking about politics with a young man from Northern Ireland. He had supported Brexit, yes, because he had believed the Conservatives' utter garbage about how much funding would go to the National Health Service. Now that Brexit is so obviously the clusterfuck of regulations and shortages that the Stay coalition had said it would be, as well as there being no benefit at all to having left the EU, Donal is, to say the least, done with Boris Johnson and the Conservatives. 

I pointed out to him that at least politicians in the UK don't pander to religion quite as blatantly or quite as regularly as American politicians do. "You don't see anyone here talking about how God wants them to do something," I said.

"No, they don't," Donal said. "Everyone would look at them as if they're quite mad."

And that was it. It's not that religion doesn't matter (Donal being from Northern Ireland knows that quite well). Indeed, some bishops sit in the House of Lords, an outdated notion in a very outdated institution, and about two-thirds of the public think that's bullshit. But I realized that one of the things we don't talk about enough in the United States is just how many crazy motherfuckers are in power. We treat crazy motherfuckers the same way we treat sane politicians when, truly, we have to call crazy motherfuckers "crazy motherfuckers."

Right now, the media and other politicians are still indulging the complete madness of those who believe in the lie that there was massive voter and election fraud that changed the outcome of the 2020 election. Of course, a good many of those who are spouting this don't believe it and are merely playing along in order to stay in good graces of Donald fucking Trump, and that's just Ol' Yeller levels of pathetic. But a whole bunch of people really believe this shit. And those who know it's not true are not doing enough to say, objectively, they are wrong. There are no "doubts." There is no hidden evidence. There's nothing. It's the electoral equivalent of insisting you see leprechauns fucking mermaids on the backs of unicorns and wanting to fight anyone who tells you it's not true. Sorry, but you're just fucking insane. 

I don't understand why the first question to any politician or pundit on any non-Fox "news" show isn't "Was Joe Biden legitimately elected president?" And if that politician or pundit doesn't say, clearly, "Yeah, of course, I'm not a crazy motherfucker," then the interview is over. Why should we give a shit what a crazy motherfucker or someone who helps keep crazy motherfuckers crazy has to say about a goddamn thing? Why would the next thing be "Well, Senator Crazy Motherfucker, you refuse to acknowledge reality when it comes to the election, but, hey, let's treat your opinion on tax policy as legitimate." Fuck that. Fucking hell, because of the failure to call out crazy, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania is fucking crazy.

And the crazy keeps going. The Great Replacement Theory, which motivated the rabid little dickhole to drive to Buffalo and gun down people at a supermarket, is racist madness, the kind of mass hysteria that motivates genocides, like in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, or fascist lockdowns of nations, essentially becoming North Korea. It doesn't even make any goddamn sense since it takes years for immigrants to become citizens in order to vote in national elections. Again, factually, the whole thing is bullshit, but people cling to it like the last piece of white driftwood in a black and brown flood. 

I'm not even getting into the Covid madness, where all of a sudden, billions of people getting a vaccine is seen as "experimental." Fuck you, you fucking bugfuck insane disease vectors. And I'm not even talking about QAnon and other warped shit. I'm talking mainstream crazy.

Yeah, whenever I hear a politician on any side say that our rights "come from God," I think, "Oh, shut the fuck up." But this shit is getting nuttier and nuttier. It's the 21st fucking century, but our leaders are expected to talk like they're pilgrims on the Mayflower or some such shit. In her commencement speech at the University of Wyoming where she said some bullshit about "two sexes" and later apologized, Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis also said, "There are those in government who believe not that the creator endowed us with inalienable rights … but that government created those rights." And Democrats say shit like that, too. Government did create those rights. That's why those rights are in the U.S. Constitution but not in others. Unless your god's a pussy and couldn't get other countries to guarantee them. But Republican nutzoids like Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet shit like "Our God is bigger" and speak about how "godless" the nation is and how Satan is doing shit and what the fuck are they even talking about. 

Look, we're used to stupid. We're used to corrupt. We're used to manipulative. We're used to that shit. But widespread crazy is scarier than all of that. Widespread crazy will lead to more violence. Widespread crazy will lead to condemnation of those who refuse to give in to the crazy. Widespread crazy is a goddamned virus that is only happy if it spreads.

And what I figured out is that too many of our leaders and media figures are not holding people accountable for crazy. Crazy is not merely problematic. It's not just another side of an issue. It's fucking crazy. This country is going fucking crazy, driven there by Fox "news" and online bullshitters who get off on making people crazy and crazy people themselves, who now have a megaphone that can be just as big as anyone trying to tell people that reality is reality.

The problem is the insanity. I wish I could give you a solution. But crazy brings out crazy, madness brings out madness, rage brings out rage. I think a box has been opened and I don't know that we can close it.

The one hope I can offer is that Donal did change. He didn't blame the anti-Brexit voters for the failure of Brexit. He blamed those who made impossible promises, and he knows that he was wrong. In fact, attitudes to immigrants have softened post-Brexit, as if everything the Leavers said was a lie. I'm not saying that kind of change of heart is possible in the United States, where people wear their madness proudly like a red cap made in China. But humans do have that capacity. Just maybe not American humans.

A Case for Letting Trump Back on Twitter: I Know, But Listen...

I know, I know, I fucking know. I remember that tense feeling, somewhere between shit-yourself anxiety and stroke-inducing rage, of wondering what deliberate, fuck-up-your-day provocation Donald Trump had tweeted. Of course, if you're of a devolved or brain-damaged or cynical mindset, you looked forward to the Trump tweets like they were worms disgorged from Daddy Bird's beak into your hungry, squawking throats. And then the rest of us would get extra rage jolts from the idea that all the greedy-mouthed baby birds were loving this whole situation.

So I'm not here to tell you that Donald Trump should be allowed back on Twitter because of free speech or censorship or whatever. Twitter is not a government entity. Trump wasn't banned for being conservative. He was banned for being a lying dick. His First Amendment rights weren't violated. No one is passing a law saying he should be punished for being a lying dick. He's free to be a lying dick in lots of places, and, well, he totally is. So, no, I don't actually give a fuck about Trump being banned. I've been tossed from shitty bars for being less of a dick and I wasn't a whiny bitch about it. I just figured it was the bar owner's prerogative and went to the next bar.

But now we're hearing that potential future Twitter owner Elon Musk (motto: "I'm not a megalomaniacal sociopath with delusions of world domination. Society just needs to bend to my will.") would allow Trump back onto the social media platform that runs many of our lives. And former CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack "Totally not a supervillain beard" Dorsey agreed with Musk, calling the decision to ban Trump something that should be reversed because the situation has "evolved." It bears saying that the reason Trump was finally banned was because he had helped foment an insurrection against the United States, but, hey, that was over a year ago. No big. 

Already the debate is under way about whether a freed Trump twittering away will destroy the country or destroy Republicans. Jill Filipovic makes a ton of good points, as she usually does, in a CNN column about how Trump drove the news cycle, in part through his Twitter feed, during the 2016 election, encouraging his debased troll army of followers, leading to both his election and the 2021 insurrection. In Slate, Richard Hasen sees the corrosive effect of a tweeting Trump on election laws and voter rights, arguing that Twitter employees should raise hell to make sure he's not allowed to return. On the flip side, Democrats and others have said that Trump's tweets will remind everyone of what an abject cockscab he is and that will work for Democrats. 

Obviously, the line between giving air to Trump's embers of lies and bullshit and giving Trump enough rope is contingent on a lot of factors, none of which we can predict. This isn't 2015 or 2016. Our fascism cherry was popped when we were fist-fucked on January 6, 2021. We are far more aware about how we're lied to. And you can make the case that a muted Trump is far less dangerous than a Trump farting loudly into the mad echo chamber of right-wing media and salivating mainstream media who want some spark in the news that isn't Ukraine or abortion. 

Except I'm not so sure. Lemme take this in another direction. It's not just that Trump has a way of fucking himself when he's allowed to speak without restraint. It's that a loud Trump with a giant microphone shuts everyone else down. He also fucks everyone else because that's what a gelatinous shit blob running on batteries of ego and hatred would do.

Listen: Right now, without Trump on Twitter, we have a bunch of voices driving the crazy right-wing conversation, mostly little Trumps and Trumpettes and Trumpazoids. It frankly makes their batshit positions seem a great deal more popular than they are. In the wake of a marginalized Trump, only speaking to fringe outlets and Fox "news," making statements that get a scintilla of the coverage his tweets got, we have this Fellini-esque parade of freaks and frauds and fuckers and Boeberts and Gaetzes and Jordans and Greenes and more, all bleating variations of the MAGA sheep-credo: "Fuck you, give me your money."

I'm asserting two things here. The first is that Trump will be a triumphant snaketwat about returning to Twitter and all of MAGA world will be wetting itself with glee. And he will suck all the oxygen out of the MAGAverse, leaving his acolytes and ass lampreys gasping for air, even as they beg him for his blessings. The second is that his novelty factor is gonna wear off pretty fuckin' fast when everyone remembers, "Oh, fuck, that's right. We really hated hearing what that orange jagoff had to say." Voters are mostly dumb and selfish and have no sense of history, even recent history. There were Obama voters who turned to Trump. Then they turned against Trump. Now they're ready to go back to Trump because they forgot how much chaos he sowed. They're not watching what he says on One America or Newsmax. They don't give a fuck about his pathetic assistants tweeting out some statement from him. They're taking hits of Trump mixed with baking soda. But the pure shit jacked right into their veins is too much. Whatever satisfying jolt of warmth you get is immediately followed by vomiting, shitting, and regret. 

And maybe one more: over here in Sanityville, USA, we fucking hate Donald Trump. Whatever visceral hatred we have for Marjorie Taylor Greene or Ted Cruz or whoever, you can multiply that by degrees when it comes to Trump. You want to inspire Democrats to vote? Give them the visibility of the loathsome pumpkin-headed former president spewing noxious insults and brags, ejaculating his ego-spunk all over the internet again. Democrats will be begging to wreck that motherfucker one more time, even if through his proxy candidates. 

These kinds of things are all conjecture, no matter which side you land on. I know this could be totally wrong, as can any prediction of what happens with a mute or blaring Trump. But we can all agree on one thing: Fuck you, Elon Musk. Just fuck you in your stupid face. Go make a fuckin' battery or a train or some other bullshit thing you promised and never delivered.

Men Are Mostly Responsible for the End of Roe, So Fuck Up Their World, Too (Updated)

The Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a draft decision on which was leaked this week, centers on a law passed by the Mississippi legislature in 2018 and signed by its governor. That law banned all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It was struck down by lower courts because it patently violated what the Supreme Court allowed in the Roe v. Wade decision. And now we know that a majority in the Supreme Court is willing to shitcan Roe in order to drag the nation into becoming a Christian theocracy.

Here's the thing about the Mississippi legislature...well, lemme let a couple of graphs do the talking.

This is the gender breakdown for Mississippi House of Representatives: 

And here it is for the Mississippi Senate:

The big purple block is males. The little lavender one is females. Now, I'm no expert in reading graphs, but my rudimentary understanding of such complex pieces of information is "Holy fuck, there's a fuckton more men than women making laws in Mississippi." And, in fact, "fuckton" would likely be a term of art here because "Approximately 12.5% of members of the Mississippi House of Representatives and about 17.6% of members of the Mississippi Senate are women." If you're like me, you're assuming that Mississippi isn't a state that happens to be bereft of women. That assumption is correct. In fact, there are more women than men in Mississippi: 51.5% of people there call themselves "women."

You could look in many of the states where they have draconian anti-abortion laws or trigger laws that will toss abortion rights completely once the Roe decision is final and find a similar or close number of women in their legislatures. Alabama? 16.4% Oklahoma? 20.8% In no state with over 40% representation from women is the right to abortion threatened. But those places with roughly 65% or more men in the legislature? Shit has gone mad. Men have decided to fuck up the world for women. So, hey,  fuck their world up, too.

If I were a pro-choice legislator in one of those ludicrously savage states, I'd be proposing all kinds of fuckin' laws to bring the pain to men. For example, one Democrat in Florida,  Tina Scott Polsky, proposed an amendment to that state's 15-week abortion ban that would force the fathers-to-be to start paying child support at 15 weeks of pregnancy. Of course, that (and every) amendment failed to be voted into the final dickish law, including one that would have added back exceptions for pregnancies from rape, incest, and human trafficking. The gender breakdown of Florida is 51.1% women. Only 35% of the state legislature is women.

Despite the failure of Polsky's amendment, this is the kind of shit that Democrats should be introducing and emphasizing. The vast majority of women don't get pregnant without men involved (leaving out sperm donors, who are generally anonymous). So while working to get anti-abortion laws overturned or to get a majority in the state legislature or Congress to make abortion rights legal everywhere, use the bullshit against men. Come up with savage child support laws. For instance, in most states, a parent needs to be behind by a certain amount before wage garnishment and other collection methods are introduced. Lower that number to $0. That's right. You miss one payment and fuck you. Suspend your passport and your driving privileges. Take money from you wherever you get it. Taxes, lotteries, your grandma, whatever. And fucking jail you if you still don't pay up after one missed payment. Call it the "Men Make Babies, Too" Act.

Let's also add that if you're a rapist who impregnates a victim and you're in jail and you happen to live in one of the states where your family can sue to stop your victim from aborting your fucking baby, write a bill that makes that family responsible for the cost of the child from pregnancy until 18 years old. Call it "Love Your Son's Rape Baby" law or something. Then you can say, "Oh, you don't love your rapist son's rape baby enough to pay for it?"

Is that fair? Well, it's not fucking fair to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term and force her to give birth and force her to face all the medical problems and bodily changes that accompany pregnancy and birth while your male ass goes about your life. So, yeah, it's more than fucking fair.

And it shouldn't need to be said, but I guess it does. While what they might go through with the end of Roe is infinitesimal compared to women's forced childbearing, in states that outlaw abortion, it's gonna make the lives of forced fathers miserable, too. Whether it's through child support laws or through changing their lives and their futures around a child they never wanted to have, men's lives in Alabama, in Idaho, in Texas, in Missouri are gonna get fucked up. 

But you know who's to blame for that? Mostly other goddamn men.

Update: As several of you have pointed out, this is a shitty idea because it will naturally hurt the working class and those in poverty, just like anti-choice laws do. Not to be a douche here, but it's kind of the point: meet their shitty, outlandish idea with a shitty, outlandish idea of our own. Let there be consequences across the board, not just on women. 

The "Grooming" Bullshit: They're Coming Up With Excuses to Murder Us

I have lived through a whole lot of rhetorical fuckery in my exhausting time dealing with the American right. I've seen us called every -ist that they found scary: Marxist, communist, socialist, anarchist (as if those are bad things). I've watched us be called demonic and anti-Christian and, heavens forbid, atheists (as if that's a bad thing). According to conservatives, we on the left hate the country, hate the troops, hate the flag, hate the police, love terrorists, love socialism (that one again), love taxes, love drugs, love perverse sex (as if that's a bad thing), and love killing babies. Specific Democrats have been baselessly accused of murder, and a couple of those specific ones are specifically Bill and Hillary Clinton. 

But we're now experiencing what I think is the first time that the idea that Democrats and the Left in general are, as a group, committing evil and that the idea has spread beyond the usual assortments of paranoid nutzoids, religious freaks, and barbaric cretins (or, you know, Fox "news" viewers). Right now, the idea that Democrats and anyone who doesn't believe Donald Trump really won in 2020 either fuck children or enable people who fuck children is being endorsed by elected Republicans. 

The attack is especially vicious against LGBTQ people, who, as a group, are being called either "pedophiles" or "groomers," meaning that they are getting kids ready to have sex with them (or, really weirdly, turning them transgender). This has gotten so ludicrous and insidious that the crazies at Moms for Liberty (motto: "The name is ironic if you're gay or trans") are going after the Trevor Project, an organization whose purpose is to prevent suicide and self-harm by young people struggling with gender and sexual identity. Why? Because the group's website allows teens to chat with counselors, but the chat function has a quick exit button that erases the chat and clears the browser history so that parents can't see that the kid they beat for being a sissy is asking for help. Yeah, that's right. Whose bullshit often drives LGTBQ kids to suicide? Dads and Moms, who wouldn't know liberty if it bit them in their evangelical, cruel asses. So, now the organization trying to keep kids alive is filled with "groomers," according to the assholes of the right.

And the definitions of "pedophilia" and "grooming" have expanded to include "discussing any relationship that is not straight and cisgender." That's not even a bit of hyperbole. It's exactly what creepy-ass lie gremlin Christopher Rufo is redefining it as, and that shit is being gobbled up on Fox "news. The supporters of the "Don't Say Gay" law in Florida (and now being passed or considered in other backwards ass states) say that it's an "anti-grooming" law. Since it prevents discussion of "sexual orientation or gender identity" in grades K-3 and then only "age-appropriate" discussion after, if that's "anti-grooming," then that means saying that gay people exist and are in relationships with other gay people qualifies as "grooming." 

By the way, yeah, you could say it also means heterosexual relationship discussion is banned, too, but, c'mon. Be fucking real here. Unless they wanted to test the law, no one is gonna complain if a female teacher tells her first-graders that she's got a husband. Everyone involved knows what the fuck the law is talking about, and pretending otherwise is just bullshit. No one accused Disney of grooming kids with all the straight kisses in its films and TV. It was just when the company said, "Hey, we're gonna have more characters with different gender and sexual identities in our shit" that it all of a sudden became time to go mousefuck crazy on them. 

I mean, look at this madness from The Federalist (motto: "Our first drafts are all scrawled in our own shit"). Bear in mind that this is an example of how Disney is "grooming" children: "In movies like 'Finding Dory' (2016) and 'Toy Story 4' (2019), same-sex couples can be seen in the background strolling down the street, sitting close to each other, and hugging a child." In other words, if you show children how the world exists in reality, you are grooming them to be gay or trans or get fucked by adults or I don't fucking know since this whole thing is oppressively dumb. 

Of course, there's an evangelical Christian element to this. As Sojourner magazine details, the modern version of the lie about homosexuality and pedophilia goes back to Anita Bryant's crusade against gays and lesbians in the 1970s. Fucking hell, this tweet from some shitheel conservative "Christian" could have been from the disgraced orange juice pusher herself: "While I think Florida’s bill could go much further, I’m glad it only applies to K-3rd graders, because the left’s hysterical reaction highlights how pedophilic & predatory their ideology is. They are truly outraged they can’t talk to 5 year olds about sex and gender switching." It's "pedophilic" to tell kids that it's okay for a woman to hold hands with a woman in public. That's not deranged and traumatizing at all.

This garbage isn't even subtle. They are completely open about it. If you decide to spelunk in the toilets of nutzoid right-wing message boards, they are pretty much calling for the deaths of Democrats because we're all groomers or groomer-enablers. Teachers are especially targeted if they happen to teach a book that doesn't condemn gay people. They see educators as the greatest threat because they are telling children that the world is not the hellscape of ass rape and forced castration that their parents make it out to be. And, yeah, that's how bizarre this has all gotten. Fuck, there's a thread attacking Kellogg's (I know, I know, fuck them) for putting out a cereal last year that celebrates all gender identities. 

What we have here is a mass hysteria-inducing election power play by some motherfuckers who don't understand what they are unleashing, along with ones who understand perfectly well that they are setting free the savages and want them to run rampant. I keep telling you that the end result of the Trumpist ideology is them killing us. Or making what we think illegal and rounding us up. Goddamn. Every LGBTQ public school teacher in a red or slightly purple state must be fucking terrified. 

The left better step up its game and soon. Shit, I guess we made a strategic mistake by not labeling the entire GOP a bunch of child-fuckers after one of their actual leaders was sent to prison for fucking a child.