They Will Want to Kill Us

Sometimes my Clark Kent life and my Rude Pundit life overlap, and so yesterday I found myself moderating a talk (by someone else) about Where We Are as a Nation. You know, Our Current Political Situation and all that. The talk itself had been dire, from a colleague who was a moderate politically (and may have been a Republican years ago), and offered a gloomy outlook for the future of the country.

During the question and answer part, people wanted to find explanations and excuses for Where We Are. One audience member offered that she felt like there was too much extremism on both sides and that these extremes were pushing things to a crisis. I interjected, "Well, let's be clear about what's considered extreme. On the right, you've got actual Nazis and white supremacists who are committing violence. On the left, what they call 'extreme' are politicians who want the same programs that most of the countries in the world have, like health care and free college." 

Another audience member argued with me, saying that I was demonizing the right and contributing to the deep divisions in this country. "Let me clarify," I told this older professor. "I'm saying that on the right there are actual terrorists. People who murder for their beliefs. We readily call them 'extreme.' But the media and conservatives portray people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as extremists, as if that's the balance. There are left-wing extremists, violent revolutionaries, ecoterrorists, and more. That's who should be the counter-balance with right-wing extremists, not Bernie Sanders." I might have also said something like "And 'Antifa' is short for 'anti-fascist.'" 

I was not very good at moderating.

One of the things the right has always excelled at is portraying anyone even slightly left of center, hell, slightly left of hard right, as an extremist. Wanna see that in action? Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, had an A- rating from the National Rifle Association (motto: "Shoot first and don't ask questions later"), one of only four Democrats in the Senate given such a glowing, pro-gun grade. But Tester decided to vote against Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. He had already voted against Neil Gorsuch but still maintained his A-. Tester was very clear that he was opposing Kavanaugh for various reasons that had nothing to do with guns. But the NRA decided today to drop him to a D grade because "Contrary to what Jon Tester says in Montana, he has supported the gun control agenda of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer by voting in favor of gun control in Washington, DC," according to some numbnuts.

That happened yesterday. Up until then, Jon Tester was seen as a 2nd Amendment-supporting Democrat. He even voted against closing the background check loophole. With one vote, though, not unlike another vote on a Supreme Court nominee, he became what is now defined as radical.

I've been complaining about this false equivalence for years now. "Oh, Republicans are putting children into concentration camps but Democrats want people to have health care" is basically the range of our political discussion. However, Donald Trump has picked up on a post-Tea Party rage at any hint of liberalism and has turned it into an attack that is very Roy Cohn (and Joe McCarthy) in making Democrats into an actual enemy of the nation.

Here he is last night at one of his Nuremberg rallies, this time for the poor suckers in Iowa: "They want to destroy everything...in their lust for power, the Democrats have become totally unhinged. They've done, they've gone, crazy, They've gone crazy...the Democrats have become too extreme and they've become frankly too dangerous to govern. They've gone wacko...you don't give matches to an arsonist and you don't give power to an angry left-wing mob and that's what the Democrats are...if Democrats take control, they will try to reverse our amazing progress and plunge our country into gridlock. Frankly, into poverty. Ultimately, into chaos...They want to turn America, these Democrats and that's what they want, into a giant sanctuary for criminal aliens and the MS 13 killers...Democrat immigration policies aren't just wrong. They're lethal."  It should be pointed out here that most of Trump's attacks on Democrats are racist dog whistles, but the dogs respond. They respond.

That's dangerous stuff. The president of the United States is saying that large number of Americans are a threat to his supporters. "Democrats are the party of crime," he repeats.  Now you can say that that's off-the-cuff, playing-to-the-crowd, or whatever you want to call Trump's free association of words and phrases that we politely call a "speech." 

But in USA Today, well, today, whether he wrote it or not (and he didn't write it), Trump has an op-ed, decidedly not improvised, where he lies outright about a Democratic-supported Medicare-for-all plan. And then he goes off, "The truth is that the centrist Democratic Party is dead. The new Democrats are radical socialists who want to model America’s economy after Venezuela. If Democrats win control of Congress this November, we will come dangerously closer to socialism in America." 

It should be pointed out here that Fred Trump made his fortune by taking advantage of government-backed loans with artificially low interest rates. But we don't call that "socialism" for some reason.

Then he launched into an attack on his fantasy version of the Democratic policies: "Today’s Democratic Party is for open-borders socialism. This radical agenda would destroy American prosperity. Under its vision, costs will spiral out of control. Taxes will skyrocket. And Democrats will seek to slash budgets for seniors’ Medicare, Social Security and defense."

For the record, "open-borders socialism" is a nonsense phrase. The Democratic approach to immigration better described as "Be a little less dickish." As for Medicare and Social Security, Republican budgets put forth by Paul Ryan and others specifically cut... you know what? It doesn't matter. Because we're not dealing with reality. We are dealing with the description of moderate to center-left policies as "radical."

If the person who you believe has been anointed by God to lead the country (and the MAGA hordes do think this of Trump) tells you that a bunch of radicals are going to destroy the country, steal your money, and kill your Mama, then that person is saying that the radicals must be stopped by any means necessary.

Trump is talking a good game by saying that people should vote. But what happens if Democrats take over the House and, long shot, sure, the Senate? Then voting failed and the radicals got into office, the ones who are going to let in the Hottentots to spear Granny. 

The transformation of Donald Trump from illegitimate president to full-on authoritarian is frighteningly organic at this point. It is the direction he's been heading, the power he craves. He dictates what is acceptable. If any minor deviation from Trump-approved beliefs is a radical threat, then that threat must be stopped by his followers. If they can't do it through the ballot box, they will want to do it in other ways. 

They will want to kill us. Whether or not they will make the leap from desire to action, I don't know. But the very idea that I don't know is scary because while I always assumed the right held hateful thoughts about the left, I never entertained the possibility of them going full Serbia on us. That's not true now. And I just don't see it in Trump and his quislings in Congress and the administration to calm the hordes. 

If they don't win, they have been told we will harm them. We're just the extremists trying to stop their march to a wealthy, white future. They will want to kill us. Trump and the politicians who support him have fanned that little ember of hatred into a flame. As we go through these next truly dangerous months, I don't know if it will become an inferno. But I fear it will.

UN Climate Report: Mother Nature Is About to Fuck Us Raw

Mother Nature is fuckin' pissed, ya'll. She's done playing around. You don't wanna do shit about climate change? Then she's breaking out the big dildo, the thick hard rubber one, like 10 inches long, the thickness of a longshoreman's wrist, fuckin' spikes all along the shaft, and she's gonna fuck the shit out of our asses without lubing that thing up. You can be scared to death or you can pretend you like the pain, but, goddamn, you are gonna be sore and torn when she's done.

Why is Mother Nature gonna get brutal on our tender sphincters? Because we had warning on top of warning about climate change. Decades of it. We had years of motherfuckin' studies and motherfuckin' science telling us to stop being such dicks about carbon emissions and to do something, some goddamn thing, to slow the wreckage of our stupid human hubris. We had Al fuckin' Gore lay it all out for us. Did we listen? No. So we get deservedly reamed.

Oh, is that too much? You read the New York Times article and feel like you get it? Fuck you. You don't get shit. Read the actual report and you'll shit yourself in fear, and then, when you're done shitting yourself, you'll shit yourself again because there's the next page and the next until you are in a pile of fear-induced shit, and that's where we all should be now.

Check out this list of things that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said they have "high" or "very high confidence" about (most of this is with an average global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees. At 2 degrees, shit gets even worse):

- Increasing warming amplifies the exposure of small islands, low-lying coastal areas and deltas to the risks associated with sea level rise for many human and ecological systems, including increased saltwater intrusion, flooding and damage to infrastructure;

- Populations at disproportionately higher risk of adverse consequences of global warming of 1.5°C and beyond include disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, some indigenous peoples, and local communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods;

- Urban heat islands often amplify the impacts of heatwaves in cities...Risks from some vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, are projected to increase with warming from 1.5°C to 2°C, including potential shifts in their geographic range;

- Exposure to multiple and compound climate-related risks increases between 1.5°C and 2°C of global warming, with greater proportions of people both so exposed and susceptible to poverty in Africa and Asia.

You got that? You think the refugee crisis is bad now? Fuckin' wait until 50 million people need to live somewhere with food and water. Fuckin' wait until India is too hot to live. It'll make every other crisis seem like a piddling trickle. And wars over resources will be goddamned inevitable.

And we're not talking the 22nd century here. We're talking in 20-30 years. Fuck, that fucks up my plan of "die before climate change gets really bad."

The worst part about the report is that if we do something now, now, now, we have a chance to slow it or even reverse it. But that means we need politicians who aren't going to be absolute dumb shits and say in response to this report, "I can give you reports that are fabulous and I can give you reports that aren’t so good."

That means we're fucked. And Mother Nature is geared up and ready for fucking. And we deserve it, man. We really just deserve it.

Columbus Day for the Conquered: Native Women Opposed to Kavanaugh Swayed Murkowski

One of the few pleasant surprises to come out of the extraordinary fuckery of the "battle" over Brett Kavanaugh (if by "battle," you mean, "a pre-determined outcome where everyone pretended the fix wasn't in, especially Susan fucking Collins") was when Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, actually voted against Kavanaugh. And one major reason for Murkowski opposing her own party was the plea from Native women survivors of sexual assault and violence.

"Alaska Native women continue to suffer the highest rate of forcible sexual assault and have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States," according to the Indian Law Resource Center. And some of these women showed up in DC to lobby Murkowski, who, to her credit, met with many of them over the course of the week. 

But the pressure on Murkowski ran deep in the Alaskan Native community, whose support was at least partially responsible for her electoral victories in 2010 (especially) and 2016. 

In an open letter to Murkowski, Natalie Landreth, a senior attorney with the Native American Rights Fund in Alaska, reminded the Senator, "This is the same community who had wristbands with your name on them so they could remember how to spell it when they had to write it in," referring to Murkowski's 2010 run as an independent candidate. As Melissa Merrick-Brady, a Native American survivor of sexual assault, wrote, "It pains me to think that our country’s leadership might allow such a figure to ascend to the highest judicial office in this land, allowing him to opine on whether I should be protected from violence." One of Merrick-Brady's senators in North Dakota, Heidi Heitkamp, did vote against Kavanaugh.

The Bering Sea Elders Group issued a statement saying, in part, "Violence against our Native women and children in Alaska is not part of our culture, but is unfortunately an epidemic in Alaska...A person’s actions, beliefs, and ways of being show you who they are, and it is our way to know a person, their actions, their beliefs, and their way of being before elevating them to an important position in the community."

It wasn't just issues of sexual violence that drove the Native groups in Alaska to lobby Murkowski. Kavanaugh had issued decisions that opposed tribal sovereignty on a host of issues. The BSEG, for instance, continued their statement, saying that Kavanaugh "has demonstrated he does not understand the inherent status, rights, and roles of federally recognized Tribes and puts at risk the 229 federally

recognized Tribes in Alaska."

Kavanaugh was opposed by the Alaska Federation of Natives because of his view of the Indian Commerce Clause. He was opposed by the Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska because of concerns about voting rights and tribal control of rivers. He was opposed by the the Republican governor and the Democratic (and Tlingit) lieutenant governor of Alaska because of fears of the Supreme Court gutting the Affordable Care Act and the Indian Child Welfare Act. That last fear is closer to reality since a district court struck down the law that said that Indian children without parents should be placed within their tribe.

But the movement in DC was led by Native women, who protested outside Murkowski's office and the office of Alaska's other senator, Dan Sullivan. The protesters there were arrested by Capitol police (although Sullivan denies calling them), and Sullivan proudly voted for Kavanaugh.

Murkowski, though, listened, and in her heartfelt speech from the Senate floor, she recognized the treatment of Native women in her state: "The levels of sexual assault that we see within our Native American and our Alaska Native communities, the rates are incredibly devastating. It is not something that we say we’ll get to tomorrow. We’ve heard those voices. We’ve heard those voices, and I hope that we have all learned something, that we owe it to the victims of sexual assault to do more and to do better and to do it now with them." She listened. For once. She listened to Native voices.

False Accusations of Rape Usually End Up Being Proven False

In May, two men, VanDyke Perry and Gregory Counts, got out of prison after 26 years. They had been convicted of rape, sodomy, and kidnapping, and they were exonerated after new DNA evidence excluded them and after the woman accusing them recanted her story. It should be a textbook case for conservatives who want to argue that young men are at risk for their well-being because they might be accused of sexual assaults or rapes they didn't commit.

The right clings to this notion that the 5% of reported rape cases that end up being classified, for various reasons, as false are an epidemic. As New York Times conservative columnist Bret Stephens scrawled today, "Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself. It inflicts psychic, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. This is nothing to sneer at." To be fair, when you're falsely accused of something, you aren't beaten and penetrated, but, you know, other than that, sure, Bret, sure.

But, see, the story of Perry and Counts doesn't fit into whatever anti-woman narrative the right is trying to construct. The two African American men were arrested in 1991 when they were 21 and 19. So a pair of young black men from a poor area of Queens, New York, during the height of the panic over crack addiction didn't really stand much of a chance against a legal system that was more than willing to railroad them. In fact, "investigators had no physical evidence. Semen recovered from the woman did not match the two accused men. The prosecution’s case relied heavily on her testimony, which was inconsistent." This was overzealous prosecution to the extreme.

Yes, what happened to the two men was awful, a tragedy on many levels.  Yet you know what really happens almost every time when a man is falsely accused of rape or assault? An investigation happens and he's cleared. It's stressful, sure, but it's over. And you know what else happens? Lemme give you a short list from the last few months.

- In August, a woman in Montgomery, Alabama, was charged with filing a false police report after she had accused a man of rape.

- In June, a female college student in Connecticut was sentenced to a year in prison for a false rape allegation against two young men.

- In May, police in Waco, Texas, declined to prosecute a woman who had falsely accused an officer of raping her. A body cam on the officer showed that it hadn't happened, but the woman hadn't filed any official report, so she wasn't charged.

Going to police with a false accusation is a crime. And you can go to prison for that crime. That seems to be a pretty big disincentive to anyone who might think about committing that crime.

Also, the fact that most of the false cases are proven false is a pretty big incentive for someone who is falsely accused to want as full an investigation as possible.

Enough already. Enough with the attacks on Christine Blasey Ford. Enough with the bizarre citing of To Kill a Mockingbird by Republicans, as if Brett Kavanaugh is comparable to a black man in the South in the 1930s. Enough with the white man grievance parade. Enough with the painting of women with the broad brush of hysteria. Enough with the failure of empathy and compassion.

Just enough already.

"A Man's Life" Counts More Than a Woman's Trauma

You know what's shocking? How it isn't that shocking that, in a rally that was ostensibly for some repugnant Republican, President Donald Trump mocked Christine Blasey Ford's testimony about Brett Kavanaugh attempting to rape her. That's just fucking depressing, like when you hear about a mass shooting and if it's less than 10 people, you mostly just think, "Ah, fuck it. It's not that bad." Once you've danced your body around before a crowd to make fun of a disabled man, you may as well just do whatever the fuck you want.

I don't think any of us would be surprised if Trump decided to act out Kavanaugh exposing himself to Deborah Ramirez. "What did he do?" he'd ask the cheering audience. "He dropped his pants and hung brains for a couple of seconds. Frankly, that woman should have been grateful she got the chance to see his perfect, incredible penis."

What Trump did say last night was cruelly fascinating in its insulting tone. He restated Ford's testimony in the most degrading way possible: "'I had one beer right. I had one beer. Well you know there was one there.' Oh good. 'How did you get home?' 'I don't remember.' 'How did you get there?' 'All remember where is the place. I don't remember how many years ago was it. I don't know. I don't know what neighborhood was it and I don't know where's the house.'" He used a slightly higher pitched voice to indicate he was being Ford.

Then he said, like a brain-damaged actor spouting lines from an imagined David Mamet play, "A man's life is in tatters. A man's life is shattered," he mourned. And there you go. "A man's life" was fucked up by some crazy cunt. "A man's life" is that so valuable that others must be silenced and discarded. That's essentially what Trump was implying.

Trump went on to offer a short performance of a poor, deprived, innocent man talking to his sainted mother about what those evil bitches did to him. Again changing his pitch, I guess to sound younger, as a son, he implored, "'I did great in school. I've worked so hard. Mom, I'm so pleased to tell you. I just got a fantastic job with IBM. I just got a fantastic job with General Motors. I just got. I'm so proud, Mom. A terrible thing just happened. A person who I've never met said that I did things that were horrible and they're firing me from my job, Mom. I don't know what to do. Mom, what do I do? What do I do, Mom? What do I do? Mom?'"

Seriously, this was like a pathetic audition for Hell's community theatre production of Fatal Attraction, The Musical.

It was also of a piece with what Trump said earlier in the day. "My whole life I've heard, 'you're innocent until proven guilty,' but now you're guilty until proven innocent. That's a very, very difficult standard," he told reporters. "It's a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of." First off, studies show that, at most, 10% of all rape allegations turn out to be false after investigation (and that means there was no conviction, so no one is "guilty" of rape). And other studies say that perhaps 65% of all sexual assaults are never reported. So for every University of Virginia-like falsehood, there are a whole bunch of unreported rapes and other attacks.

Plus, you know what I never did as a young man or as a not-young one now? I never fucking walked down the street wondering if I was going to be raped. I never fucking walked into a park wondering if I was going to get raped. I never fucking looked for my car in a parking lot wondering if I was going to get raped. I never fucking had trouble opening my front door with groceries in my hands while wondering if I was going to get raped. I never fucking went to an empty building on the weekend at my school wondering if I was going to get raped. I never fucking rode an elevator or walked down a stairway wondering if I was going to get raped. I never fucking went to a party or a bar wondering if I was going to get raped. I never fucking hung out with my friends and acquaintances wondering if one of them was going to rape me. I never fucking took a drink from someone wondering if it was going to knock me out so they could rape me. I never fucking got up in the morning and had a 100 times during the day where I wondered if I was going to be raped.

So I know very clearly who is and who isn't living in a scary time, and it sure as fuck ain't young men.

Perhaps even more gut-churning than Trump's own bullying of a sexual assault victim was the idiot horde's reactions to it. Again, it's shocking that, really, it's not that shocking. When Trump started his "I don't know" riff, so many in the crowd at the 8400 seat arena in Southaven, Mississippi, were on his side, and a whole lot of the credulous rubes started hee-hawing in delight, their yahoo yawps and grunts urging him on, their pounded clapping serving as his tribal rhythm, making him dance more enthusiastically for their adoration. What a bunch of goddamned animals, hooting their approval of the denigration of a woman who Trump himself said was credible. At this point, Trump has gone so low, so depraved, that he could select a MAGA hat-wearing child to finger his asshole through every rally speech and families would be tearing each other to shreds for their little ones to be chosen for the honor.

Of course, mostly, this was about Trump himself, as he gave away a moment later at the rally: "I've had many false accusations. I've had it all. I've had so many. And when I say it didn't happen nobody believes me." Well, the problem is that too many people believe him. Not enough people believe the women whose traumas he feels so free to knock down.

15 Years of This Here Blog: Join Up for More Rudeness, Including Audio Fun

So here's the thing: Last year, after well over a decade of writing for free at this joint (except for begging for money every couple of years for a new computer and whiskey, sweet mother's milk of whiskey), I started a Patreon page where monthly donors get new shit either every week or every month, depending on the donation level. It's a little looser there, with funny stories and pop culture stuff. Still a good deal of politics, but not exclusively.

In the last couple of months, I did a dive into the QAnon Reddit page, wrote about the undocumented immigrant neighbor of mine who helped stop crime on my block, reviewed Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, and posted audio stories about when I was involved in protests against South Africa and that time I was assaulted by performance artist Karen Finley. In other words, it's a lot of fun, it's freewheeling, and it's cheap as fuck.

How cheap? For $1 a month you get 1 audio post and 1 exclusive blog post (meaning I'm not putting it on the Rude Pundit blog) each month.

For $3 a month, you get weekly stuff, sometimes even more than weekly, including 2 audio posts. Like, for instance, I'm posting daily this week for Patreon as I tell some stories from the last 15 years of sweaty, stanky bloggery. It's "A History of Rudeness."

And my podcast, Another Goddamn Podcast, will be starting up again next week. If you donate at the $5 a month level, you get exclusive extended interviews, along with all the other shit. Already, donors have heard more from Molly Jong-Fast, Jo Miller, and Joe Harris than if you just got it through your iTunes store or Stitcher.

If you donate $10 a month, then I'll get you some tickets when the next Rude Pundit show happens (and it might be happening sooner than you think, like in the next year).

For all the loyal and disloyal readers of the blog, I'm still posting there, wild and free and naked as it ever was. Enjoy it and pass it along. Hate it and threaten to murder me. The internet is the id unleashed and unhinged, and I am happy to let mine wander with abandon.

But if the Patreon gets up high enough with the monthly donations, I want to be able to pay people to write some stuff and produce some stuff. Hell, I'd just like to pay someone to edit the podcast other than me. And maybe travel to some places to do recordings at rallies and events. I got plans, in other words. Oh, and, yeah, whiskey and weed and maybe one or two other sinful things will be purchased.

So come on along and join the nearly 200 people who have gotten on the bonus rudeness train. If you join now, you can have instant access to the dozens of posts already there. That's at least a full night of me and you, all alone, on your lap and in your ears.

(By the way, if you wanna just toss a couple of bucks in the guitar case, you can still donate right here or over on that "Donate" button on the side.)

Brett Kavanaugh Would Likely Not Survive an Interview With Your HR Department

Last Thursday, as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh bellowed and sucked down water and snuffled like a coke fiend with too many nose hairs, I asked the good people of Twitter a simple question. "Just curious: What would HR at your company or work say about all this? Would they let you hire Kavanaugh?" I wondered. And, if this completely biased sample of responses is any indication, Judge Kavanaugh would not get the job.

A sampling (with some minor editing for clarity):

"I say this as a management-side employment attorney: HR would say, 'We can’t say for certain that he did those things, but in the last interview he acted crazy. Out of control. Unable to answer questions in an appropriate manner. We obviously can’t hire him.'"

"I am in HR. If someone came in for a job interview and ranted and raved like that, not only would he not be hired, he’d be escorted out by security."

"This made me laugh thinking of the interviews I used to do. Angry, belligerent, won't give straight answers, lies about everything--no way would I even consider hiring this guy. Lawsuit waiting to happen."

"I was in HR all my life. I would never hire someone that can’t control his temper or was emotional in front of me no matter what his resume or background check revealed."

"Sadly, my former workplace did hire a guy just like this, despite being openly rude to the women on the hiring committee. It took 3 years and his aggression putting contracts in jeopardy for them to get rid of him."

"My boss hired a guy like this once (although I can’t imagine he acted this way in the interview). My advice to co-workers: 'Just stand back far enough so you don’t get splattered with blood when he shoots himself in the foot.' He was there 3 weeks."

If Kavanaugh had been on trial, his Emile Zola act might have been compelling, even defiant. And all the conservative spoogebuckets who have gone to the barricades for Kavanaugh, pounding their fists and declaring innocent-until-proven-guilty is dead? They might have a point.

But the motherfucker wasn't on trial. He was sitting before the hiring committee for his new job where standards are a whole lot looser. And, yeah, sometimes at the job interview, you get asked about uncomfortable shit, and if you act like a frothing dickhead about blow all over the joint, there's a good chance you won't get the job.

That's because companies and other organizations (like universities) are worried that you will be a problem. Your resume can be a glowing, glorious monument to your awesomeness, but if you send up any signals that one day you might cause grief for your employers or, even worse, cause a lawsuit, you are done. It might not be fair, but that's the way it is.

I know this not just from the collected wisdom of Twitter jockeys. I know it because I've been on both sides of the interview process. I've talked to dozens upon dozens of candidates for positions from administrative assistant to provost of my college. One candidate for a pretty big job was a total jerk to everyone, acting as if arrogance was going to be seen as charming or some such shit. No fuckin' way.

And I've been the asshole. I was once up for a job that, early on in a two-day interview, I decided I didn't want. So my attitude was "ahh, fuck it." When the dean of this podunk Pennsylvania college said to me, "You're from the south. You'll come cheap," if I had wanted the the position, I'd've laughed at the entirely improper thing and said something self-effacing.

But I didn't give a fuck what she or anyone else thought of me. So I said in my worst Jethro Clampett accent, "That's right, Dean. I teach a class. You gimme a chicken. I teach another one. Gimme some beans." And then I went on until my pantry was full. The appalled look on the Dean's face told me that we were done here.

On another job interview, for one I wanted, a dean asked me why I wanted to leave the place where I was working. That's actually an inappropriate question when it comes to public colleges. I could have gotten all high dudgeon about it and huffed, "None of your business. I like beer!" But I sucked it up and answered the goddamn question. Because, as I said, I wanted the fuckin' job.

Look, obviously, a seat on the Supreme Court isn't the same as 2nd desk humper in the third row of gray cubicles. But if you're not worth hiring for that cubicle, you are a far fucking way from being worthy of the a lifetime appointment deciding life and death issues for everyone in the country.

And that's not even getting into the whole sexual predator side of things with Kavanaugh.

15 Years of Rudeness: What the Hell Is Wrong With Me?

Today marks one hell of a milestone/millstone. It's been 15 years since the first post here at the Rude Pundit. And, sadly, except for a few words that I used to say with regularity that are not worth the trouble to say (often), not much has changed.

Oh, we had a good run there for a couple of years, but the same fuckers in charge are still in charge (and I mean that literally in some cases). The same Fox "news" template still runs the media narrative (aided and abetted by its devolved offspring like Breitbart and nutzoid message boards).  The same battles over race and sex and sexuality and abortion and health care are still going on.

And, while some of us asshole bloggers have gone on to bigger and better things (looking at you, Ezra Klein and Joy Reid), a good many of us are still asshole bloggers, raging in hopes of causing the dying of the right. We can't stop, people like me and Digby and Atrios and Driftglass and Emptywheel and so many others. That is our curse, while our blessing is our readers, new and old.

I'll have a bit more to say on Monday (along with a big plug for my Patreon).

And while I'm not doing a big fundraiser this year, hey, if you wanna toss some change into the ol' tip jar, I won't stop ya. You can click here or over there on the side.

Onward, and, dear sweet fuckin' Jesus, hopefully upward.

Random Observations on a Raging, Privileged, Alcoholic Rapist's Testimony

1. It should have been over when Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in his opening statement, accused Democrats and "the left" of conspiring to leak the allegation of sexual assault by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. When he yelled at the Senate Judiciary Committee, "This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. And millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups," Kavanaugh was clearly stating that he would never even pretend to be an impartial judge. He was a member of Ken Starr's penis warriors and George W. Bush's scabrous legal team; he merely confirmed that once a political hack, always a political hack.

2. It should have been over when Senator Amy Klobuchar asked, "So you’re saying there’s never been a case where you drank so much that you didn’t remember what happened the night before, or part of what happened" and Kavanaugh replied, "It’s — you’re asking about, you know, blackout. I don’t know. Have you?" and Klobuchar retorted, "Could you answer the question, Judge? I just — so you — that’s not happened. Is that your answer?" and Kavanaugh answered, "Yeah, and I’m curious if you have." At that moment, confronted with a woman who was questioning his honesty, Kavanaugh revealed he is the kind of asshole that Klobuchar would have known well, since she had just fucking said that her father is a recovering alcoholic. He turned an accusation against him into a chance to shame her. (He did the same thing with Sheldon Whitehouse, asking, "Do you like beer?" when the senator asked Kavanaugh about his drinking.)

3. It should have been over when Senator Dick Durbin asked, "Judge Kavanaugh, will you support an FBI investigation right now?" and Kavanaugh replied, "I will do whatever the committee wants to-" and Durbin interrupted, "Personally, do you think that’s the best thing for us to do?" and Kavanaugh was utterly silent. He would not call for reopening his FBI background check to look into his past because, at a bare minimum, it would reveal that Kavanaugh has lied repeatedly while under oath about his partying habits, his definition of slang, his treatment of female classmates, and many other things short of rape and assault that would call into question his fitness to be a judge. And I'd be willing to bet money that it would find that he did the things that Ford and other women have said he did.

4. It should have been over when it was apparent that Kavanaugh is a raging alcoholic, a privileged prick who got away with all kinds of shit because he's white and male and wealthy and has a mother who was an attorney for the Maryland State's Attorney office in Montgomery County. Kavanaugh's unrepentant belligerence and his bristling that anyone would dare to question his honesty was especially pronounced when women on the committee asked him to explain himself.

5. It's clear that Republicans are willing to vote for someone to the Supreme Court who couldn't suppress his sense of entitlement and essentially promised to get back at groups that acted against him (Kavanaugh said, "As we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around").  Even putting aside the truly awful allegations by at least 3 women against him, Kavanaugh has shown through his complete lack of grace under pressure that he has no right to even be a tourist at the Supreme Court. If any Democratic nominee had behaved like Kavanaugh, Republicans would have torched the hearing room to prevent the nomination from moving forward.

6. More importantly, though, is that Republicans know that Kavanaugh did attack Ford and others. They know it because they refuse to call for an FBI investigation, which is far different than having the staff of GOP senators question people. They know it because they aren't attacking Ford's story, just her ability to remember who tried to rape her. And they are choosing to ignore it because it inconveniences their timeline and irritates their mad president. This is a profound failure of ethics and morality, but, well, it is the GOP.

7. And Kavanaugh went at Democrats the way he did for the very reason that he attacked women and drank until he blacked out: he knew he would get away with it because there are men like him making sure he does.

8. One final observation: I have been drinking since the 1980s. I know drinking and I know drinkers. Brett Kavanaugh was every fucking piece of shit who used alcohol as an excuse to be a fucking piece of shit. And then they denied they were pieces of shit when they were sober. Except you couldn't hide it. You get them into a situation with even a little stress, and that fucking piece of shit part of them rears its stinking head. Because that's who they are at their core.

9. Ford was amazing, wasn't she?

(Last night on Twitter, I asked how HR at people's workplace would have reacted to Kavanaugh. The responses are enlightening.)

When We Discuss Brett Kavanaugh, We Need to Understand Rape and Assault in the 1980s

In 1983, at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, members of the Alpha Tau Delta fraternity were accused of committing a gang rape on a drunk young woman at a frat house party. Asked about the allegations, one fraternity member said, "The young lady went out and got herself in trouble. She was loose and wild, imbibing many things and she was flaunting herself."

After an investigation by the administration, UPenn decided to revoke recognition of the fraternity. They felt there was enough evidence to warrant a campus death penalty. Indeed, the administration was so concerned by what they found that they considered individual internal punishment for the students involved.

However, they did not go to the police. They did not have the fraternity members who were accused of the gang rape arrested. This happened during a period of time where there was an upswing in the reported gang rapes on college campuses and elsewhere.

In the New York Times in 1983,  a lawyer who was a member of the New York Family Violence Board wrote about how the law dealt with rapes where the victim was drunk or drugged (and with the assumption that the crime involved a man raping a woman), "When lack of consent is based on physical incapacity, mental incapacity or mental defect, the male can win acquittal by proving that he was unaware of the victim's incapacity to consent." This led to many men being found innocent by pleading they were unaware. And, in New York, the previous sexual history of the victim could be used in court, with defense attorneys often aggressively questioning women on the stand.

Even in 1987, "in courtrooms nationwide, many women still find that their legal claims and credibility or character are being judged on the basis of factors that seem to many legal experts and feminists to be antiquated, irrelevant and prejudicial: the company they keep, their sexual mores and how they walk, talk, dress and handle their emotions." When it came to date rape, a sex crimes prosecutor said, "Little things work against [the victim], like the fact that she invited the guy in for a cup of coffee or for a nightcap, or even went to his place. There is then the presumption that she wouldn't be there unless it was a sexual encounter.''

The same thing went if a woman went to a party where there was heavy drinking and drug use. And that's not getting into the horror of laws that essentially allowed a man to get away with raping his wife.

No, obviously, rape was not just a problem in the 1980s. But something was going on in the 1980s, and that was that women were coming out of the battles for equality in the 1960s and 1970s to assert a place in American society that upended the gender hierarchy. For instance, between 1970 and 1988, the proportion of young women attending college went from 26.3 percent to 36.8 percent.

Susan Faludi's classic book Backlash traced how the media and politicians, including President Ronald Reagan, reacted against the feminist movement's successes. I'm not saying that movies like Porky's (one of the top-grossing films of 1982) caused anyone to rape or sexually assault a woman. But I am saying that the message of the time was that men were being emasculated by the feminist movement and needed to assert dominance (and many, many men thought this was utter garbage). Now when we hear incels and MRAs say these kinds of things, it's laughable. It was mainstream in the 1980s.

I was there in the 1980s, a young man coming of age. I went for a short period to an elite college, Tulane, with the privileged sons of privileged families. I heard stories about assaults and rapes of incapacitated women, all of which were presented as if "she was asking for it." I don't want to make this about me, but, as someone whose hero was Alan Alda, who actively campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, I thought it was all disgusting. And it was one of the major reasons I left Tulane. I had amazing friends and professors who changed my life, but I couldn't stand the coked-up, pampered jerks who debased anyone not like them, including my roommate, who was a member of the fraternity banned from campus, the DKE, same as Brett Kavanaugh up at Yale during the same time.

You can't understand the Kavanaugh allegations unless you understand the way rape and sexual assault was still dealt with and thought of then. Let me explain this with an example.

In 1981, in the TV sitcom Facts of Life, one of the high school girls, Natalie, is attacked and almost raped on her way home from a costume party. Her PTSD from the event is played for laughs, as she refuses to go outside from fear. Offered tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert, Natalie at first is excited and then says, "Sorry, I can't go. I just remembered that I'm no longer allowing myself to experience joy or laughter." The laugh track surged.

She is eventually convinced to go to a self-defense class, where the instructor, a male, accuses Natalie of having brought on the attack herself. He asks her, "Was it night time when the attack happened?" and "Did you ask someone to walk with you?" and "Did you stick to a well lighted path?" and "Were you carrying a purse?" before showing her all the things in her purse she should have used as weapons. Natalie concludes that she should have left the party by herself and she should have done more to defend herself.

In 1981, in one of the most popular shows on TV, the message was that women were to blame for their sexual assault.

The Pathetic Incredulity of Republicans: Benghazi and Kavanaugh

When I see GOP Senators talk about the women accusing Brett Kavanaugh of myriad sorts of sexual assault, I keep coming back to the things that Republicans are ready to believe (or pretend to believe for the sake of political gain) with no evidence or evidence so bizarre as to be nonsensical at best, and downright dangerous at worst.

For instance, I keep thinking about the 2012 Benghazi attack, where 4 Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, were killed in a raid on the consulate there, and how, no matter how many times Republicans were told that there was no conspiracy of silence or conspiracy of inaction or conspiracy of any sort, even after one Senate committee and five fucking House hearings and investigations, all led by Republicans, as well as one by a  Senate Select Committee, current Judiciary Committee Member Republican Senator Ted "Don't Hit Me, Beto" Cruz was still not satisfied. In 2014, he went on Fox "news" and demanded more answers, more goddamned investigations. And so there were more. There was a House Select Committee that investigated and found nothing other than random fuck-ups that should be avoided in the future. That's on top of an FBI and State Department investigation right after it happened.

Goddamnit, they were after the truth, these brave Republicans willing to believe any weird ass theory barked at them from Breitbart or shat straight into their open hands by Sean Hannity. And then, once the election of 2016 was over and Hillary Clinton had lost, not a goddamn word from Ted Cruz. That motherfucker was talking Benghazi all the way through 2016, as were his fellow Judiciary Committee fuckfaces like John Cornyn. The election was over and it was done. Hell, Orrin Hatch, another of those fuckfaces, even suggested that they just forget about Benghazi. Shit, last year, fuckin' Ted Cruz co-sponsored a bill to cut in half the security budget for embassies and consulates, in direct contradiction of what every goddamned investigation said.

From e-mails to uranium sales to President Obama's birth certificate, these shitheels and ratfuckers couldn't believe bullshit fast enough. If it was the barest of anti-Obama or anti-Hillary hints of scandal, Republicans would jump on that like white cops on a black grandmother waving her cane too much. Everyone believes shit when it's to their advantage. That's human nature. But fuckin' Republicans, man, they believe it like their lives depended on it. They take things that require more leaps of faith than that the earth was made in 7 days and hold them up as absolute, delivered from God's mouth truth. And even when it's proven that they're just fuckin' lying or, you know, wrong, Republicans say, "Well, yeah, but what if we have more hearings?" They're like a bunch of idiot shepherds standing around an animal carcass, saying, "Maybe if we fuck this dead goat more, it'll come back to life."

So we're not talking run-of-the-mill hypocrisy when it comes to their treatment of the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. We're talking a kind of meta-hypocrisy, one that is about how they approach those things that need evidence. Whenever it benefits them, they will gnaw at it like a pit bull on a cow bone. And when it doesn't, well, shit, they don't want to be bothered to support even a minimal investigation. But they'll support Kavanaugh, damnit, because that's what they're supposed to do because something, something midterm turnout. (I'd argue they want to assure the nutzoid evangelicals that they're gonna get their Roe overturning vote on the court before the midterms.)

Yet, if you go back to the fake scandals of the Bill Clinton presidency, and you'll see that it was almost always Democrats, including Clinton's attorney general, who were calling for an investigation, with the idea being that finding the facts would shut Republicans the fuck up. Of course, that was wishful thinking at its most pathetically wishful. It can't go without saying that Kavanaugh himself sought to get "answers" on one of the scuzziest of the Clinton "scandals," that the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster was really a murder, a hit done by the Clintons. To this day, there are people who believe that is true, along with the idea that Hillary Clinton did 45 murders (no, really, look that shit up).

The point here is that the abject refusal on the part of Republicans to call for any kind of investigation, beyond Senate staff, of the multiple allegations against Kavanaugh, involving everything from dick-waving to participating in running a train on a drunk woman, speaks to the fucked up sexism of the Republicans. Democrats have forced out Al Franken and Anthony Weiner and want Keith Ellison to be investigated. Republicans not only refuse to believe Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez and, potentially, others, but they won't even allow ask for law enforcement to look into it in the course of an expanded background check. Plainly, they are afraid of what will be discovered. (And it can't be said enough: Any investigation into Ford's allegations would have been over by now.)

We've known for a long time that Republicans basically couldn't give a flea fart about women. They are hurt and confused by the #MeToo movement, like spider monkeys who don't know where to go once their rainforest has been mowed down so they just throw shit at everyone around them. So it's not that there is anything shocking in the behavior of Republicans.

But the brazenness of their unrelenting fuckery is going off the charts. And it's just so obvious that they have learned not a goddamned thing since the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearing in 1991. The difference, of course, is that the other side has learned a thing or two. Hopefully, it's enough for Democrats to cause a reckoning that has been nearly 30 years in the making.

Enjoying the Toxic Shit and Coal Water, Carolinas?

Every flood is a filthy stew of garbage, shit, and chemicals, and that's mainly because we live in garbage, shit, and chemicals. But the post-Hurricane Florence floods in North and South Carolina have an extra soupcon of nastiness because of just how much those states decided to fuck their environment. Right now, pig shit and poison are leaking into flood waters, which will go into the rivers, lakes, and water supply, and there is a good chance that, as the rivers continue to rise, a great deal more pig shit and poison will wash into the food chain.

You've no doubt heard by now about the pig shit lagoons, which sounds like some punishment in Hell but is actually a real thing where the industrial pig farms collect the literal millions upon millions of gallons of manure into open-air ponds. Then, because life is just one big joke, a bacteria is tossed into the shit slurry that turns it as bright pink as a princess's ball gown.

Already, over 20 of the shit lakes have had flood waters cause them to overflow, and at least one has had a breach. Now, there are about 3000 of these manure lagoons in North Carolina alone, according to the NC Pork Council (which is not nearly as fun an organization as it sounds). That's for 2100 pig farms. Another 90 or so have the potential to overflow. So, yeah, 110 out of 3000 is not bad except for the fact that it's 110 giant pools of pig shit and piss.

And if that wasn't delicious enough, a Duke Energy landfill in North Carolina has been breached, causing coal ash, which is totally not clean, to be spilled. This is on top of another spill at a coal-fired electric plant, with the chance very high that a retired plant's coal ash pit will be overtopped by flood waters. The leakage of coal ash is also a fear in South Carolina.  It means that, on top of pig shit, mercury, arsenic, and other nasty stuff will get into the water. Already, over 180 dump truckloads worth of coal ash have leaked out. Again, it doesn't seem like much, except that it's fucking arsenic and mercury. (Update: A few minutes after posting this, AP reported that a dam was breached at that retired plant, and coal ash is likely flowing into the Cape Fear River.)

When he visited the region this week, President Donald Trump, who is just a grown-up, racist, and rapey Garbage Pail Kid, declared, "Washington is with you.  Trump is with you.  We are all with you 100 percent.  And we’ll get through it.  And I think the most exciting part is going to be that rebuild, because you’re going to have a lot of rebuilding." Putting aside his fuckin' weirdo third-person quirk and fucked-up delight at rebuilding, it's utterly untrue that Washington is with the Carolinas 100 percent.

Because, see, the Trump EPA won't do a thing about the pig shit lagoons or the coal ash heaps. It won't do a thing about climate change (just like North Carolina refused to), which is what has exacerbated the flooding, especially along the coast. The federal government will help rebuild, sure, but it's just providing more places to be wrecked by the next toxic floods, which will be more frequent, more severe, and more toxic. But, hey, as Trump said to a victim in North Carolina, "Have a good time."

By the way, just to make this all more disgusting, right now tankers are traversing North Carolina with the pig shit that was sucked out of lagoons that were in danger of spilling over. So you've got shit trucks going from shit lagoon to shit lagoon, which seems about an accurate description of where we find ourselves now as a nation.

Conservatives Are Right: This Is About Abortion

Making the rounds in conservative shit-tossing circles in the last day or so is that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her in 1982 when they were both in high school wouldn't have been heard at all if Kavanaugh were a solid vote to uphold Roe v. Wade. "It's about abortion," they say, these bloated white men who rarely see the sun from their snake holes. And it really is an all-star line-up of demi-human fuck rags that are asserting this

Erick "Erick" Erickson, over on his website The Regurgitant, stated flatly that Democrats are supporting Ford and attacking Kavanaugh "in order to protect the right to kill girls in utero." Yes, this pasty motherfucker, who tells us over and over to love each other because GodJeebus wrote it in his wacky book of fairy tales, said, "This entire thing is about the right to kill kids, not about the veracity of the accusation." Although, you know, no one accused Neil Gorsuch of attempted rape, so were Democrats just lazy then?

Over on his radio show, Shakey the Deaf Clown's Masturbatorium of Rage, Rush Limbaugh blurbled, "This is all about abortion. It is about nothing else as far as the left is concerned. They want to be able to continue uninterrupted with their behavior when it comes to abortion. Sex without consequence, life without consequence. They are scared to death that a Republican or a conservative majority is going to overturn Roe vs. Wade." And then he unhinged his jaw to eat the array of puppies laid before him at the start of every episode.

On his Fox "news," Tucker Carlson spoke up before being bitch-slapped on his show, Everyone Bitch Slaps Tucker Carlson, offering, "Does anyone really believe the story would have surfaced if Brett Kavanaugh had pledged allegiance to Roe v Wade? Of course, it wouldn't have." And then he went on to burn a cross, salute Hitler, and get bitch slapped by whichever vaguely liberal guest he had on to bitch slap him, all while he stared out at us like the most racist and confused cocker spaniel ever.

And, you know, let's be fair: they're right that this is about abortion. Except not in the way they're putting it. 'Cause, see, what it's really about is that woman-hating conservatives know that Kavanaugh is the final vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that's the fuckin' goal here. Kavanaugh is the pay-off for decades of support, through money and votes, of the evangelical nutzoid right.

They've been wearing their knees out since the Reagan era, praying and drooling over the prospect of shitcanning abortion rights and forcing all those whores to have their goddamn babies. They thought that Robert Bork would be their black-robed savior back in 1987, but those liberal motherfuckers made a case about Bork being batshit insane, and so Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy after the Senate voted Bork down, and that heathen son of a bitch Kennedy kept upholding Roe. It's fuckin' poetic to these savage zealots that Kavanaugh would take Kennedy's place and do what Kennedy didn't and what Bork would have.

So let's reverse this shit here. Yeah, it's about abortion. Because, see, I don't know if Democrats would have brought up the Ford allegations if Kavanaugh were a liberal nominee. I'd like to think they would have, especially considering how quickly they turned against Al Franken and Anthony Weiner.  But I sure as shit know that if Kavanaugh did believe Roe was settled law, Republicans would have been screaming for the FBI to be involved.

Now, though, the GOP wants this shit to go away, and they are sticking with Kavanaugh because they're scared to death that a blue wave will sweep the Senate away from their filthy hands before they can get another misogynist on the bench. They will do or say whatever they can because they can fuckin' taste the end of Roe, with the shitty states gearing up to end abortion rights. And then they can tell the Christian fucknuts that all their faith and prayers paid off because they get to control women's bodies.

Which is exactly what Kavanaugh tried to do in 1982.

Kavanaugh Is a Creep (And Ford Is Courageous)

When Judge Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearing began on September 4, I was totally skeeved out by the guy. It wasn't just his mushy, pale complexion, retrograde politics, and fake "aw-schucks" demeanor that made my skin crawl. His opening statement was just fuckin' weird. I tweeted, "I gotta tell ya: Between spurning the handshake of Fred Guttenberg and name-checking all the girls on his daughter's basketball team, Kavanaugh came across as one creepy bastard." I stand uncorrected on that. And I'm not even talking about his ultra-creepy attention to Bill Clinton's dick and semen and Monica Lewinsky's vagina back when he worked for Ken Starr.

So many of his first words to the committee were about how much he really, really loves and respects women that I thought it was just a way to mitigate his opposition to Roe v. Wade. I mean, c'mon. Between going on about how great his mom is to his coaching of his daughter's basketball team to "A majority of my 48 law clerks have been women," Kavanaugh may as well have just winked at Dianne Feinstein and said, "See? I have no problem with the ladies."

During the questioning, Kavanaugh revealed that there were already two other letters from groups of women talking about what a great guy he is. No, really. Here's Kavanaugh, responding to Sen. Orrin Hatch: "You've received a letter from 10 college friends of mine who were women, who were women athletes at Yale. Talked about how I treated them and women's sports with respect and as equal, even when I was in college. You have a letter from 84 women I worked with in the Bush administration who talked about my efforts to work with them in the intense environment of the West Wing, especially after September 11th."

Prior to the revelation that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford wrote a letter to Feinstein saying that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when she was 15 and he was 17, this could easily be seen as a kind of inoculation against all those liberals saying that he's going to send women to their deaths in back alleys (even if, you know, he really is going to send women to their deaths in back alleys).  I mean, his creepy-ass dissent in Garza v. Hargan, where he argued a 17 year-old undocumented girl could be blocked from getting an abortion, speaks volumes about what he really thinks about young women, more so than coaching them.

But now, with the addition of the already-prepped letter from 65 women who claim Kavanaugh was aces in high school, it's clear that Republicans knew something was up with this creepy motherfucker, and they were ready with the signatures to soften the blow. And, frankly, it ought to make us wonder what else Republicans are hiding in all those pages of documents they have refused to release or even allowed Democrats to see.

Any attack on Ford's credibility has to start with the simple question of what she has to gain from all of this. She initially wanted to remain anonymous, but then the information on Ford's letter was leaked by "multiple sources" to The Intercept, as well as to Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker. She's a professor at Palo Alto University, connected with Stanford, so she has a successful career. Hell, she's written on recovery and growth after the trauma of 9/11. Now, she's going to face an unending shitstorm from the right. If she hasn't already, she'll get death threats, her college will be inundated with fake complaints trying to get her fired, and she'll have her looks torn to shreds. Hell, the fuckin' brain trust of conservative nutzoids, including gender traitor Laura Ingraham, already tried to go after her but ended up attacking another Christine Ford.

Some of us also remember the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, which was about egregious sexual harassment. I wrote then in the college paper about it, saying that Thomas wasn't going to go to jail or even lose his job. He just won't get the promotion. "Only one of them is telling the truth," I wrote. "One of them is an insane liar, and I believe he now sits on the Supreme Court." And every fucking decision that Thomas has made about women's rights has proven how little he thinks of women's agency beyond being objects for male sexuality, fit for subservience. But Hill was dragged through the mud, degraded and insulted, and ultimately treated as if she were just making it all up for shits and giggles. Those hearings, led by Joe Biden (who later apologized for them), were a national embarrassment.

Twenty-seven years later, how difficult is it to take Ford at face value when she says that Kavanaugh held her down, tried to take off her clothes, and covered her mouth to silence her screams, that she thought she might be killed? Is it really that difficult to imagine that she didn't tell anyone about this deep trauma until years later? Is it really that difficult to believe that a preppy little douchebag senior from an elite all-boy's high school in the DC suburbs would get shit-faced at a preppy douchebag party in 1982 and think he could get away with raping the sophomore from the girl's school?

There's another letter, this one from over 200 women who went to Ford's high school around the same time period,  and it says, essentially, "Yeah, this is the way these little rapist shits acted."

Motherfuckers, I grew up in the 1980s. Half our pop culture, from Sixteen Candles to the book Less Than Zero to MTV's Spring Break, was about getting girls so drunk or high that they couldn't say, "No," when it wasn't about trying to tear their clothes off or peep at them in their showers or bedrooms or locker rooms. Most of us knew that it was all fantasy bullshit about a lack of consequences for assholes. But a fuck of a lot of young men thought it was a license to bust a nut whenever and wherever and however.

Yeah, I fuckin' think Kavanaugh did it. I don't give a shit if it happened in high school because I think he's lying about it now, which even some Republicans have said is enough to get him voted down. There should be an investigation. And there are going to be hearings next week. A smart administration would pull the nomination. Hell, when George W. Bush pulled Harriet Miers, he got Samuel Alito. But, you know, we're dealing with Trump here.

Kavanaugh's creepy need to demonstrate how much he cares about women was there all the time, showing us, by protesting so vociferously, who he really is. We should thank Ford for putting her trauma out there for the world to judge, which is another kind of trauma, and being brave enough to take on this cyclone of condemnation and rage.

I'm on the UnPresidented Podcast - Check It Out

Yesterday, I chatted for over an hour with Americablog's John Aravosis and Cliff Schecter of The Daily Beast on their UnPresidented Podcast. We got filthy about creepy Kavanaugh, creepy Manafort, and Trump's creepy denial of deaths in Puerto Rico. Lots of fun.

Check out the 20 minute excerpt below and you can subscribe to hear the full 79 minute version, along with other episodes where they talk to Bill Scher, Molly Jong-Fast, and more.

What Did That Dumb Orange Motherfucker Say Now? (Hurricane and 9/11 Edition)

Yesterday, at his press briefing on Hurricane Florence, which is likely to fuck up South Carolina, along with possibly North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and/or Maryland, Donald Trump, a man whose every word and hand gesture makes him seem like a carny barker trying to get people to see the "mermaid" that's just a dead monkey with a fish tail sewn on, shit all over Puerto Rico. Devastation from Hurricane Maria last year was exacerbated, according to the goddamn president of the United States, because those freakin' Ricans were completely incompetent and that the island was already fucked before Maria arrived.

He really said, "Puerto Rico got hit not with one hurricane but with two. And the problem with Puerto Rico is their electric grid and their electric generating plant was dead before the storms ever hit. It was in very bad shape. It was in bankruptcy. It had no money. It was largely — you know, it was largely closed. And when the storm hit, they had no electricity — essentially before the storm. And when the storm hit, that took it out entirely."

The plant wasn't dead. Like the grid itself, it was in shitty shape. It needed a ton of work and money. A wise leader might say that this is an opportunity to help Puerto Rico get an electric grid that is at least part of the 21st century. But not Trump. For him, it was a chance to pass off any blame for the fuckery that contributed to the deaths of nearly 3000 Americans. He blamed the mayor of San Juan, even though many deaths occurred in rural areas where she's not the fuckin' mayor. He blamed the fact that the place is an island, as if the Federal Emergency Management Agency shouldn't be prepared for island disasters, considering that one state and all U.S. territories are goddamned islands.  

But a man who, with a straight face, can say that the government didn't need to learn jackshit about any failures in Puerto Rico, who can actually verbalize that it was "an incredible, unsung success," is not a man who really gives a sad donkey fuck about anyone. He just keeps barreling ahead, presenting every massive cock-up as someone else's problem or some way that evil motherfuckers want to hold him back and keep him down. Just wait until he blames the trillion dollar deficit on Obamacare or something and not his goddamned tax cuts.

And there is always some stupid in whatever Trump says, some thing that everyone fuckin' knows already that he's gotta act like is the biggest discovery in the world, like, "Holy shit, you know a man can piss standing up?" In this case, it was hurricane research: "You know, we go out there; you have people that actually go fly through these storms. These are very brave people. But they fly through." Yeah, brain dead King Louie, we've watched the news. They've been doing it for like 75 years. He wouldn't care if you told him because he's got no damn shame.

The level of decorum he displayed yesterday as he walked on the tarmac near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, pumping his wee fists and doing that lip bite he thinks looks tough, but mostly looks like he's letting out a big, wet fart, was when he was heading to a 9/11 memorial ceremony, America's holiest of holy days. Even there, before and after his speech, he pointed at people in the crowd and gave his stubby thumbs up, like a douchebro at a frat mixer approving of who his bud is hitting on.  Yet he gave a speech that was so sleepy, it was as if John Kelly told him no Big Macs if he veered off text to talk about "fake news" or the electoral college totals. He did get to say, "radical Islamic terrorism," which probably gave a half-stiffie.

But that's nothing compared to the weirdo fuckin' video posted to his social media where Trump talked about 9/11 from "the really beautiful lawn of the Rose Garden," as he put it. He praised the "incredible" people on Flight 93 who prevented their plane from crashing into "the White House or the Capitol or wherever it was heading," which, fine, yeah, the target is up for debate, but it's just a strange, dismissive way to put it. He continued, "These were 3000 incredible people, and we never will let this happen again."

You just wanna shout at the your phone or your computer or tablet, "Motherfucker, you let it happen again. You let it happen in Puerto Rico. It. Fucking. Happened. Except this time you were the hijacker and the federal government was the plane."

I have lots of friends and some family in Florence's path. The hurricane is gonna be awful. I'm expecting the aftermath is going to be even worse because this fuckin' president doesn't know how to land, how to save the passengers in case of emergency. He only knows how to crash.

Barack Obama, Serena Williams, and the White People Unable to Handle Black Rage

Barack and Michelle Obama were always aware of how too many white people would portray any sign of negative feelings from them. For both, it was specifically gendered and specifically racialized. Michelle Obama talked about how she was called an "angry black woman" when she appeared on the national stage, as if a black woman who fights for anything must be diminished by making her into a caricature. Senator and then candidate and then President Obama constantly, and consciously, fought against the image of the angry black man, the allusion to someone who riots or can't be controlled, as well as to the black men who were lynched. Both images are rooted not just in stereotypes, but in a historical dehumanization of African Americans by whites. It didn't matter, though, whether they ever betrayed any hints of anger. These two kind, loving, and smart people were constantly portrayed as violent, terroristic, and savage.

This weekend, Barack Obama made his first public statements in a long time that directly criticized the presidency of Donald Trump. It was pointed, but pretty mild in comparison to what Trump and most Republicans say. But it was very much Obama-esque, with its constant pleas to common sense against the idiocies of others. "How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?" he asked the crowd in Illinois, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. And Obama is always ready to contextualize the problems of today within recent history. He said that Trump is "just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes."

From the reaction of the conservative media and from Trump's minions, you'd've thought that Obama called for the White House to burn. Columnist Michael Graham said Obama was speaking with "condescension, arrogance." Another was outraged that Obama called Republicans' ludicrous overreaction to the Benghazi attack a "conspiracy theory" in "an outrageous partisan speech." The Conservative Review (which I guess is a thing) declared, "Obama the demagogue is back." Republican politicians went after Obama, with Mike Pence giving that pinched face look and saying he found Obama's words "disappointing" because it breaks with some kind of unspoken precedent of ex-presidents staying away from criticizing current Oval Office occupants.

Does it even need saying that Donald Trump can take a sledgehammer to every precedent and every bit of decorum and the very people attacking Obama will praise Trump for his refusal to play by any rules?

Does it even need saying that Trump goes after Obama every single chance he gets and when Obama dares to say something in his own defense, it's just dismissed as sour grapes?

Does it even need saying that Trump gets away with his rule-breaking because he's white and Obama must stay within the lines at all time, that any deviation from a proscribed respectability makes him an object of derision and degradation by a large racist faction that still can't get over his election?

Which brings us to Serena Williams, perhaps the greatest athlete ever, and her outrage about her treatment at the U.S. Open women's final on Saturday. Many better writers than me have dealt with the sexism and the toxic combination of racism and sexism that allowed umpire Carlos Ramos to pile on penalties because Williams was angry at him for accusing her of cheating.

Whether or not you think Williams was justified in her confrontations with Ramos, if you know anything about tennis, you know that white male players routinely aggressively, angrily, and violently attack the umpires, their rackets, and anyone within range of their spit. Williams was being more respectful than any one of them, and I'm not even talking about regularly explosive icons like John McEnroe or Jimmy Connors. I'm talking about Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, all of whom have blown up without penalty. (And let's not even get into the fact that just about every coach makes hand gestures in the stands.)

The response on the right ranged from mocking Williams for arguing with the refs "only when she's losing" (which, again, is pretty much true for any athlete in any sport who ever argued with officials) to the blatantly racist work from Australian editorial cartoonist Mark Knight in the Herald Sun, which you will not be shocked to hear is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. That image, with its exaggerated features on Williams, including large lips and fuzzy hair that look straight out of a KKK flyer, with the drawing of a wispy, blonde Osaka in contrast, shows you how black rage is perceived by racists, as animalistic, childish, devolved.

What you see time and again is a white fear of black rage, a rage that is more often than not self-repressed and self-censored. And it doesn't matter how mild the rage - as in Obama's criticism of Trump - or how pronounced  - as with Williams or Black Lives Matters or football players taking a knee or Maxine Waters - it will be interpreted as a threat to a sanctimonious white hegemony. Those invested in that power structure will react as if being attacked personally.

That reaction, the immediate need to diminish, to derogate, to distort the words and actions of black people who show even a hint of rage demands an answer.  Barack Obama and Serena Williams answer it by keeping on, by historicizing their rage and by negating their detractors, time and again by the radical act of simply being present and black and unbowed.

At her press conference after the match, Williams said, "The fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person that has emotions, and that want to express themselves, and want to be a strong woman. They’re going to be allowed to do that because of today. Maybe it didn’t work out for me, but it’s going to work out for the next person." I can't imagine white people being in a position to have to say that, one day, the culture around them will allow them to fully express their feelings.

Hey, Look Over Here. I'm Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump White House, Too

I can remember the moment clearly: the young daughter of one of President Donald Trump's top aides brought a puppy to the office. Her father had asked Chief of Staff John Kelly if it was okay. Kelly, in that irascible way of his, said, "Who gives a fuck?" before he went back to prying the nuclear football out of the screaming president's hands.

Everyone of us in the West Wing knows that President Trump is afraid of dogs. "Dingoes are dogs," I once heard him say. "They eat babies. They eat souls." And then he leaned back in his chair and softly wept as he stared out at nothing, whispering, "So many babies. So many souls."

The president was wandering around the halls, having gotten loose from the Oval Office, when he saw the puppy. It was a pug, so it was truly adorable. He gestured at the girl, who smiled angelically at the man her father had told her deserves everyone's respect and loyalty. "I want to fuck it," he said. The Secret Service agents looked at each other and then went for the aide's daughter. "No, not the girl," he scoffed. "The dog."

Later, the aide told me, "I'm glad it was the dog. It would have been hard to let him take my daughter, but I would have because of the Supreme Court." I nodded. We all nodded because we all would have done the same.

We are the Resistance inside the Trump White House. We are not crazy liberals like Nancy Pelosi. No, we are conservatives who believe in conservative things like lower taxes for the poor rich people and regulation cutting for our struggling trillion-dollar corporations and a bigger military that's bigger just so we can say, "See? Look how big it is" and our voters will lap it up. We like when President Trump agrees to cut taxes and the rest, but we sure don't like it when he's wacky-crazy.

Like the dog. See, the aide handed the puppy over to Trump, who sniffed it and then quickly ambled back to the Oval Office. I got Secretary of Defense Mattis on the phone and said, "We have a situation. A fucking situation." Mattis happened to be in the building, and he rushed over. We burst into the Oval Office to see the president with his pants down, about to start having sex with the dog.

Mattis looked at me and said, "Quick, on Ivanka's desk. There's a stuffed animal. It looks like a dog. Get it."

"Ivanka has a desk?" I asked.

"Yes. Get the doll!"

I ran to the anteroom, and there was a small, tan unicorn on a white desk next to a pile of unsold, fake fashionable clothes. I ripped off the doll's horn, ran back, and tossed it to Mattis, who yelled, "Wait, Mr. President!" Trump turned, the pug in one hand, his penis in the other. "You can't fuck that puppy."

Trump gave that look that said he didn't believe you, you know, where he pulls back his head and it looks like he face goes right into his neck. "I'm the president of the United States. That was some election night, wasn't it? You see that map? So I can fuck any puppy I want."

Mattis said, "You can't fuck it because...it needs to be lubed up first or it'll hurt."

The president paused. He contemplated the situation. Then he said, "You're right. Good man. This guy. Always looking out for me." He handed the puppy over to Mattis. "Lube up the dog." Mattis turned his back, put the puppy in his jacket, pumped out some hand cream that was on the president's desk, rubbed it on the doll, and handed it to the anxious president.

Trump started slamming the dog against his semi-erect penis over and over, crying out, "Yeah, yeah, that's what you get for eating souls!" If it had been the real puppy, the cries would have been horrible, the bone breaking a nightmare. Mattis pushed me out of the room, telling me to give the pug back to the little girl and "get them both out of this Hell House." As the door shut, I could hear the President of the United States grunt in orgasm before he fell over onto the floor. Mike Pence was rushing over to lick the floor clean, as he does.

We in the Resistance know that Donald Trump needs to be institutionalized and that Russia owns him and his family like a hog farmer owns a pen of pigs. Sure, it'd be easy to just go to the press, admit that I'm someone really high up in the administration, and reveal all the awful things I see on an hourly basis, like how racist he is, how he'll shit on his desk and announce, "Look, I made another Ben Carson" after which he tosses the shit at Sarah Sanders and laughs as she runs out of the room, crying.

But I'm not going to do that because we are this close to taking away abortion rights from women and who knows? Maybe we'll teach those queers they don't have a right to get married. Constantly being on the verge of Armageddon is a small price to pay.  We're good as long as we can steer this hulking, mentally-deficient manchild to keep signing the documents we put in front of him. He's happy just to show off that he can write his name.

Besides, by writing this, I'm getting you all to wonder who I am rather than worry about Brett Kavanaugh, who is going to make liberals so sad, or those kids we're never going to reunite with their parents. And that's a good day's work.

The Kavanaugh Battle Was Over Before It Ever Got Started, So We Have to Think Ahead

It was heartening as hell to see Democrats put up a fight this morning over the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, as average a nutzoid conservative as you're going to find. Seriously, he is no more fucking grotesque and retrograde than Samuel Alito or Neil Gorsuch.  But, obviously, there are some extrinsic concerns here that made the Democratic minority on the Senate Judiciary Committee hulk out for a while.

For instance, the committee was not allowed to see any documents for the period of time when Kavanaugh was George W. Bush's White House Staff Secretary, which is a kind of counsel, from 2003-2006. He was only supposed to be there for a year but his nomination to the DC Circuit Court in 2004 stalled because, well, shit, he didn't really have the fucking qualifications to be a circuit court judge. In 2006, it finally got rammed through, and that was his reward for having been a savage dogfucker working for Kenneth Starr's pursuit of Bill Clinton's penis. Kavanaugh was responsible for getting lots of asshole judges through for Bush during those three years, so, you know, those records might be relevant to his, lemme see, judgment.

And then there's the minor issue of who nominated Kavanaugh, which would be Donald Trump, a man whose presidency is sitting there while a dump truck of shit slowly tilts up and we're all just waiting until the whole load comes pouring out on it. Democrats and anyone with a goddamn brain are thinking that maybe a motherfucker who is accused of fucking mothers shouldn't get to pick a judge who might sit in, lemme see, judgment over him.

So, yeah, way to go, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. The base needs to see that kind of fight. Hell, if nothing else, the Democratic side looks a bit more like America, with women and people of color mixing it up alongside the white dudes. Over on the GOP side, it's all white guys (well, Ted Cruz is half-Cuban, but fuck that guy).

But it was all for nothing, really. The corpse of Chuck Grassley stuck to his guns and refused any motions to even have a vote that would fail on delaying the hearing. Grassley was his usual dickish self, commenting about every Democratic opening statement like he was on the couch and bellowing at Hannity on his TV. And Republicans like Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake, who had expressed dismay about shit that Trump had done even recently, like tweeting out an attack on the Department of Justice for indicting two GOP members of Congress, raised their haunches so that Trump would have easy access to fucking their asses. It is fait a-motherfuckin'-ccompli on Kavanaugh (barring some major revelation or fuck-up in the next couple of days).

It goes without saying that, in this fight and the Gorsuch fight, Democrats were playing catch-up for the mistakes they made in not blowing up the Senate over the Republicans' refusal to even consider the nomination by Barack Obama of Merrick Garland in 2016. By putting up only a relatively minor fuss with the hope that Hillary Clinton would be elected and thus would put more liberals on the court, Democrats gambled and lost hugely. Of course, they were also hoping that, post-election, Republicans would be honorable in their actions, and that fuckin' unicorn was murdered sometime around 2009, if not before.

Republicans were never going to be honorable. They were going to fuck shit up and then pretend that Democrats did it first, always going back to the Robert Bork hearings and vote in 1987, always forgetting that Bork had six Republicans vote against his nomination (and that Democrats were in control of the Senate). When Harriet Miers had to withdraw her nomination in 2005, Republicans were in the majority in the Senate. So where is the blame there?

Besides, Republicans kept talking about the sanctity of the process when every fucking one of those pricks blocked Garland's nomination, even when they admitted he was totally qualified. The worst was querulous worm Lindsey Graham, who had the audacity to say to Democrats, "You had a chance and you lost. If you want to pick judges from your way of thinking you better win an election." This bitch-faced cockscab had no problem preventing President Obama from appointing judges. Jesus, what life must be like for these jackoffs with their heads pressed so hard on Mitch McConnell's anus that they can't breathe.

So what are Democrats to do? We could fight now, however useless the battle. Hell, push Republicans to say stupid shit, like Sasse whining that pro-choice protesters are "hysterical," and use it in ads. Get Kavanaugh on record saying that he won't recuse himself from cases that involve Trump personally. One senator could make a big show, like refuse to stop talking until he or she is dragged out by security. Or all of them could just refuse to participate. Walk the fuck out and flip off the majority. Fuck, that's way more interesting than watching Republicans circle jerk around Kavanaugh as they drool over a future where women die from unsafe, illegal abortions and environmental regulations are ground into asbestos dust.

Or you could think ahead. And that's where you gotta get fucking badass. What if Democrats issued a statement saying that, if they get a majority or one or both chambers of Congress, they will launch an investigation of the records that were kept from them? That they will crawl into the asses of every judge appointed by Trump and, if they find any reason to, have them charged with contempt or perjury for the answers given under oath? For instance, you know, like Kavanaugh seems to have done in 2006. And that if they get enough Democrats elected, they will impeach and remove from the bench any Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump because Republicans have so tainted the process?

Can they do all that? Who the fuck cares? You think Republicans wonder if they can get away with shit before they do it? They fuckin' do it and let the chips fall where they may. If they wreck something on the way, then they say it deserved wrecking.

Playing nice has lost us the Supreme Court. You wanna get it back? Stop playing and start behaving like there are lives at stake.

A Poem for the Laborers

These Hands, These Roots
By John Olivares Espinoza

Go on, tell me
My hands look like yours,
Nail clipped, filed, buffed, shined.
They weren’t always so.
My hands were

Forged from
Gardening, working so deep
In the soil, they could have been roots.
Fingers splintered by wooden
Rakes and shovels.

Some gardener—
Whose face and name get lost
Like loose coins in my memory’s
backseat—told me women
Look at men’s hands

For dark half-circles
Between their nails, which give away
Your blue-collar status like a pair of torn jeans.
This is no matter how handsome your face.
I knew I had hope.

But what about
Lupe, whose mower chopped
His fingertips instead of blades of grass,
Who then preserved them in an ice chest
Next to some plums?

So I scrub, clip,
And lotion my hands with aloe,
Fearing bachelorhood and Internet dating.
I take pride in my hands now,
But what about when

The skin gathers at the knuckle,
And arthritis tangles my fingers for
Cracking my knuckles since I was ten?
But until then, hold my hand
Tightly with yours

As my other hand
Wipes the sweat from my brow
Under the perspiration of work and love
And the fact I know no other way
To wrestle out a life for us.