A Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Part 1: Mask Madness)

The first time I saw the irrationality of large groups of adults happened when I was an adolescent in Lafayette, Louisiana. My mom took me to a parish council meeting (in case you don't know, parishes are counties but they're called "parishes" in Louisiana because Catholicism) for a debate over allowing fluoridation of the water in the community. I had asked to go because I've always been perverse that way. To my family, it seemed like the easiest call: Of course. We had moved from a town in Florida where the water was fluoridated and we were all fine.

I wasn't really surprised at how many people opposed it. However, I remember being shocked (and, lemme be honest here, amused - I was around 12) by the passionate way these putative grown-ups, some of whom were parents of friends of mine, spouted insane bullshit. It wasn't just that they were ignorant. They were proudly ignorant, wanting to share that ignorance with the whole goddamn city. Even in the dark ages of pre-internet time, they had done their own "research" and brandished supposed studies that showed how fluoride caused all kinds of maladies, from mental illness to bone destruction. It was weird and eye-opening. I mean, none of us who drank fluoridated water had grown a third arm or shit out teeth or gone dumb. Besides, the garbage put into the air by the oil industry and the chemical plants was gonna get us if the lead paint and asbestos in our schools didn't first. That didn't matter. 

What mattered was some egghead doctors thought they knew better about how to take care of children's teeth than the gathered moms and dads and that shit just wouldn't fly. And to this day, there is no fluoride in the water in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, and the state's overall dental health is consistently among the worst in the country. 

Ignorance and cowardice won because, well, it usually does. Right now, for instance, the Covid vaccination rate in Lafayette Parish is around 39%, and it's not close to the lowest in the state. And its rates of infection, hospitalization, and death are at or near the highest since the start of the pandemic, which proves that the fucking worst people can fuck things up even in a state with a Democratic governor who has issued a mask mandate that most everyone is just ignoring because all the right-wingers are ear- and eye-fucking them with waves of disinformation and lies that they gobble up like kibble from Jesus's asshole.

That scene of brazen, public, proud ignorance I witnessed as a kid is playing out every damn day. 

In Michigan, Kalamazoo County's Health Department held a meeting on mask mandates where the people said shit like, "Don’t tell me how to raise my family" and "We as parents should decide what that risk is going to be." At a Kent County meeting, you could hear some fucknut say, creepily, "We are responsible for our biological property, which is our children" while people fucking applauded those sentiments. Not to get all into moron logic, but the second your kids step outside your house, they gotta play by the rules or go the fuck home to their biological owners. (Yeah, that's genuinely creepy. Can we get child protective services over to that house?)

Up the road a little ways in Ottawa County, parents dragged kids to chant, sing, and pray outside a Board of Commissioners meeting. One man-shaped butt plug shouted at the commissioners, "There's hell coming and I'm not doing it to threaten anybody but there's a lot of good guys out there ready to do bad things soon. Watch what's coming." These little bitches do this all the time: they aren't threatening anyone, but here's a threat. Fuck you, you fake warrior. Make a goddamn threat and take the consequences or sit the fuck down. 

In Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont had to stop a back-to-school roundtable at an actual high school because anti-mask dickmites showed up to yell at him and other officials. They were called "criminals" and one asshole called out, "When did we start living in Nazi Germany, Ned?" The answer, of course, is when a bunch of unelected thugs started refusing to follow legitimate laws and used force to shut down dissent with their extremist beliefs. But that's a bit too nuanced for the Masks = Holocaust crowd.

I just wanna say to all of 'em, "Motherfuckers, we're the ones who should be pissed off. We got vaccinated. We did what was good for the nation, what was good for everyone. We thought we were gonna be in unmasked bliss and getting back to normal, but you ignorant fucks blew it for everyone. Eat my whole ass." But that won't matter to someone who thinks they are so right and righteous in their stupidity that they need to show everyone, like a proud toddler with an erection.

And let's not even begin to get into the basic fuckery behind Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's executive order suspending laws so that no government nor any body that receives funds from the state can issue a vaccine mandate. Abbott, who has decided to try to out-Trump Trump on deranged and harmful acts, is sucking so hard at the nutzoid right teat that he'll go cross-eyed from the effort. There should be a national vaccine mandate and anyone who doesn't like it can go live on Covid island where they can pass around variants until they run out of Greek letters or people.

Or Florida. Jesus fuck, Florida.

The GOP has put this nation on a ledge and threatened to push it off. And every day, they keep chipping more and more of that ledge away through their actions and inaction. For those who know that they're spreading utter bullshit, it's brutal and cruel. For those who are true believers, it's dumbfounding. We're approaching a convulsion point where the only way some will know how to react is through violence. And that still won't be enough for the conservative jackals feeding on our anxiety and rage and conflict.

We've been close to madness in modern times before as a nation, but each time, we seem to pull back just before we plunge over that edge. I'm not so sure we can this time.

(In Part 2: The Afghanistan withdrawal is breaking the brains of the warmongers.)

Note to Anti-Maskers: You're Not Revolutionaries. You're Just Assholes.

At one point in the chaotic Louisiana Board of Secondary and Elementary Education meeting in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, a local Christian extremist pastor, Tony Spell, announced as the elected officials tried to start things, "Let’s welcome the board to our meeting today." He was standing on a chair, surrounded by a couple of hundred people there to protest the school mask mandate issued by Governor John Bel Edwards. Despite the requirement, almost none of the gathered flesh lumps wore masks in the tight space. 

Spell, his hair greased back, declared, "King Edwards is the biggest lawbreaker in the state history," an objectively false statement since, you know, the fucking state was pretty much founded by pirates. Hell, even if Edwards were breaking the law, he wouldn't be the biggest lawbreaker who was governor. The ghosts of Huey Long and Edwin Edwards (no relation to John Bel) must have been thinking, "What the fuck? Forget about us already?"

But facts were hard to come by in the meeting room, as they are in all these school board and other meetings where whiny assholes wail about their children's loss of freedom and order is barely or not maintained and no one has the fucking guts to say to the cops there, "Arrest these dumb pricks. They're too stupid to walk and breathe at the same time."

After watching and reading about a bunch of the anti-mask uproars, two things are perfectly clear:

1. You don't fucking know how to raise your kids better just because you pooped them out or spewed some jizz into a woman who pooped out your kids.

2. These motherfuckers really do think they're revolutionaries.

Look again at what Skeevy Spell said: "Let's welcome the board to our meeting today." Before that, Spell essentially declared himself as the leader of the whole goddamn thing, saying, with no sense of irony, "We're going to run this meeting by Robert's Rules of Order" and then started calling witnesses. In other words, the group of deranged virus-lovers believed they had taken over the state school board. While the police remained idle, the board members did vote to shitcan the whole meeting.

This kind of scene from the depths of MAGA madness is playing out all over the country. In the Philly suburb of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, the North Penn School Board was deciding on whether or not to have a mask mandate for students, and its meeting last Thursday devolved into a shouting match where one fucking moronic woman actually brought up, "The Nuremburg Code of 1947, U.S. federal law, prohibits forcing or coercing anyone, under any circumstances, to participate in a medical experiment. And the code states: 'the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.' In lieu of all of this information, my kids will not be adhering to the mask mandate — which by the way is not a law." The Nuremberg thing is bullshit that's been around for months in the Facebook shit pages of the nutzoid right because it's one of those things that idiots say to sound smart. Of course, the meeting had to be shut down because of the barbaric yowls of the anti-maskers, but the school board did pass the mandate.

And that's because something else is true: the people at these meetings don't represent how actually reasonable most people are. Polls show that over two-thirds of the public support mask mandates in schools. But you know who don't go to meetings where they know that a bunch of screaming fucknuts aren't going to be wearing masks? The people who support mask mandates.

None of these shit-smeared yahoos is the revolutionary they think they are. At best, they're the loudest farting assholes in the right-wing flatulence chorus. You think that's too harsh? Check out these motherfuckers from a school board meeting in Virginia Beach, Virginia. This is how they reacted to speakers who favored masks:

"A woman snorted with laughter as a teen said she was in favor of masks because she worried about people like her dad, who has one lung.

"A man rolled his eyes at an 11-year-old who asked for unity in the face of the virus, suggesting she was just manifesting her mother’s fear: 'Good job, mom,' he said with a snicker.

"The crowd laughed at a board member while she talked about comforting children who have lost a parent to COVID-19."

The board voted in favor of the mask mandate, so suck on that, you cruel jizz stains.

I have long, long ago given up having any sympathy for the belligerently unmasked and/or unvaccinated. I have given up feeling bad when someone who said Covid is a hoax or vaccines are mind control ends up dying from the virus. As I've said, I want them to be vaccinated. I want them to save their own lives. But, you know, you fucked around and you found out. Just stop taking up ICU beds from people who gave a shit or the kids you gave Covid to.

But the anti-mask warriors behave as if the school board meetings are the U.S. Capitol and they all have painted faces and are wearing horns, ready to overthrow the government. It's worse than the Tea Party bullshit back in 2010 because, as stupid as that was, at least it was mostly directed at full-time members of Congress. This shit is just neighbors attacking neighbors. It's less 1776 and more Lord of the Flies.

When, After All, It Was You and Me: Spreading Blame Where It Belongs for the War in Afghanistan

Those of us who opposed invading Afghanistan in 2001 were few, with overwhelming public support for bombing the shit out of the Taliban for harboring 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and possibly supporting al-Qaeda (they really don't have the same goals). Or that's what we were told. When I said that I opposed the war two decades ago, I was looked at like a goddamn traitor. I've said multiple times that the 9/11 attacks were crimes, not acts of war. What's the difference? Scores of soldiers from the Japanese military were involved in attacking Pearl Harbor. 19 deranged fundamentalist dickholes, exploited by cave-dwelling zealots who sure as fuck weren't doing a suicide mission themselves, were directly involved in taking down the Twin Towers, hitting the Pentagon, and losing a fight over Pennsylvania. A couple of decent metal detectors and an extra frisk or two would have ended the whole thing. As I've said often, 9/11 was a James Bond villain plot where James Bond didn't defuse the bomb in time. 

I remember clearly (and wrote about this in 2004) when then-comedian and political writer Al Franken interviewed Boston Globe columnist James Carroll on his Air America show (yeah, that was a lifetime ago). Carroll shocked Franken by stating that he thought the invasion of Afghanistan had been a huge fuckup, just like the invasion of Iraq. Franken said the thing that most on the left still say (and, to be honest, I've said once or twice): we had the Taliban on the run and the Iraq War was a massive distraction from accomplishing the mission in Afghanistan. Carroll stood firm that it was all a complete clusterfuck we had no business fighting. Franken left it at a kind of agree-to-disagree stage because Carroll was right, as was Rep. Barbara Lee, the sole vote in Congress against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the blank check given to President Bush (and all presidents after) to wage war, as were the tiny percentage of us who opposed the war on the grounds that it's a fucking war against a nation that didn't, as a nation, attack us, that, at worst, was harboring a criminal that it was willing to hand over to a neutral country. (No, really.)

There are mountains of blame to go around for the failure of the United States to stand an army and a stable government in a place that, in its best times, had a couple of cities that were islands of progress amid a rocky land of ignorance and poverty, in a nation where opium and heroin make up a big share of the GDP (at least 10%), which the Taliban has been controlling. And while we could date the blame back to the fucking British attempting to make it another goddamn colony or perhaps blame the United States for arming the mujahideen against the Soviet Union for stupid Cold War reasons (or, you know, the USSR for backing the assassination of the Afghan president and a coup in 1978), so much of blame for the war started in 2001 clearly and obviously rests with the vile George W. Bush and his cabal of neocons with imperial hard-ons who wanted to fuck countries into freedom without their consent. 

It's tempting to leave it there. But I can't because that lets others off the hook. And I'm not talking about Obama and Trump. No, I'm talking about the bloodthirsty American public who, for years after the attacks of September 11, wanted to keep murdering people overseas in order to satiate an impossible desire for vengeance. And I get it, I get it. I can remember right after the attack thinking, "Someone was really fucking dumb for deciding to poke the fucking bear." I can remember feeling the desire to fucking waste some motherfuckers in the name of the dead. Fuck, I had family that barely got away from the collapse of the towers. That's only human to wanna fuck shit up. What's also human is to take a moment and think, "Okay, yeah, lizard brain can take over but what if it didn't?"

Almost everyone let their lizard brain run rampant. Polls from September 2001 and for nearly a year after showed 85-94% support for going to war in Afghanistan. One November 2001 poll asked, "How long would you be willing to use combat forces to deal with the problem of terrorism -- less than one year, one to two years, three to five years, or more than five years if it takes that long?" 63% said more than five years, with 10% saying up to 5 years. The support for extended war in Afghanistan crossed party lines, ideological lines, generational lines, all the fucking lines. 

You wanted war. You already hated the Taliban for how they were making life a living hell for women because of their bullshit adherence to bullshit Sharia law. You wanted al-Qaeda destroyed because you were told, over and over, that 9/11 changed everything. You wanted blood. And you can sit there and try to say you didn't want this, but, really, c'mon, the best you can do is that sometime five or seven years after the war's start, you finally started to think, "Whoa, this is way fucked up." 

Or maybe it was even longer. In June 2009, a Pew Research poll showed that 57% of Americans, including 45% of Democrats, still thought that we should stay in Afghanistan. 76% said that it would be a "major threat" to the U.S. if the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan. By September 2009, the support for the war would finally drop to 50% and it continued downward. The surge in troops that President Obama did (against then Vice President Joe Biden's advice), with the accompanying rise in American casualties in the war, seemed to turn the tide, with support, already dropping, bottoming out for Democrats. 

Clearly, if we're judging things by public support, we should have gotten the fuck out of Afghanistan in 2009 and not stayed for another dozen years before facing the inevitable. But the American public bears the burden of fighting this war that was misguided from the start. Americans needed pounds of flesh, needed to get repaid for the murder of Americans with multiple degrees of interest on that debt. 

I wish we had been wrong, those of us who opposed the war. I wish we had set up a glorious oasis of democracy and freedom, with schools, with alternate crops for the poppy farmers, with modernization of the nation. Yeah, that's my Western mindset at work, sure, but when it comes to the horror that Afghan women in particular are facing, well, fuck it. 

This is a tragedy. It was never not going to be a tragedy. Yes, President Biden was brave to decide this was a mistake and it was time to stop making it, even if the speed at which Afghanistan fell was breathtaking (and truly telling). We should be letting in refugees by the tens of thousands, at least those Afghans who helped our troops during this disaster, if not thousands upon thousands more. We couldn't shoot our way to peace. We poured in money and killed so many people and had so many killed. And still we promised more than we could ever deliver. Let's at least own our role in ruining their lives.

(Note: Of course, the real villains here are the Taliban. Fuck those delusional incel motherfuckers.)

(Note: If you want to know what the Afghans were thinking in the first decade of the war, check out this report.)

Now Abbott, DeSantis, and Other COVID Accomplice Governors Need to Resign

At some point, if vaccination rates climb in Texas and Florida and other states where the Delta variant of COVID-19 has been allowed to freely lung-fuck the residents, I'd almost expect the governors of those states who refused to do jackshit to mitigate the virus to say, "See? It took a few thousand more deaths, but now people are making the personal choice to get vaccinated. Government didn't force them to. Reverse psychology in action."

Of course, they aren't that crafty. What we have are ideological pig fuckers who are getting high on the power they have over the lives and deaths of the people in their states. They see defiance of rational actions to slow the spread of the virus as some kind of mighty stand for freedom and rights and the economy when, really, they're just accomplices to the murder and maiming that Covid is doing. 

Over in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis is the discharge from that infected penis of a state, the hospitals in the central part have been inundated with patients at record levels as cases surge to their highest levels in the pandemic. In St. Petersburg, emergency rooms are so full that patients have to wait for at least an hour in an ambulance before being allowed in for, you know, their emergency. Nearly 70% of Florida hospitals will experience a shortage of staff in the next seven days. In Brevard County, where 313 patients are hospitalized with Covid, only 3 are vaccinated. That's over 99% of patients unvaccinated. The Florida Department of Health and Human Services is reported to have requested hundreds of ventilators from the federal government, and it seems like they didn't tell DeSantis about it. Meanwhile, DeSantis and the savages in the Florida GOP are against vaccine mandates and masking requirements, as well as vaccine passports, essentially inviting Covid to speed around the state and fuck up everyone. DeSantis is a sentient hemorrhoid that was cut off Donald Trump's asshole, and fortunately, mayors and county school board superintendents are telling the governor to go fuck himself, even with the threat of legal action hanging over them.

In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott is the dry cow dung on the bottom of a cheap pair of boots, the ICUs are filling up to capacity with Covid patients. Austin activated its emergency alert system to warn people about the worsening situation, and Houston hospitals are putting up tents to deal with the extra patients. While going to fucking war over mask mandates, Abbott has asked hospitals to postpone elective surgeries to make more room even more sick and dying. At this point, it's like Abbott's tiny, fucked-up brain has been taken over by Covid and it's forcing him to not only allow Covid to spread, but to make it comfortable while it kills Texans. Fortunately, like in Florida, leaders in different localities have told Abbott he can eat their whole asses when it comes to school mask mandates. One judge in Dallas said, "The citizens of Dallas County have and will continue to be damaged and injured by Governor Abbott’s conduct." Of course, Abbott has said he would fight that decision and one in San Antonio because, goddamnit, he has to strangle more children to calm the Covid brain worms.

Where the fuck else do you want to go? Down to Mississippi, where Gov. Tate Reeves, who really looks like he's got a woman pit in his basement, has also shit all over mask mandates and the CDC, even as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths blow up all over the state. By the way, less than 35% of Mississippians are fully vaccinated. Up to Missouri, where Gov. Dipshit Magoo said he thought it "undermined" confidence in the vaccine to ask the vaccinated to mask up, but when you have a toxic soup of disease and assholes in your state, where only 41% are fully vaccinated, then it's pretty fucking hard to trust people to wear masks voluntarily. And, yeah, the hospitals are overwhelmed, too. 

Republicans (along with most Democrats) were screaming for the head of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for sexual harassment, and, thankfully, he resigned yesterday. It was the right and decent thing to do because he had demonstrated that he no longer could be trusted to run the state (and, as an employee of the state of New York, I'll just say, "Fuck, yeah" to his departure). 

So what about DeSantis, Abbott, Reeves, and Parsons (the aforementioned "Dipshit Magoo")? They are essentially accomplices to the spread of Covid, helping it thrive and continue, allowing it to take down more children, providing it with incubators for more variants. They are feeding the people of their states to a dragon that promised them electoral gold in exchange for sacrifices. There should be an outcry for them to resign in disgrace because while Covid giddily run rampant through their populations, what the fuck have they been working on? Fucking anti-critical race theory laws? Restricting voting rights? That's not fiddling while Rome burns. That's jacking off on the ashes of the dead.

Like Cuomo but different in kind, their behavior has demonstrated they are unfit to lead their states. Get the fuck out of the way and let someone who gives a damn try to fix things. Jesus, at least Gov. Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas admits he fucked up on mask mandates. The rest of them are shamelessly doubling down. Of course, they're Republicans, so shame isn't really in their vocabulary or the menu of emotions they feel. 

(Note: The outlier here is Louisiana, where the Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, has reinstated a mask mandate in response to the shocking surge of cases. We'll see what the people do there. I don't have much faith in my home state.)

Maybe We're Just Sick of Ignorance and This Time We Can Do Something About It

The easiest way to describe the genuine anger at the anti-vax idiots is that we're fucking sick of their shit. We're tired of having the direction of our lives decided by the most credulous and easily manipulated motherfuckers in the population. We've reached the end of our proverbial ropes and, goddamnit, we're done buying longer ropes.

You saw that today when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who successfully guided his state through the worst shit in the first part of the pandemic, was fucking done with the anti-vax protesters at a news conference he was having. "Because of what you are saying and standing for people are losing their life... and you have to know that," he told the hooting morons, calling them "knuckleheads," a favorite term of his. 

I could go back a long fucking time in detailing all the shit we've been forced to eat, but let's just concentrate on the last few years. So much of it was assholishness and savagery that we had no fucking say in and no control over. We've had to sit there while knuckle-dragging, Fox-lobotomized cock dribbles cheered for all the brute bullshit that Donald Trump and the various infected pustules in his administration could do, like banning people from mostly Muslim-majority countries for no rational reason and separating migrant children from their families for the specific purpose of being dicks to them. We could do nothing when the perverse Republicans in the Senate not only prevented Barack Obama from making a Supreme Court pick nearly a year before the next president would be inaugurated, but then decided it was cool to rush through a nominee after people had already started voting for the 2020 election, thus allowing a SCOTUS face-fucking on issues like abortion and voting rights all but inevitable. We watched in horror as the federal government was used as a weapon against Black Lives Matter protesters and as open, enthusiastic racists were welcomed, even honored, by the GOP, who couldn't be bothered to do a goddamn thing about the ongoing execution by cop of black people. We couldn't do a fucking thing as Trump pranced around the globe, dicking over the United States's longtime alliances, wiping his ass with the Paris Agreement on climate change, and pissing on the Iran nuclear deal. And speaking of climate change, we've had to watch dumbfounded for years as Trump reversed even the small bit of progress that the country was making, essentially declaring that he'll be dead, so fuck it, burn all the fossil fuels you can, fuckers, because wind turbines are ugly and kill birds. And that's not even getting into the scandal upon scandal upon scandal, all happening while the sinister cuntmites in the GOP grinned, their teeth slicked with MAGA jizz, discovered that they fucking loved being openly evil, and enabled, supported, aided, abetted, and cheered the filthiest urges of this filthiest of presidents and his mongrel circle, making celebrities out of the skeeviest, stupidest of their pitiful lot. 

And then we were helpless for the first year of the Covid pandemic, aghast as we saw the White House simply refuse to do basic things to help not just the sick, but the front line workers who were working themselves sometimes to death trying to keep the rest of us alive. We saw organized groups threaten to fucking murder leaders over efforts by state governments to mitigate the spread of the virus. And we saw Trump and the GOP act as if this was all just the price to pay for some debased notion of freedom, one that was contorted around allowing a certain number of people to die rather than raise taxes on the wealthy in order to prevent economic collapse.

And, through it all, we had to watch the idiot hordes of MAGA cretins whoop it up, acting like every fucking day was asshole Christmas, electing rank boobs to Congress just because they promised to be Trump's ass remoras while doing nothing except piss off the liberals. The last fucking straw was the vaccine. That was it. That was the breaking point. When these yahoos who aren't fit to live in sewage ditches refused to get vaccinated from the very vaccine that their great and powerful leader bragged about helping create, when they decided that that vaccine was a plot to control their brains or poison them, and when their monstrously dumb decision allowed the virus to regroup and fill the hospitals with patients again in places where their idiocy ran amok, when the yahoos and their skeevy leaders mock the idea that masks might be needed again because of the actions of the very yahoos who need to masks, well, that fucking does it. E-fucking-nough.

So, yeah, we have some fucking control, some power here, and we're gonna use it. Companies are saying, "Get fucking vaccinated or fuck off." Cities and schools and other places are saying, "Get fucking vaccinated or stay in your homes, you plague rats." And while some states have banned mandates for localities and schools, many of those are based on the emergency authorization and would expire once the Covid vaccine receives full FDA approval, which is expected in the next couple of weeks. 

When I read shit like "Stop Harassing the Unvaccinated" by Washington Post columnist and torture apologist Marc Thiessen, I just wanna say, "Bitch, we've been polite up until now." Shit, most polls show that at least 60% of Americans support vaccine mandates. We haven't even started harassing them.

We're done. We've eaten enough shit force-fed us from the right-wing moron brigade. Finally, there's something where we have some control, where we don't have to beg GOP senators for crumbs or where we don't have to try to convince Joe fucking Manchin or Kyrsten goddamn Sinema to end the filibuster rule. Those of us in places where hospitalization isn't skyrocketing because of the rate of vaccinations want to keep it that way. 

And we're saying, "Fuck you" to the unvaccinated because, at last, we can and because we're tired of bearing the consequences for your irrationality and ignorance.

(Note: This shouldn't need to be said, but, obviously, if you can't get vaccinated because of some medical condition, you're not included. Also, if you're in an underserved area, that's a different case.  And kids. But if you're just being stubborn, selfish, and/or stupid, yeah, fuck you.)

The Trumpist Right Wants to Emasculate Any Male Who Has Emotions About January 6

The first hearing of the House Select Committee on the January 6 terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol ran the way every hearing on a national tragedy should run. It was emotional, informative, and unifying (yes, unifying - I'll get to that at the end). By refusing to allow the participation of Rep. Jim Jordan, who is one of the most ardent carriers of every drop of water Donald Trump dribbles and someone who looks like he smells like sweaty, unwashed polyester, Nancy Pelosi assured the committee that it wouldn't be interrupted by constant bullshit objections and constant questions about Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Instead, we got real.

What we were able to hear was the raw hurt and mostly muted rage of the four police officers who were testifying. Capitol police officers Aquilino Gonell and Harry Dunn and DC Metro officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges offered vivid details of the violence when the mob of fucknuts, tripping balls on Trumpism, rampaged into the Capitol. The four men were compassionate to their fellow officers and righteously pissed off at the rioters and their enablers and supporters in the media and in the federal government. They all had the greatest contempt for the revisionists and denialists in Congress, whose lives the men defended, and elsewhere for saying that January 6 wasn't an insurrection, that the rally before the attack was a "love fest," as Fucko the Former President called it. And they all got choked up talking about their near-murders, the worry of their families, and the utter betrayal of any sense of nation by the rampaging fucknuts. 

So, of course, right-wing dickscabs had to immediately attack them for either being pussies, being mentally ill, or just pretending. Some of the dickscabs I'm gonna mention here might make you say, "Who the fuck cares?" but the point is that a shit-ton of people do care what these dickscabs say. So while we may look at, for example, disgraced former NYPD commissioner and convicted felon Bernard Kerik and think, "Fuck that guy," the asshole's treated like a hero in conservative corners.

Speaking of that asshole, he tweeted an image Gonell crying and wrote, "Having commanded the NYPD on 9/11 and been stabbed and shot at; and witnessed numerous colleagues shot and killed in the 80s - 90s in the line of duty, I am shocked at the cowardice. They should be fired - not fit for duty." It's pure emasculation and it's pure backwards ass delusion, hearkening back to a time when the (almost entirely male) police were supposed to just suck up the traumas of their work and take it out on the next perp or their wives or the bottle, abuse being better than dealing with their shit.

Also going straight for the emasculation angle is another conservative criminal and vile propagandist, Dinesh D'Souza, whose sole purpose seems to be trying to out-whore every other nutzoid on the right for that filthy rube lucre, tweeted, "If the #CapitolPolice were this discombulated [his misspelling] by a boisterous walk-through—much tamer than an Antifa assault on a public building and on par with what we’ve seen at innumerable campus occupations—I wonder how they’d hold up in the event of a real insurrection." You got that? It was "a boisterous walk-through," like a frat going to the Louvre, and not a dangerous assault on democracy. And if that wasn't shitty enough, he also tweeted, "I’m reliably informed that the rumor is untrue: The #CapitolPolice have NOT decided to change their official name to the Capitol Pussies." Nothing like a bitch-faced troll calling cops who were nearly killed "pussies" to show how much blue lives really don't matter to you.

On his Fox "news" entertainment program, Tucker Carlson, who always looks like he's wondering if it's wrong to have the dog lick peanut butter off his balls while the dog is licking peanut butter off his balls, played a clip of Fanone saying, "I’ve been left with the psychological trauma and the emotional anxiety of having survived such a horrific event." Carlson, who should be called "the worst human being" to his stupid face every fucking time he steps foot in public, snickered at Fanone's pain and then asked why Fanone didn't say he was traumatized by BLM protests in DC, as if Carlson gets to decide what is traumatic and what isn't. I'm guessing that Fanone wasn't dragged on the ground, beaten unconscious, tasered multiple times in his neck, and threatened to be killed with his own gun by the BLM marchers as he was by the savage incels at the Capitol. Tuckfuck went on to accuse Dunn and Gonell of lying about what happened to them, which I assume is what Carlson would do if any non-white people accused white people of crimes. 

Carlson's Fox "news" co-conspirator and noxious doom weasel, Laura Ingraham, merely laughed at the officers' pain and accused them of being actors, and she gave them awards for their "performances." Ingraham smeared and sneered, "Now the award for best use of an exaggeration in a supporting role, the winner is Aquilino Gonell, who thinks the pen is literally mightier than the sword." She then played a clip of Gonell saying, "He had all these items and things that were thrown at us and attack and use to attack us. Those are weapons, no matter if it is a pen." But she didn't include exactly what Gonell had said were the weapons he saw: "a baseball bat, a hockey stick, a rebar, a flagpole, including the American flag, pepper spray, bear spray." Yeah, those things can kill you or ruin your fucking day, if not your entire life.

(By the way, lemme pause here to say how fucked up it is that one of the big defenses conservatives are using about January 6 is that there were "no guns." Putting aside that the statement is a factual lie and that baseball bats are also murder weapons, those who say it are implying that no one was really in any danger because of the lack of guns. You got that? In other words, they are declaring that guns kill people. The only logical conclusion to this is that guns should be banned in general, just as they are on the Capitol grounds, because conservatives say we're safer without them.)

This could easily go on with mention of grifting motherfuckers like Greg Kelly over on Newsmax (motto: "Democracy dies in darkness because that's where we strangled it"), who tweeted that "None of these cops can be trusted with weapons.  Resign" and "Put HODGES on 'desk duty' right away.  He's not equipped to be a cop" (Hodges was the cop who was screaming out while being crushed in a doorway), as well as, pithily, "What a bunch of BABIES." Or Fox "news" regular Julie Kelly, who declared the officers "crisis actors" and mocked Dunn for describing being called the n-word with "Oh, the drama!" Shockingly, both Kellys aren't married to each other. They're both just incredibly shitty humans with the same last name.

Almost the entirety of the GOP and the right, especially the right-wing media slime corps, is deeply invested in tearing down any sense that something extraordinary happened on January 6. Every attempt to invest it with greater weight, like calling it the coup attempt or the terrorist attack that it clearly was, has to be cut off at the knees, and it doesn't matter who has to be denigrated in order to minimize the events. Because, see, if you buy the truth of January 6, the one that every video has shown us, the one that every witness has told us, the one your own eyes and ears have seen and heard, then you have to acknowledge the other truth, which all four officers want to be acknowledged: that this was aided and abetted by some of the politicians screaming for this hearing to be silenced and by the White House. And, goddamnit, if they can't convince you everyone is just lying, then they'll degrade the supposedly brave man, emasculate them, cut off their balls, and hope you think they're pussies, too, because who wants to side with cowards?

In other words, it's better to divide the country more than to acknowledge that the hearing should be a unifying moment, one where we recognize the enemy within and all fight to get rid of it. That would have been so simple, just like it could have been with Covid. But Republicans have met the enemy and it is them and, clearly, they like it.

Answering the Dumb Responses to "Why We're So Fucking Angry at the Unvaccinated"

In response to my post from earlier this week, a number of skeevy anti-vax taint-huffers wrote to inform me of how wrong I am. Some were of the polite "have you considered this?" variety. Others were more along the line of "Fuck you, you fucking asshole." My favorite was the one person who accused me of being a shill for Big Pharma, making bank by promoting their murder shot. Man, I wish. 

Of course, what goes unexplained in that scenario there is that if Big Pharma were really deceiving people and serving up poison, wouldn't that eliminate their customer base? I mean, at least oxy addicted people for a while before they died. You kill your users right out of the gate, and you've cut your profits way down. 

And that's the way most of this shit went. Usually, all I had to do was ask for a source or evidence and the whole fucking thing would fall apart.

Like this from last night over on the Twitter: "Have you seen the thousands of illegal immigrants pouring over our border daily?  Covid is up 900% along the border because of it.  And these people are being bussed around the country. Wake up!!!!" I asked the yelly tweeter for a source.  This was followed by her asking what I wanted the source for: "That thousands of illegals are pouring over the border?  That thousands of illegals are pouring over the border with Covid?" I responded that I wanted info on it all. So she sent me some stuff about the surge at the southern border, which, fine, we all knew about. 

And then she sent me a Fox "news" article that does indeed claim a "900% increase" in the number of Covid cases, which sounds ominous as fuck. That is, until you read the piece, which says, "There were 135 detainees who tested positive in the first two weeks of July alone, marking a 900% increase in confirmed positive cases compared to the previous 14 months." That's it. It went from around 14 cases to 135 cases, which, while a 9x increase, is hardly a reason to slam the shit-yourself button, especially since that's out of around 100,000 people. I mean, if I had 1 bottle of whiskey and now I have 11 of them, it's a 1000% increase, but I don't say that because that makes me sound like a fucking idiot. All that increase means is that Covid cases at the border are rising because of the Delta variant, just like everywhere else. 

So all she really wanted to do was tell me she hates Mexicans, which I wish she had because that's racist and shitty but it's at least honest.

Without quoting any more of their incoherent, subhuman gruntings, lemme try to answer a few more of the dumbass responses.

1. The vaccine is flat out killing people and/or giving them seizures and/or tearing up their internal organs and/or raping their cats and laughing while doing it. Your cat is safe. You have a better chance of lightning striking your nipple rings than you have of dying or being harmed by the vaccine. This hysterical shit is never calmed down by citing actual statistics, like the odds of death versus the odds of your nipples going all Ben Franklin. No, no, these motherfuckers have secret sources that tell them that people are just fucking dropping dead left and right after they get the jab. But the government or Big Pharma or George Soros would have to be hiding thousands of deaths for it to even be statistically significant when you're talking about 140 million people who have been fully vaccinated. That's a fuck-ton of shocked nipples.

2. Tucker Carlson said thousands of people died from the vaccine. Tucker Carlson said it and I believe in him more than I believe in God. First off, Tucker Carlson is the rectal prolapse of Fox "news" in that he's showing us everything that Fox thought it was keeping hidden up its own ass. Never listen to a rectal prolapse. It's just desperate for attention. And that number is garbage because it comes from a garbage self-reporting site that doesn't say what someone died from, only that they died at some point after being vaccinated. The Covid vaccine doesn't prevent cancer. 

3. I done had me the Co-Vids, so I don't need yer fancy vaks-seen. Okay, lemme deal with this one on a more personal basis: Hey, you dicks. I had the 'rona. I had it and recovered and got an antibody test in May 2020 and lo and fuckin' behold, I had me some antibodies. Made me feel like the goddamn Incredible Hulk or something (but there was no one available to smash in the lonely Covid summer). Then I went to give plasma in January and, oh, shit, I didn't have antibodies anymore. Now, it's entirely possible one or the other test was a false reading. It's also likely that my antibodies faded because I had a mild case of Covid. I was gonna get vaccinated anyways, but I sure as hell got it because no one knows how well protected you are post-infection. In other words, don't act like you're a fucking virologist when you're not a fucking virologist.

I mean, really, c'mon, anti-vaxers. Just say you're afraid. Just say you're fucking cowards, that you're like cave people who cowered and shit themselves when they first saw fire, that you're part of the crowd of barbarians who would burn astronomers at the stake when they said that the earth revolves around the sun, that you're the country bumpkins who thought movies were ghosts and phantoms. 

Because you either embrace incredible scientific advancements or you scream at the setting sun like a lunatic because you believe it will never rise again. 

Why We're So Fucking Angry at the Unvaccinated

One night long ago, I saw a small cat in an underpass during a downpour in Louisiana. I was driving home in the dark when my headlights caught a glimpse of an animal that was cowering on the sidewalk as the puddle down there started to become a flood. Part of me wanted to keep driving, but another part said, "No. Turn around, asshole," and I listened to the part that didn't wanna think that I let something drown. So I went back. It was late, like about two in the morning, and few other cars were on the road. I stopped in the underpass, railroad tracks above me, and I got out. There I saw the cat, just a bit older than a kitten, and I approached it, using as soothing a voice as I could. But when I got close, it hissed and clawed at me.  What the fuck was I doing? "Goddamnit," I thought because I knew I couldn't give in to the voice in my head that said, "Fuck that cat. Go home." I went back to the car and found a large towel in the trunk. 

When I approached the cat again, it hissed, spit, did that weird growl-meow thing, and tried to claw me. I sat on the sidewalk with the towel and waited, talking gently. I knew it was wet and freaked out, but I wanted to help it. At one point, I reached out to try to pet it, but the little shit just fucking ripped my hand, and really, I kind of wanted to kill it myself right then. Instead, I tried again to soothe it, but it wasn't happening, and the water was gonna be up to where the cat was gonna have to swim for it and probably not make it. So, screw it, I covered my hands in the towel, reached out quickly, and grabbed the damn cat, wrapping it in the towel while it screamed and tried to claw. "Stop it! I'm trying to fucking help you!" I said, obviously expecting the cat to understand me. I put it in the passenger seat where I could hold the towel closed. Yeah, I know the cat was panicking, but it was this or probably drowning or getting run over or something other horrible thing. Eventually, through cat magic, it got out of the towel and was free in the car. Fortunately, it didn't attack my face. It just hissed and leaped onto the floor in the back, hiding under the seat. I stopped at a gas station to get something for my bleeding hand. When I got out of the car, the cat leaped out and ran under the barely open garage door. As it was running away, I muttered, "You're welcome, you dumb fuck." I don't have strong opinions on cats in general one way or the other. I mean, I'm allergic as hell, but I don't hate them or anything. However, I hated that cat, and I would have saved it again if I had to.

I thought about this short, silly story as I read again and again about how we the vaccinated, we who believe that the vaccine is not only safe but is the only way out of the coronavirus clusterfuck, we who want everyone to get vaccinated need to reason with the willfully unvaccinated (who are different than those who can't get it because of some medical condition or are too young; I'm also leaving out those who are in communities that are underserved by the health care system, so, really, basically, I'm talking about Republicans), need to be more understanding, and need to calmly explain the vaccine to them. 

But you know what? There are a fuckton of us who think that we had months of understanding. And where the fuck did that get us? 

We're furious. We're furious at adults who made adult decisions that fucked it all up. We're furious that, after all the shit they've done to fuck up this country by voting for Trump, they won't do this one goddamn thing by getting the vaccine that Trump is legitimately partially responsible for getting developed so quickly. So this was your win, and you refused to take the W. 

Jesus fuck, Trump voters should be having crazed, hedonistic vaccination parties, whooping it up with shitty fast food and fucking each other wearing nothing but red MAGA hats as they celebrate their great and glorious Covid killer president with a primal orgy of doughy flesh suctioning against doughy flesh and wheezy cigarette coughing in harmony with inarticulate grunts of ecstasy, all in worship of their orange god who has deigned them worthy of saving, firing guns in the air in triumph. Yeah, you dumb motherfuckers, you missed a golden opportunity to own us liberals so fuckin' good that we would have had to throw up our hands and say, "You're right. We are so fucking owned. Here's a delicious cup of our tears for you to drink" while we get the vaccine, too. 

But you didn't. Instead, you decided that it had become tainted because Trump lost, and you decided to say fuck everyone, and you decided to disappear down the shit-smeared rabbit-holes of conspiracy theory YouTube videos and worthless websites and Tucker Carlson's smug, elitist maw. You decided that the hurt feelings of one man were more important than saving the nation. You made these decisions, on your own, as motherfucking grown-ups, and now we're supposed to reach out to you and gently cajole you to do something like you're tired children? Fuck you. That fucking ship sailed. 

Bitches, we want you to get vaccinated not just for us, but for you. We want you to get vaccinated so you don't get sick and clog our hospitals with your ventilated semi-corpses, driving our awful health care system even further into the ground. We want you to get vaccinated so you're not a goddamned incubator for the next variant, the one that the vaccine can't mitigate the effects of or the one that really fucking kills our children. Yeah, we want to save your fucking asses even if you don't want them saved with the added bonus that it saves us.

We're fucking angry because we were legit so fucking close to being over this virus. If vaccinations had continued at the rate they were going in the first part of the year, we'd be at herd immunity. But rather than that actual freedom, you fucknuts think that you have the "freedom" to go around spreading Covid to whoever the fuck gets in your ignorant way and you call that a constitutional right. No, it's not. It's not your right to spread a disease that might kill even 1 out of 100 people who get it. 

We're fucking angry because every fucking thing you say about Covid is just blindingly stupid. It's "poison"? So you think the 180 million people in the United States who got at least one dose of the vaccine are gonna die? You think that the thousands of people who worked on the vaccines are in a secret conspiracy that none of them will reveal? And for those who say they wanna wait to see, man, it's been over a year since the first batch of test subjects got vaccinated. They're alive. I know a couple of them. They're not gonna suddenly explode in five more years or grow demon testicles on the backs of their heads in ten. That's not how vaccines work. That's not how any of this works.

Or you say some shit like "It was rushed." No, you goddamned pathetic moron. Decades of research on this type of vaccine and even more decades of modern fucking medicine got us to the point where we could do this quickly. That's a good thing. It's so good that Trump gave the effort to do it the spastic little boy name of "Operation Warp Speed." So you can't support Trump and say the vaccine was rushed. He fucking rushed it. And as long as the medical scientists say it's cool, even those of us who fucking hate Trump are good with it. 

If you're a vaccine hesitant evangelical because "God gave us immune systems" or whatever, then don't take painkillers or antibiotics when you're sick. God hates hypocrites. He told me that. You don't believe me? Why? 'Cause I might just be making shit up? Yeah, welcome to religion, motherfuckers. Besides, you can always get your God on by saying that the invisible sky wizard waved a magic wand and gave humans the ability to create vaccines to stop viruses the Devil made. Man, this shit is easy.

And I'm not even gonna address the microchip/magnetism/alien DNA or whatever crazy horse diarrhea is flowing out of some people's idiot mouths. Fuck those people. Covid can take them. (That's a joke, you fucking mental invalids.)

This isn't even to get into the way you cockscabs have attacked Anthony Fauci and other scientists desperately trying to save your worthless lives. That deserves its own post.

But most of all, we're angry at how easy this could have all been. The vaccines were done. They were rolled out pretty damn smoothly and quickly. I can't get past how such a simple, common thing like getting a vaccine became a war. It's so ludicrous. It's so goddamn ludicrous. How can you look at case after case of people who were against the vaccine who now are sick or dead and still cling to that belief?  That makes you such a fool. You're wrong. You're just so fucking wrong about everything here. 

So, yeah, we've been patient. And now we're ready to do what it fucking takes to get you vaccinated. No, that doesn't mean forced vaccination. We're not evil, despite what you think. But, if that means paying you to do it, fine. I do not have a problem with that. And I won't even be a selfish dick about it and whine that I should have been paid, too. But we are gonna have to make it hurt if you still refuse to get vaccinated, and that should mean you don't get to participate in daily life. Bottom fucking line. We need to do like France and say, "Yeah, go fuck yourself with a baguette if you wanna go to restaurants or clubs or bars or sports stadiums without being vaccinated." And that might mean a fucking genuine i.d. card or phone app or something to prove it, not just a scribbled little card that can easily be faked. See? No one is forcing you to put on pants. We're just saying that if you don't wear pants, you gotta stay home.

To get back to the cat story up top, it's not a perfect analogy. My stakes with the cat were infinitely lower than our stakes with Covid. But it works in this way: I didn't like that cat. That cat didn't like me. At the end of the day, all that mattered was to stop it from dying, no matter how stupid and scared and stubborn it was. Once that was done, once that simple but meaningful interaction had finished, we could go back to whatever we wanted to do, a bit scarred, but alive.

Republicans Loved the Covid Vaccine Before They Hated It

I have seen a lot of cynical shit when it comes to the way that conservative politicians and media whores manipulate their fucking ignorant followers, from the Cadillac-driving welfare queens to drug hysteria to birtherism and so very much more. But I cannot wrap my head around the exploitation of fear and the selfish hyping of ideological division behind the right-wing campaign against the Covid vaccine. It's nonsensical on a health level and on a basic reality level, and for the majority of us who know that the only way to finally be out of the coronavirus despair is with herd immunity from the vaccine, it's unforgivable.

Prior to the election of Joe Biden as president, Donald Trump, his ass remoras in the GOP, and the conservative press bottom-feeders were all about how awesome the Covid vaccine was gonna be and how it was gonna be available to everyone. Here's Trump in an interview with Sean "Frankenstein-Shaped" Hannity on June 25, 2020: "I think the vaccines are coming along great...I think it will be even before the end of the year, we’ll have a vaccine. We have great companies, and we’re totally mobilized. Military is doing it. We’re ready to go. As soon as they have it, we will be distributing that all over the country." Nothing but enthusiasm and hype. 

In August 2020, at one of his endless, hedonistically self-aggrandizing daily press conferences, Trump preened, "We are investing in the development and manufacture of the top six vaccine candidates to ensure a rapid delivery. The military is ready to go. They’re ready to deliver a vaccine to Americans as soon as one is fully approved by the FDA. And we’re moving very close to that approval. We’re on track to rapidly produce 100 million doses as soon as the vaccine is approved and up to 500 million shortly thereafter. So we’ll have 600 million doses." If we have 600 million doses, that means he was expecting everyone to get the vaccine. 

I mean, Jesus fuck, in December, after the election, then-Vice President Mike Pence, prior to being the target of a literal lynch mob, spoke in his usual squeamish biblical tones about the vaccine: "I think every American can be proud that we are just a matter of days away in this whole of America approach, to delivering a safe and effective vaccine unto the American people." You got that? A "whole of America approach." Not "minus the fucknuts who all of a sudden are raging against science."

And it wasn't just Pence that was all about celebrating what Trump hath given unto the pleading masses. At their own press conference in November, Senate Republicans were braying about how amazing it was and how Democrats like Andrew Cuomo were being dicks for saying they didn't trust the Trump administration's ability to distribute the vaccine. John "The Easy Joke Here Is 'Bare Asshole'" Barrasso of Wyoming  exclaimed, "This is something to celebrate. This is a success for the world to turn to America and say, 'You have done it and you have done it right.'" Iowa's Joni "I Take My Anger Out on Pig Nuts" Ernst agreed, saying, "I do want to give a shout out to the Trump Administration for making this possible by thinking outside of that box on making sure that we can deliver those much needed vaccinations quickly to the American people." 

And as for health care workers, many of whom are now resisting getting vaccinated? Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar was clear that they should be at or near the front of the line: "As important as doctors and nurses, it’s the janitors, it’s the orderlies, it’s the aides, everybody who are providing that kind of help that make the system in the hospital, the nursing home, what have you, work and are just as important, if not more often, than everybody else to make sure they get protection also." 

It was fucking nothing but celebration, back-slapping, and joy. Sure, they used language at times like "Everyone who wants a vaccine will be able to get it." And, at the time, when the number of people who didn't want to get vaccinated was at around 33%, Trump wouldn't say a bad word about antivaxers when prompted by Laura Ingraham on Fox "news" back in August. But even with that, no one in the mainstream media was saying the crazy shit that's going on now, with the bizarro theories of government control and forced vaccination in order to scare people away.

Instead it was all positive, forward-looking, and ambitious. At an HHS event in December, when Trump was still in office, one of the doctors there, Bruno Pettinaux, said pretty fucking clearly, "I look forward to also taking this vaccine when my turn comes, and I highly encourage everyone to seriously consider being vaccinated when the opportunity arises." And he didn't even get flooded with death threats after. I mean, for fuck's sake, even Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, who has become the loudest antivax dick in the Senate, said in December, "Operation Warp Speed was brilliant. We need to celebrate vaccine development, but it still won't be available to every American for months." Yeah, he was anticipating, not dreading its availability. 

What I don't get is that the right, especially the evangelical right (which is wildly anti-vax), talks all the time about "miracles." Well, you know what? The Covid vaccines are a goddamn miracle, a scientific miracle. And I don't use that word lightly. When the vaccines were being developed, the researchers were hoping for a 50-60% effectiveness against Covid, which would still have been a game-changer. Instead, the Moderna and Pfizer double shot is over 90% effective, which shocked everyone. Yeah, it's a fucking miracle, and it's a tribute to the amazing things that humanity can do, across administrations, across parties. It's this generation's motherfucking moon shot and everyone involved should be gleeful. This one thing wasn't fucked up by the Trump administration. They should be out there braying like just-fucked teenagers about how incredible it is instead of hiding in the shadows from the irrational forces that they helped unleash. It's a miracle. You wanna bring the invisible sky wizard into it? Fine. Say that God inspired everyone who made it and gave them the abilities to do it. There. God make the vaccine. Fucking happy?

We know what this is about, and this gets back to that incredible cynicism I started with. Obviously, it's about the right denying the Biden administration a win with Covid herd immunity. Obviously, it's a craven ploy to keep the nutzoid evangelicals and the conspiracy fucked-heads on edge and pouring money into the coffers of whoever exploits them. And if a couple percent of them die, well, shit, that's just the price of lying about freedom.

If we had a sane ex-president, this could all be solved. He would be out there talking nonstop about his amazing triumph in getting the vaccine done so quickly and how everyone should get it instead of whining about the election. But Trump is not sane. And, truthfully, neither is half the nation anymore.

(Note: Yeah, I know. "Not all Republicans." But, you know, it ain't Democrats scaring people away from the vaccine.)

Tennessee Legislators Are Outraged That Teenagers Might Want to (Checks Notes) Not Get Covid

The state of Tennessee abides by the "Mature Minor Doctrine" when it comes to almost all medical care. That means that minors between 14 and 18 years-old can see doctors on their own without a parent's permission. The physician or medical provider may decide not to provide care based on a judgment about the maturity of the teenager, but, generally, if you're over 14, you can get medical help (except abortions because, well, Tennessee). A 1987 Tennessee Supreme Court decision clearly put this doctrine in place for the state. Hell, the Tennessee legislature even passed legislation guaranteeing that minors could get medical care without parental consent for things like drug abuse, emergencies, and even contraception. Sometimes, sanity does exist where you least expect it. And then again...

When the Covid vaccine was made available to those 12 and up, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health, sent guidance to all vaccine providers as a response to inquiries about the applicability of the Mature Minor Doctrine in the case of the Covid vaccine. Prior to sending the email, Dr. Fiscus had contacted the Department of Health's general counsel for a statement she could use for the guidance, and she received an email that had the very document I linked to up there, adding that it had been "blessed by the Governor’s office on the subject" and "feel free to distribute to anyone." So she did. 

And, because we live in the stupidest fucking time possible, someone complained and that complaint led to Republicans in the state legislature losing their shit. They attacked Dr. Fiscus and the Department of Health for the letter and for ads that featured kids that read, "Tennesseans 12+ Eligible for Vaccines: Give COVID-19 vaccines a shot." That's pretty much bullying, according to GOP assholes, like Rep. Scott Cepicky from the ass-end of nowhere, who said, "For a department of ours to make it seem like you need a vaccine...to fit in is peer pressure applied by the state of Tennessee. Personally, I think it's reprehensible that you would do that, that you would do that to our youth." Another dumbass, Sen. Janice Bowling from Sisterfuck or Pigass or something, said of the letter, which, again, was sent to vaccine providers in case a 14 year-old came in to get jabbed, "It is very disconcerting to see the letter, or memo, from Dr. Fiscus stating that Tennessee law allows the Department of Health to give vaccinations to children 14 years of age." Except Tennessee law does allow it. Also, Tennessee is way the fuck behind on vaccinations in general, with only 38% of the population fully-vaccinated and the Delta variant starting to kick medical asses.

And, because the stupidest fucking time possible always leads to the stupidest actions possible, the governor fired Dr. Fiscus. In her response to her termination, she wrote an impassioned plea: "I am afraid for my state. I am angry for the amazing people of the Tennessee Department of Health who have been mistreated by an uneducated public and leaders who have only their own interests in mind. And I am deeply saddened for the people of Tennessee, who will continue to become sick and die from this vaccine-preventable disease because they choose to listen to the nonsense spread by ignorant people." Damn straight. Science, motherfuckers.

And, because the stupidest fucking actions possible are always topped by something even stupider, today, the Tennessee Department of Health, which had already slowed outreach to young people on the Covid vaccine, decided that it "will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases." That's right. That's how fucking awful this has gotten. That's how short-sighted, idiotic, and savage the Tennessee GOP is. No outreach for any vaccines they might have missed. No outreach for flu shots. Nor for meningococcal vaccines. Certainly not for HPV vaccines.

There's bonus fuckery, too, like "the health department will also stop all COVID-19 vaccine events on school property." I got my vaccine at a high school in NYC. I'm sure many others have gotten theirs at schools, and one event was planned in Tennessee for this month. That's canceled. 

Let's remember that the reason for young people to get vaccinated is not their risk for Covid; they rarely get seriously ill or die from it, although it's more frequent than any side effects from the vaccines. It's so that they don't carry the disease and, really, so they don't become incubators for fucked up variants. But this is some insidious shit because the basis for any of this is the completely deranged idea that the vaccine is harmful in some way. And it's not. It's extraordinarily safe. It's so safe that it's morally and medically fucking wrong not to get it.

It is madness, truly. The country is being divided into zones based on the vaccination rate, and that shit's unsustainable and nonsensical. More on that later this week.

Hey, Fellow White People, We Should Be Ashamed and Angry About Racism in American History

When I was applying for jobs in academia years ago, I figured that, depending where I was applying, my whiteness and maleness would work against me or in my favor. It never occurred to me to resent the idea that I might lose out to an equally qualified non-white person or a woman because I believe that diversity in education is an imperative to maybe, perhaps one day overcoming or at least ameliorating the effects of racism and sexism. On more than one occasion, some other white guy would ask me if I was upset that I might lose out on a dream job because of affirmative action or diversity hiring. 

And my answer was always the same: "I'm not angry at people today for getting jobs. I'm not angry at people today for considering race and sex as factors. I am pissed off as hell at all the stupid, racist, sexist white men in the past who fucked it all up." 

See, what gets me, time and again, is trying to conceive of all the people whose genius, whose talent, whose abilities were never even given a chance because of the actual laws and the unspoken rules of white male domination and oppression. If you really think about it, that loss is overwhelming. It's incalculable. And it is frankly entirely rational, entirely normal, entirely expected that trying to wrap your head around it is going to make a white person feel like shit. 

Frankly, we white people should feel shame. We should feel anger. And rather than deny those feelings, rather than repress them and revolt against them, we should embrace them, learn from them, and grow from them. Otherwise, we'll just keep doing all the things that make future whites ashamed and angry, perpetuating the very system that we're pretending we've defeated. 

The fake outrage over critical race theory in schools has morphed from the bizarre idea that a law school idea about race and the judicial system was being taught to grade school kids to an existential threat to the nation. It has gone from banning teaching about white privilege to banning books deemed offensive, like the children's book Ruby Bridges Goes to School, about the young Black girl who integrated the New Orlean public schools and faced screaming mobs of white people while doing it. 

And why is this? Because learning that white people were cruel racists makes white people feel bad so don't teach the truth about the racial history of this country. You think that's an oversimplification? The head of one mothers' group in Tennessee said that the Ruby Bridges book "too harshly delineated between Black and white people, and that the book didn't offer 'redemption' at its end." The book does offer redemption: for Ruby Bridges and those opposed to segregation. There are objectively good people and bad people. And you know what else the book has? It shows a photo of a white member of the Eisenhower administration and says that "The United States government said: 'Segregation is wrong.'" So it does have good white people. It just says that the racist white people were wrong, so that must be the problem.

By the way, that same mom says that it's offensive for students to learn to spell words like "injustice," "unequal," "inequality," "protest," "marching" and "segregation," in case you really wondered what this was about. 

(Yes, of course, it's a grift, a scam to fundraise off the rubes. But it has also become an obsession on the right, to the point of violence at school board meetings and death threats against teachers. So let's take it seriously.)

Those attacking critical race theory believe that some of the racial sensitivity training (which have little to do with actual critical race theory, it's becoming tedious to point out) that some companies, government agencies, and, yes, teachers are undertaking are actually "political indoctrination" in disguise. What makes it political indoctrination? The fact that it asks white people to contemplate that much of what we consider even foundational ideas about the United States come from a white perspective because, for much of the history of this county, the white perspective was the only one that was allowed to be expressed. And that once we recognize that, we realize that we need to revise how we conceive of some of the things that we white people take for granted as true. It's called "growth." I'd call it "evolution," but you know how that would go.

If what you get from that is that white people are bad and that you don't want to feel bad, that's on you. For chrissake, as a white person, why wouldn't I feel like shit about the fact that the country wouldn't exist without the enslavement of one race and the genocide of another, both done by white people? Why wouldn't I feel like shit that the white-run government didn't enforce the very laws that it created to bring about equality between the races? Why in the world wouldn't I feel like shit about lynching and terrorism by whites against Black people? As someone who grew up white in the south, why wouldn't I feel like shit about the Supreme Court-endorsed apartheid that prevented Black people from prospering for a hundred years after slavery? Why wouldn't I feel like shit about policies like red-lining and banking discrimination and environmental ghettoes? We're now talking about things white people have done in my lifetime, not 400 years ago. 

Goddamn, you'd have to be so deep in denial, so delusional, so sociopathic to not think that whiteness has been used as a weapon against non-white people. Don't tell me not to feel like hell. Tell me how you agree that we need to accept it, teach it, learn it, and change it. 

Instead, now we've got things like the governor of Nebraska praising the Board of Regents for the University of Nebraska system for putting out a statement opposing critical race theory in the university curriculum. We've got idiots like Sen. Tom Cotton raging at professors and the Pentagon for daring to teach it to cadets at the military academies. 

As if it was written by a hyper-patriotic child, the University of Nebraska statement reads, in part, "America is the best country in the world and anyone can achieve the American Dream here." Putting aside that the country is actually called "the United States of America" and, by default, you could only achieve the American Dream here, it's just laughable in its pathetic hyperbole. 

A truly great country doesn't have to keep saying it's great. A truly great country can handle more than one idea about itself. A truly great country is one that recognizes its mistakes and treats them as the chance to become, what's the phrase, "a more perfect union," as our flawed, racist, but, yes, wise founders said.

Why Critical Race Theory? Because What the Hell Else Do Republicans Have to Run on

One technique I use when teaching my students the historical background of a text is to get them to imagine what it was like in that time period and how it might have affected the writers. Imagine, say, the smell of Elizabethan London and tell me that the shit-laden streets around the Globe Theatre didn't have an impact on Shakespeare. Or maybe just facts of existence, like the idea that around the corner, at any moment, the fucking plague could just shut everything down and take out half the people you know. How does that not take up permanent residence in your brain and be a part of everything? How does it not impact every aspect of life, from the laws that are created to the interactions between people in everyday life? Of course, it does. And to deny that would be sheer ignorance.  

One of the things that critical race theory asks us to do is to make those connections with the history of this nation. It honestly seems like a rational way of looking at the past: Slavery existed. Jim Crow laws existed. The economy of the nation was based on those realities. Those are indisputable parts of the American past. They indisputably maintained a huge difference in power between Blacks and whites. How could they not have affected every single person every single day? How could they not have had an effect on the culture, the laws, the society, and why wouldn't some of those effects of racism, many of them embedded in the law, have persisted to this day in things like the carceral state and ongoing poverty? And if you agree with that, then you would have to agree that when teaching the history of this country in an honest way, you'd have to acknowledge those racist realities. In fact, the only way to avoid discussing any of this is to willfully obfuscate or outright lie about history because telling the actual history of this country might mean having to acknowledge that we are living in a janky house built on one fucked-up foundation. 

So the right has decided on a two-prong approach to demonizing anyone who might dare to say that bad shit that happened in the past still has relevance and reverberations today. 

One of those prongs is obvious: Just fuckin' lie. Just fuckin' lie as openly and carelessly as you can and rely on the laziness and stupidity of those you're lying to. For instance, here's very white Kayleigh McEnany, who was Donald Trump's most grotesque press secretary, lying about slavery and the founders: "We know most of our forefathers, all of our main Founding Fathers were against slavery, recognized the evils of it." We know for sure that 41 of 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves at the time. Of the "main Founding Fathers," only John Adams gets off scot-free. Franklin later became an abolitionist and freed his slaves. But Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all were slaveowners. (Alexander Hamilton is up for debate.) So, yeah, we can argue about the range of their attitudes towards slavery and abolition, but it's hard to say someone is "against slavery" when they own slaves. 

The lying prong goes hand-in-hand with the other prong, which is more of a meta-approach that can be best summarized as "Teaching critical race theory to schoolkids is a problem because it's a problem." This is the new version of "Communists are hiding under your bed" in that nothing needs to be proven so nothing can be disproven. You don't have to understand a single thing about critical race theory. You don't have to offer an example of critical race theory being taught to third-graders. It just is happening and it's making your white child hate themselves. 

(Note: One thing that never comes up here is that maybe it's a rational reaction to be angry at what your racial group did to another racial group just because of the color of their skin. I'm fucking furious and ashamed about the evil and stupidity of whites because what they did was evil and stupid. That doesn't make me self-hating. That makes me sane. And maybe a little compassionate to the victims of whites' evil and stupidity. But I guess that's why it needs to be silenced.)

There are so many examples that involve Fox "news" white nationalist Tucker Carlson, who always looks like he's wondering if he can fit a second butt plug up there, that it would take a fucking book to list them all just from the last month. Fox "news" has become the critical race theory clearing house, with stories like "Ohio private school students denied reenrollment after moms' 'inflammatory' campaign against 'indoctrination,'" which is about these two white morons who spewed a bunch of lies and threatened the school with withholding payment for tuition even after the school had addressed many of their concerns about how race was being taught. That was a beautiful "fuck around and find out" moment.

Carlson has gone so hysterical that it would be laughable if people didn't take this shitheel seriously. Critical race theory, says Carlson, is "civilization-ending poison." You might think, "Whoa, whoa, there Tuckus. Wouldn't racism be civilization-ending poison?" Ah, but then you fall into his trap because to the anti-critical race theory goons, critical race theory itself is racist because it points out that white people used racism in the formation of this nation and that its effects are still felt today. To put it simply, "Telling me about racism makes me, a white person, feel bad so stop telling me or you're the racist." To put it more simply, picture a grown man sticking his fingers in his ears and going "La, la, la, it's not true if I can't hear you!"

Again, a sane, healthy society would be engaged in an ongoing examination of how racism was woven into the fabric of this goddamned country and figure out how to rip those threads out and seam the fucking thing to attempt to be whole, and teaching kids about this shit is a good place to start. Jesus, is it so fucking wrong to say that maybe we shouldn't teach that everything needs to viewed through a white lens? Is that such a fucking threat? "Inclusion" is not "replacement." In fact, it's expanding the ways that you learn. That's complex and requires that you give a goddamn about changing things. We didn't weaken the study of literature by including James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. We made it so much richer.

Carlson's solution is much easier because it's insidious, dumb, and untenable: "How widespread is it? Well, we can’t really be sure until we finally get cameras in the classroom, as we put them on the chests of police officers. Until we finally bet a civilian review board in every town in America to oversee the people teaching your kids, forming their minds. Until we do, we can’t know exactly how widespread this is." Yeah, that's exactly how fucked this has gotten: Make sure strangers can watch your kids all day on video. Not creepy at all. And in states where anti-critical race theory laws were passed, it's fucking Orwellian (and I'm using that properly). 

Let's be honest, though. The real reason behind the critical race theory apocalypse talk is that it gives Republicans something to campaign on and raise cash with. It's one of the top stories on the GOP's website. It's big on the National Republican Senatorial Committee's website, as well as on the National Republican Congressional Committee, supporting House candidates. Incumbents like John Kennedy from Louisiana are blathering bullshit about it as they face reelection in 2022. 

What the fuck else do they have except made up shit like this? Jobs? The pandemic response? The shit that actually matters in the day-to-day lives of Americans? And even the other overblown issues or lies the GOP is pushing, like the rise in crime or whatever the fuck they're making up about immigration, are all tied to race in some way. So maybe, in that way, it's typical Republicanism: hinge it all on white fears of no longer controlling non-whites.

Emotions Experienced While Watching the New York Times Video on the January 6 Insurrection

If you haven't yet, you should absolutely watch the 40-minute video blow-by-blow of the January 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol that was produced by the New York Times. If you're like me, you will go through some things as you watch the consortium of copious cretins and countless cunts attack the center of our democracy to try to stop it in its tracks from certifying the fair and lawful election of Joe Biden. I thought a bunch of shit, like:

1. I remembered when I marched in a peaceful protest at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul in 2008. I ended up with a group of Code Pink activists, and when we left the park where we had gathered and headed into the downtown area, the streets were solidly lined with cops in riot gear. It was goddamn wall of helmets, bulletproof vests, and black batons at the ready, all the cops armed, with snipers on the roofs, staring down at us through their scopes. I tried to interview some of the police, but, you know, they weren't in the mood to be friendly. It was meant to intimidate us and meant to keep us in line, with the idea being that if we stepped out of where we were supposed to be, we'd be met with intense force by some motherfuckers just aching to ruin our days. Yeah, I couldn't help but think about those cops and all the cops that were a constant presence at Occupy Wall Street and at other protests when the Times video showed how essentially a skeleton crew of Capitol police were on duty on a day when fucking truck horns were blowing about how there was going to be premeditated and planned violence against the Capitol itself. 

2. I know we say a lot that it's really kind of miraculous that no members of Congress or their staffs were taken hostage or strung up by the cretins and cunts in the crowd that scampered through the building like a pack of starved curs off-leash and looking for blood. But, to me, what was even more miraculous is that the police didn't gun these motherfuckers down by the dozens. And, yeah, yeah, we can say with a fair amount of certainty that if the Capitol had been rampaged through by Black Lives Matter protesters or Muslim activists, the marble would have become a morgue. But that doesn't really cover every single one of those officers. We've seen tons of situations where cops shoot someone walking towards them with a knife, yet the police officers outside the Capitol didn't draw their weapons while being beaten by the crowd with flagpoles and batons, while having their eyes gouged and being sprayed with bear mace. I've read that they knew they were badly outnumbered and feared the crowd getting even more violent, but that doesn't explain the almost entire lack of gunfire. The police were restrained (heroically so, in some cases) while it was pandemonium, and a whole lot of assholes should be grateful that they were. 

3. Yeah, okay, you wanna bring up Ashli Babbitt, the one person shot and killed by an officer as she was about to breach the doorway to the Speaker of the House's lobby? You go right ahead, but if I'm being totally honest here, and why the fuck not, fuck Ashli Babbitt. I don't fucking care. Watch the video. She was about to leap through the window where there were cops with their guns drawn, telling her to stop. She didn't. She was on a mission to undo the election, and she had already committed violence and probably wanted to do more, with those around her shattering windows and breaking doors. Fuck her. Fuck her and fuck everyone turning a traitor into a martyr. And you know what else? Fuck the other rioters who died, like the Q-Anon crazy who was crushed to death by other crazies, like the guys who died of a heart attack or stroke. I feel bad for their families, sure, yeah, I guess. But the ones who died? They were adults who made adult decisions that got them fucking killed. I think of them the same way I think of the Confederate soldiers whose rotted bodies pollute our American soil.

4. If I haven't been clear, the rioters were plainly, in their own words, there to invade the House and the Senate and halt the election certification. They were there to fuck shit up (as more than one announced). Some were in organized groups, like the self-fellaters known as the Proud Boys and the twatmites known as the Oath Keepers. Most seemed to be a conglomeration of random shitheels and fucknuts who wanted to get their white rage on. Sure, you could make a case that this was a bunch of military LARPers who got out of control. Except there were real fucking soldiers in there, even some active duty. But not a goddamn one of them didn't understand that what they were doing was breaking the law. They just thought they were the law, that they were righteous, that Donald fucking Trump's mad insistence that it was a "stolen election," which was really just his desperation to stave off prison and bankruptcy, gave them some kind of imprimatur of official status, that their defeated president would pardon them, even. It doesn't matter that they really believed in their cause (although I'm guessing many were just getting off on the violence). It doesn't matter that they were lied to and continue to be lied to. You wanna sit at home and wallow in your ignorance and hatred, fine. You wanna bring that shit out and try to overthrown the government by violence? You fucking get what you deserve: hundreds of people under arrest and being whiny bitches about it. 

5. Another thing that comes through is just how disgusting the vast, vast majority of the GOP is in denying their complicity in making January 6 happen and in their concerted effort to scrub the insurrectionist intent of the events of the day. There's flaccid cock Andrew Clyde going from cowering behind armed law enforcement to pronouncing that the rioters were mere "tourists." And the media savages who weren't even there are shown pronouncing that the whole thing is overblown. Watch the events. The rioting fucks have murder in their eyes. Even now, we have the shit-slicked worms that lead the GOP, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, refusing to allow for an independent commission to look into January 6, with McCarthy inhaling Trump's nutsack deeply as he decries any effort to investigate things by Congress. And then there are the slop-sucking piglets of the nutzoid right, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who always looks like he's worried he's gonna be caught masturbating to images of dead immigrants on his work computer. Lauren Boebert, who is Marjorie Taylor Greene without the charm, is palling around with one of the extremists who attacked the Capitol because of course she is. 

6. No, you right-wing dickheads, we can't get past January 6 until the motherfuckers who caused it are held accountable. If you don't want that, then that means you know who is responsible. And it's not just Trump and Giuliani and Matt Gaetz and Alex Jones and the other raging whores who spoke to the crowds. It's not just the ones openly provoking it. It's people like you who cheered it on and who want it to go away before the jig is up.