500,000+ Dead Need to Be Piled in Front of the GOP

This dumbfuck nation has no idea about how deep the post-traumatic stress disorder it's going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future is going to be. As we shift back to whatever normalcy is, we are going to bear the scars of the miserable last year and more. Every human interaction will be burdened with a sense of unease, an anxiety that will remain even as we know that we're vaccinated, that the virus is gone or under control. We will have been rewired by this brief but scarring period, and that goes even for those who act like it's all back to how things were pre-COVID. Resistance to the trauma is an active effect of it. 

And then there's the mountain of the dead to contend with. Over a half-million people who lived in the goddamned United States are no longer here, and that's another scar on our exhausted, marked-up bodies. We cannot allow that loss to simply be absorbed into our collective propensity to repress, to forget the quotidian horrors of 21st-century existence. We need to keep that pain and grief present. And we need to lay those corpses down where they belong: piled like fleshy cordwood right in front of the Republicans.

We live in the world that they fucked up. No, the GOP didn't start the coronavirus, but they sure as hell made it into a catastrophe through their unending support for Donald Trump, who saw COVID not as a crisis but as a turd in the punchbowl at his gaudy party that he wasn't going to fish out. And they can't ever be allowed to forget it. What I fear is that the Republican Party is already changing the narrative, shifting blame for the high death count to states, to federal medical officials like Anthony Fauci, and, when it doesn't seem completely insane, eventually to the Biden administration, sweeping their own guilt away. 

You can see it happen in real time with their refusal to deal honestly in any way with the insurrection and riot at the Capitol on January 6. You can see it in the party's refusal to censure, formally or informally, their members who profess to believe that the 2020 election was so filled with fraud and illegalities that Donald Trump actually beat Joe Biden. In fact, when you get to the level of the state GOP, they've gone completely nutzoid in their adherence to what we now call "the Big Lie" about the election, using it as an excuse to fuck over the voters with bullshit, useless restrictions that seek to turn Democratic voters into criminals. They are gaslighting and then building their agenda on how they've gaslit everyone.

In her scathing piece titled "Trump Is Guilty of Pandemicide" in Foreign Policy, Laurie Garrett damningly lays out how Trump completely checked out on any decisions at all on COVID efforts between the election and the inauguration. He was essentially telling us all to go fuck ourselves and die if he wasn't installed back in office. And it's not as if he did much of anything before, other than not blocking funding to get a vaccine. He made masks and social distancing and lockdowns into a political battleground. He perversely refused to acknowledge the dead and sick, offering virtually no words of comfort or sympathy. He lied about his own bout of coronavirus. He supported the sick fucks who protested maskless against restrictions, even to the point of violence, even to the point of an attempted kidnap/murder of the governor of Michigan. He held rallies and events with no masking and no social distancing that were superspreader events. He pointedly declined to use the Defense Production Act until too far into the pandemic and even then on a limited basis. He didn't give a single rat shit about having a national plan on testing and mitigation, and, at the end, we lost two months of vaccine distribution because, as I said, we could all go fuck ourselves, as far as he was concerned. So many lives could have been saved. So many jobs and businesses could have been saved. As Garrett puts it, prior to Trump, "no sitting U.S. president...has willfully allowed such preventable carnage to unfold on the American people."

And sitting there, almost to a person, aiding and abetting and supporting and comforting Trump was the Republican Party. They didn't kill people with weapons, but they sure as hell caused hundreds of thousands more to die than needed to. They're counting on the short attention span of American voters to forget that complicity or to believe the lies they are telling now. Democrats can't allow that to happen. The corpses of COVID victims ought to be tied to each one of them, weighing them down like Jacob Marley's chains. 

Democrats are losing the moment. They are losing the chance to tar and feather Republicans with their failure, much like they did in 2009. They are losing the momentum and the plot on the COVID relief package as they try to get Republicans to buy into it (even if President Biden has said that he doesn't have a problem passing it without them). Hell, in 2009, by this point, the Recovery Act had been signed into law by Barack Obama to deal with the economic crisis. Meanwhile, Republicans have been given a chance to regroup post-insurrection and get their cocks hard for obstruction while Democrats keep finding ways to step on their dicks every time they move, even as the bill is supported by a huge majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans. Just pass the goddamn thing.

But it's not just a problem with the legislation. Democrats are also dropping the ball on making sure that everyone fucking knows that the reason vaccine distribution is going so well now is because of the Democrats running the federal government now. Donald Trump is a moronic piece of shit, but he's a savant when it comes to marketing himself. He fucking dreads the idea of not getting credit for the vaccine rollout. It's not that he deserves any credit, but that never stopped him from claiming it. He knows that Democrats could easily plant their flag on the vaccine's success. 

And, frankly, I don't know what the fuck they're waiting for. Get those ads out there. That's where you draw the separation between the parties in stark terms: They're the disease; we're the cure. (Not to go all Cobra on you.) There should be a commission on the COVID incompetence like what's being done with the 1/6 coup attempt. And, in general, we should have more moments like Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly absolutely tearing Republican Jim Jordan a new asshole, as he did today over the election fuckery.

I know we say all the time that Democrats are unmatched in their ability to fuck up golden opportunities to put a goddamn stake in the heart of the GOP vampires. But this shit isn't even that hard. Every terrible allegation you can make against Republicans is fucking real, unlike the fantasy crap they pin on Democrats. And it would suck to lose the chance to secure a narrative that paints the GOP as the criminals and extremists they are, all in the name of some worthless fucking illusion of unity.

See, Democrats can explain, the problem with unity, the problem with bipartisanship is that one of the parties is filled with murderers. Look at all the dead people piled in front of them.

Dead Terrrorist: Rush Limbaugh Wrecked America

When I heard Rush Limbaugh had finally died, my first thought was "I hope he was screaming in pain when the light switch flicked off." He had lost his hearing, battled opioid addiction, and succumbed to lung cancer, and he still didn't suffer enough. I hope he realized at the end that there was no afterlife, that after he died, he was dead. Forever. 

Rush Limbaugh was already a mad bomber before he was invited to become the spiritual leader of the terrorist movement known as the Republican Party. The top hyena of the savage beasts of right-wing talk radio, Limbaugh was the jabbering clown, mixing the naughty school boy humor of drive-time DJs and the nonstop ranting of an end times preacher. He gave voice to the aggrieved white men who saw their hegemonic control over everything being encroached upon by women, by people of color, by gays and lesbians, by them, that undefined shadow culture ready to wreck all that the good, bleached, heteronationalists had done for the ungrateful hottentots, whores, and homos. He turned "liberal" into a dirty word, and we are just recovering from that.

Like Ronald Reagan letting the evangelical sadists into the White House, thus making them a poisonous political force we are dealing with to this day, Limbaugh's status was legitimized by President George H. W. Bush. Bush was seeking man-of-the-people street cred in his run against the genuinely earthy Bill Clinton in 1992. Against the young, hip, sexually-voracious Clinton, Bush seemed like an out-of-touch dilettante, a prissy pussy, a rich elitist, so he took a sojourn to Limbaugh's studio, which must have smelled like phlegmy cigar breath and fiery beef farts, to canoodle with the egotistical prick with a mic, who was already on a tear against both Bill and Hillary Clinton, with whom he'd be obsessed for the rest of his shitty life. And why not? In that election year, Limbaugh was the most popular talk radio host in the country, he had a number one bestseller with his first book, and was about to launch his quick and pathetic failure of a TV show. He was fucking ubiquitous. Hell, Bush had already hosted him overnight at the White House. 

You who weren't aware or alive during this time have no idea how huge Limbaugh was, how significant, and how omnipresent he was. I was talking to my pal Mark last night about it. Back in the 1990s, as part of a radio drama show I produced in Tennessee, I wrote a parody of Limbaugh called "The Rich Flemball Show" (no, it was not subtle). And Mark played Flemball, so I thought he'd have some insights or at least a good insult or two upon that bastard's death. He told me about how, in his town in middle Tennessee, "There was a barbecue restaurant that had a Rush room. Every day they would turn on Rush to listen, and every day the room would be filled with people who wanted to listen to Rush." He said that when Limbaugh was at his peak, you couldn't be at a red light without someone blaring Rush. "My mail carrier would have Rush playing whenever she drove up," he added.  People wanted to act like and be Rush Limbaugh. (And, yes, radio was that important back then, pre-internet, pre-Fox "news.")

There was something else that George H. W. Bush was seeking that Limbaugh embodied: identification with a caricature of a type of masculinity. Not rugged machismo, no, that was for Reagan and his horses and ranch. That took too much physical effort. Instead, it was a white male dominance, a sense that power and acclaim and riches and women were owed to the white men. In Limbaugh's telling, it wasn’t enough that men were seen as superior. It’s that all opposed to men had to be defeated and denigrated. You couldn't just say someone was wrong; you had to dehumanize them, and that meant something beyond calling them "hippies" or "communists" (although he certainly did). It meant being as savage and cruel as possible. Limbaugh set out to destroy the center and the left in our political spectrum, leaving only a brute force right led by white men and possibly a non-white or two who acknowledged how awesome white men are.

You can read all about Limbaugh's wanton cruelty, like his attacks on women's sexuality while constantly bragging about his own. He didn't coin the term "feminazi," but he popularized it to the point that it helped wreck the momentum of the feminist movement for decades. That pejorative debased any feminist effort, from equal pay to equal treatment at work to issues like rape laws and sexual harassment policies, all things he saw as attacks on normative white masculinity. He wrote in in The Way Things Ought to Be, "A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed." His reasoning is that women want abortions because it disempowers men. "They don't need men in order to be happy," he blathered on motherfuckingly. "They certainly don't want males to be able to exert any control over them. Abortion is the ultimate symbol of women's emancipation from the power and influence of men." Remember: he's saying that this is a bad thing. Anything a woman did to gain power had to be done at the expense of male power, and that shit would not stand in his perverse world view.

There was an image of the white male as the natural leader of the world, that to criticize the white male is to demean him (which is the narcissistic way in which "political correctness" and "cancel culture" are defined by these pricks). Limbaugh didn't invent toxic masculinity, but he made it something to be embraced, something to aspire to for men, and you had to actively resist it. For many in the 1990s and since, it's easier to embrace this image of the white collar male as conqueror, the Attilas of the cubicles. It presents an outdated and even comforting way of ordering the world, but, of course, it was one that was based on a bullshit hierarchy and notions of gender and race that were outdated in the 1970s. 

Mark said, "The one image that sticks in my head is a close-up photo of him, looking up at his jowls, cigar stuck between his teeth, as if saying, 'Look what a tough son of a bitch I am.'" And on his show, he would assert an alpha male dominance over callers that was just tedious because he always could just cut them off and move on. Limbaugh couched all of this in biblical bullshit, yammering on about how Christianity needed to be taught in schools and that biblical notions of identity needed to be enforced. He embraced the evangelical nutzoids and they embraced him because they both pushed a patriarchal view that was the antithesis of the embrace of equality of the sexes, genders, sexualities, and races. That shit is comforting to too many people, and Limbaugh leaned into it, even as he rotated through so many wives it was as if he announced, "Bring me another woman. This one broke" before he moved on to the next one. 

Some will tell you that Limbaugh was funny, that his caller abortions and his jokey slams on the disabled and the deceased were just dark, edgy humor. Except this deaf bitch punched down most of the time, and that's not funny. Besides, that's what conservatives will always say when they're caught being complete fucks: we were joking. I read Limbaugh's fucking books. He wasn't joking. Chances are that he hated you and wanted you to be, at least, subservient to him, or, even, dead at his feet.

We are living in the United States that Rush Limbaugh was a large part of creating. He inspired Newt Gingrich to fuck up the running of Congress. He tore apart families like right-wing media and Donald Trump did in more recent decades. Hell, my brother listened to that brazen buffoon for a few years, and I regularly had to say, "No, fuck him. I wish he would choke to death on one of his cock-substitute stogies." He perverted media by substituting his bullshit lies for actual facts. He showed Roger Ailes that you could make shit-tons of money by spouting the most racist, divisive fuckery and laugh at the rubes while you counted the cash. He was cruel to the weak and made hate into a something to aspire to. Jesus, he made it fine for conservatives to not even pretend they gave a shit about people who weren't them and gave license for the right to use degrading language to anyone different. And he inspired all those even further devolved shit worms that came after him, like Hannity and Coulter and fucking Tucker Carlson. 

"He won," Mark said. "He made the Republican Party in his image: a bunch of fucking misanthropes with no sense of humor about themselves, and that's it. That's who they are for the foreseeable future. He's a big part of why their party is so broken, that us vs. them mentality." He didn't do it alone, but, goddamn, he gave the GOP license to treat legislating as a battle to the death. He fanned flames of the culture war until he could cackle over the conflagrations like a gleeful arsonist jacking off as his fires burned down schoolhouses. "I'm glad he lived to see Trump lose," Mark said, for, yes, Trump was the ideal Limbaugh president, a fake tough guy who thought his bravado and bullshit masculinity would make him a great leader. 

I hated Rush Limbaugh for over three decades. It was a visceral, burning hatred, the kind that has only been topped by a hatred for George W. Bush and Donald Trump. I fucking hate bullies, and that's what he was, always pushing around others through his sexism and racism and homophobia and Islamophobia. More than that, he was a terrorist, finding new targets to poison and electrocute and blow up. He didn't give a fuck how much damage he did as long as he got credit for doing it. He wanted you to feel inferior to him, like every half-assed, self-hating shitheel in history. And he arguably caused more death and destruction than ten Osama bin Ladens. It would take volumes to detail all the evil done by him and in his name.

Yeah, I fucking hope he died screaming. I fucking hope he was in just enough pain to feel it all without going into shock. If there's a hell, I hope he's next to Antonin Scalia, awaiting a train of hot, spiked demon dicks to ream his ass and mouth for eternity, two spurts of lava jizz coursing through him from each side until they fill his desiccated lungs, over and over again. 

Then he'll begin to come close to feeling all the suffering he caused on earth.

(Note: There are no fat jokes in here because I made enough of them over the years. Unlike Limbaugh, I don't do the same schtick forever.)

Texas Learns That Government Has to Do Something Other Than Restrict Abortion

In his State of the State address at the beginning of February, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott laid out five "emergency items" that the legislature can vote on within 60 days of the start of the session. These included passing a weak bail reform measure, punishing cities that "defund the police," protecting companies from lawsuits related to COVID-19, and doing something something "election integrity." The one infrastructure measure that was given emergency status was a genuinely good one: expanding broadband access for rural communities.  Of course, it's hard to use broadband when your power is out.

The rest of Abbott's agenda was the usual conservative culture war bullshit. "In this session, we need a law that insures that the life of every child will be spared from the ravages of abortion," Abbott said. And "we need to erect a complete barrier against any government official anywhere from treading on gun rights in Texas. Texas must be a Second Amendment sanctuary state." Oh, and don't worry. Your right to get coronavirus at church will be protected: "I want a law this session that prevents any government entity from shutting down religious activities in Texas." In other words, mostly cruel and dumb garbage that benefits no one except the politicians who have lied so much that the truth looks like a liberal conspiracy to their idiot hordes.

There was no talk about using tax funds from the economy Abbott bragged about to shore up the energy grid in Texas. There was actually nothing else about infrastructure other than making sure that Pornhub streams smoothly on the ranches of West Texas. But Abbott did say one other thing that is pretty relevant to the frozen clusterfuck the state has become in the last two days: "Texas prides itself on low regulations, but our response to the crisis revealed even more regulations that can be cut... I’m asking the legislature to make permanent some of the regulatory relief that are authorized. This will cut red tape and unleash the full might of the Texas economy."

I'm going to guess that the blackouts, low or no water, frozen and burst pipes, and the damage all that causes will have a greater economic impact on Texas than the "red tape" of regulations. And, to state the blatantly obvious, it was lack of regulation enforcement or regulations themselves that created this ice dildo Texas fucked itself with. See, Texas had a similar situation in 1989 and decided, "Ah, fuck it, we'll be fine." Then it happened again in 2011 and Texas decided, "Ah, fuck it, we'll be fine." 

Except really, it wasn't fine. To be fair, the Texas legislature did pass "a law in 2011 requiring power companies to file regular reports with the Texas Public Utility Commission about their weatherization efforts." But, you know, that doesn't mean anything was actually weatherized, although they talked about spending the money to prevent rolling blackouts without doing much because that's what the fuck happens in a state where the utilities barely have to answer to the government because capitalism and freedom.

In November, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas's Manager of Resource Adequacy Pete Warnken "assured the Legislature that the agency had studied a range of extreme weather scenarios for the coming winter and had determined, 'there is sufficient generation to adequately serve our customers.' But ERCOT only sets best practices for generators, unable to force them to better protect their equipment from the cold. State Rep. Gene Wu described it as, 'trusting producers to use profit motive to maintain production.'"

You got that? This isn't about the lies that Texas officials and right-wing media fuckstooges have told about wind power being the culprit for breaking the power grid in the state. (It's not. It's everything, which means that it's mostly natural gas issues because that's what generates most of the power in Texas.) It's about a state government that's been run by Republicans alone since 2003. It's about the conservative fuckery over the years, including deregulation, climate change denial, and refusal to spend on the basic shit that people need while instead worrying about whether or not the motherfucking Dallas Mavericks are playing the National Anthem before their games.

This is a climate disaster, with at least 10 people dead already and more misery on the way, including possible issues with the food supply chain. Abbott is blaming the Green New Deal, which is not a law anywhere, but, hey, it's better than saying, "Yeah, we fucked up royally for nearly a generation and need to be voted the fuck out of office before we kill more of you." Or you could listen to cockfleas like former governor and former Secretary of Energy Rick "Wait, You Mean the Job's Not Just About Oil" Perry saying, "Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business."

That's what these assholes think about you: Texans would rather freeze to death and starve than let the big ol' guvmint do the job that a motherfucking government is supposed to do. And that's where you come in, Texans. Your government can do more than pass anti-abortion laws and create gun sanctuaries, where rifles and pistols can run wild and free. It can actually make it so shit isn't miserable. Get on that.

Oh, by the way, Abbott is now saying that "reform at ERCOT would be an emergency item during the legislative session." Don't hold your breath that they'll actually, you know, regulate it.

Democrats Are Trying to Save the Republicans' Souls, But the GOP Prefers Damnation

Note on Saturday, 2/13: You could read all of this in past tense now. But it still stands. 

In their presentation of the ironclad case against Donald Trump, Democrats are offering Republicans that rarest of things in this time of wanton condemnation and belligerent tribalism: a chance at redemption. By cataloging Trump's sins against democracy and the stability of the nation, enabled and cheered on by most Republican senators and nearly all of the hooting maniacs in the Republican caucus in the House, yes, Democratic House managers have demonstrated that the Republican Party has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Trump Corporation. 

But they are not doing it merely to attack the craven lackeys of the disgraced former president. They are doing it to say, "This is what you've become. This is the man you have given the last shards of your wrecked integrity to." And then Democrats are giving Republicans this chance to untether themselves from Trump and his shrinking hordes of idiots. They are trying to save the debased souls of Republicans. It's a kindness, a mitzvah, as House manager Jamie Raskin eloquently placed the decision in terms of larger morality. 

Yet, almost assuredly, Republicans are going to vote for their own damnation. 

Right now, the only thing that can save the GOP from Trump is banning him from running for federal office. Trump knows the power he has over the party: he could, on a whim or on a grudge, start a third party and take a big chunk of Republicans with him. But that only works if he's on the top of the ticket in 2024. The number of rabid Don, Jr. devotees is gonna turn out to be pathetic, like low enough to make that desperate bastard cry more. So the equation is pretty simple: take a Trump run out of the picture and the Republican Party is free to go back to being basically the exact same thing it always was, a bunch of hateful motherfuckers who want to inflict maximum harm on the poor while enriching themselves and their donors but unburdened by the destructive oaf who will dominate them as long as he chooses to do so. 

Basically, you can break down the Republicans in the Senate into a few distinct categories in their relation to this reality:

You've got your ride-or-die ones, which includes the actual true believers (like quivering worms Mike Lee and Tommy Tuberville), Trump's ass remoras (like Lindsey Graham and Marsha Blackburn), and the fake Trump-humpers, like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who believe that they can take Trump's place as the God of the Yahoos once he's gone (which likely means they're gambling on him going to prison or being dead or too physically weak to run in 2024). Oh, and Rand Paul, but fuck that guy.

You've got your Sweet-Jesus-make-him-go-away ones, like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski. That also includes assholes like Ben Sasse, who wants to run for president but without being eclipsed by an orange shadow. Also, fuck that guy.

And you've got your supposedly-savvy ones who, to the extent that we know, are wrestling with their votes. That includes Mitch McConnell, who wants his fucking power without having to deal with Trump  but also wants to retain power in the likelihood that Trump's acquitted and is watching things like the treatment of Liz Cheney and trying to figure out how to fit his square dick in a round hole so he can get the fuck out of this relatively unscathed. McConnell knows just enough to tell senators to vote their consciences, but he's not brave enough to tell them to vote to convict. As for the rest in this group, you've probably got your "I want to convict, but I won't because I don't want all the death threats" crowd, as well as your "I want to acquit because I suck but I know he's guilty and, goddamnit, I might actually have a conscience on this one thing since my family was scared I was going to die on January 6." You see that in the eyes of someone like Rob Portman. Fuck that guy.

(Side note: This would be the time to get donors to the GOP to make a statement. Will corporations stop supporting senators who vote to acquit? Because that would change some minds pretty fuckin' quickly.)

Look, we're almost certain about how this is going to go. Yes, Republicans will take damnation because that's who they are. It's who they've been for decades. They have successfully manipulated class resentment to their favor. They have exploited racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia and homophobia and weaponized it. They will drive the working class and those in poverty to their graves rather than raise taxes on the wealthy and pretend that that's the American way and, really, at this point, it kind of is. Reagan let the evangelical crazies in the door to the GOP, and it's been wide-open ever since, and it's a straight line from that to QAnon and the Proud Boys and the Trumpists taking over the joint.

Democrats have given Republicans a gift, a way to begin to purge themselves and demonstrate that there is a glimmer of decency left in them. It couldn't be more obvious that Trump spent years getting his followers ready to commit violence in his name. The vote to convict couldn't be more obvious. Democrats are practically begging Republicans to take this opportunity. The question is whether they are too dumb, too awful, too greedy, and/or too short-sighted to take it.

But, if they don't, it's also a trap. Barring any last minute shocks, they will vote to acquit. When they do, Republicans are saying that they belong to Trump. They are his loyal curs and they're just fine with that, as they have been throughout his terrible presidency, supporting him on his savage cruelties and abhorrent egomania. They are just fine with his violence and lawlessness. They are fine with him threatening their lives. They are fine with him continuing to pervert and contort all aspects of the American political system. They don't give a fuck about democracy. If they can get his blessings and a kind word, it's all good. 

As I've said before, to continue to support Trump is evil. Some people justify their evil through a larger ideological frame to make themselves feel better. And some people just like being evil.

Younger Democrats Are All Out of Fucks to Give for Republicans' Feelings

Let us say, and why not, that you're a Democrat who came of age in this century and then got elected to Congress. Your adult experience of the Republican party really starts with George W. Bush and the Iraq "war" and the economic meltdown and the fucktastrophe that was the response to Hurricane Katrina. You don't fondly remember Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan getting their Irish on to cut deals. You don't give a goddamn about how chummy Bob Dole and George McGovern were. You don't give a fuck about how there used to be liberal Rockefeller Republicans or there were glory days of cooperation or any of that bullshit that people exaggerate like their dick size on a Grinder profile. You only know Republicans as the savage motherfuckers who have twice wrecked the country and who treated Barack Obama like shit, who blocked progress in every area, who filled the judiciary with brutal idiots with culture warrior and evangelical nutzoid street cred, and who whine like wounded bitches whenever anyone dares to call them on their fuckery.

Imagine how freeing it must be, how liberating to not be burdened by that history. Younger Democrats get it. They know that the Republican Party is just a bunch of cruel capitalism fanatics, Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and conspiracy maniacs. They deal with the GOP as it is, not the fantasy of how it was, not the fantasy of how it could be. 

That's why to those of us who have been waiting for this Democratic Party to finally emerge, who hoped that it would move beyond the torpor of tepid tradition and cancerous comity, these last few weeks have been like getting a breath of fresh air after being locked in a closet and having to inhale Joe Lieberman's farts for years. 

Look at where things are going: Democrats are embracing the agenda (heavily influenced by the Bernie Sanders left, which, despite what you may think of Sanders himself or some of his more dickish followers, has brought more energy and youth to the Democratic Party since Obama's first campaign, and that's a net good by any fucking stretch of your political imagination) that is supported by the majority of the American people. And most of it is supported by big majorities, like the approval of Biden's COVID relief bill is at roughly 60-66%, including at least a third of Republicans.  Who the fuck cares what Marco Rubio or Marsha Blackburn whine about when you've got that much of the public behind you? If you can't run on "We did what the country wanted us to do," then you suck. 

The Democrats who have run out of fucks to give about what Republicans think, believe, want, need, or feel are pushing the party leftward (if by "leftward," you mean, "Where nearly every other country in the fucking civilized world has been for decades and calls 'the middle'"). You see it in how vitally important raising the minimum wage is at last, as well as canceling student debt. You see it in how a push for a rational, compassionate immigration policy might actually get off the ground beyond reversing the xenophobic fucknuttery of the Trump administration. President Joe Biden's policies so far have been, on the whole, more progressive than I think anyone anticipated, and his "yeah, suck my balls, we'll go it alone" response to Republicans wanting to negotiate COVID relief to death was encouraging as hell. 

The older generation that gets on board will reap rewards, like not being primaried. For instance, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is no idiot, and he's following that leftward tilt to avoid a primary from someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And, frankly, the same goes for Nancy Pelosi's "you can eat my whole ass" approach to slamming through impeachment in the wake of Trump's traitorous encouragement of a coup attempt. Even more to the point, a Republican, fucking Mitt Romney sees the way the wind is blowing and has gotten behind an effort to reduce the number of children living in poverty through, Reagan wept, money from the government (and Biden is supporting it, too).

That's why it's beyond maddening when the traditionalists and the supposedly enlightened "moderate" Democrats rear their dumb fucking heads and advocate for shit like the filibuster, as if a Senate rule is more important than the will of the majority of the country on something like expanding health care, or like the completely dumb means-testing for the financial support in the COVID relief bill. Or even in the fucked way that Democrats are conducting the Senate trial for Trump. Call fuckin' witnesses. If we're throwing down over an insurrection, let's throw the fuck down.

This is not temporary. Democrats have developed a deep, deep bench since 2016, one that includes not only the Squad and Katie Porter, but newcomers like Cori Bush, Ritchie Torres, Jon Ossoff, and Raphael Warnock, all of whom understand that Republicans represent an existential threat to democracy and not just Democrats. They have been given no reason to give a single half-hearted fuck about the GOP. They're right, as are all of us who have been wanting this attitude for years. Maybe Trump finally scared the shit out of Democrats, as if they finally understood that you can't win a game when your opponent has wiped his ass with the rules.

Really, the Republican Party is only alive as long as Donald Trump wants it to be. That's how pathetic it is. That's how useless it is. Fuck them until they're buried in the cold, cold ground and govern as if we can actually fix the shit that needs fixing.

Republicans Want to Ignore the Trauma of the Capitol Riot Because Most of Them Are Guilty of Inciting It

I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again. I've had guns pointed at me multiple times. I've been in fights. I've done some weird shit that was dumb and dangerous. None of that made much of an impression on my psyche because I was fairly certain each time that I wasn't going to die. The one thing that sticks with me is one sound: the jiggling of a locked doorknob as someone tried to open the door to the bedroom I was in. No one else was supposed to be in the apartment of my then-partner. But at around 3 in the morning, from the bed, I heard the screen door open and then some prying at the front door and then footsteps and then a pause and then the metal knob being turned. This was before cell phones, and the only landline in the joint was in the living room, so calling the cops was out of the question. I yelled, "Whoever you are, I've got a gun" as, yes, I held in my hand the pistol that my partner kept under her bed, ready to shoot anyone who came through the door. It didn't come to that. They ran away and we discovered the only thing missing was the large knife that we had left on the counter in the mess we intended to clean in the morning. Whoever was there didn't intend to rob. They could have grabbed the TV and a couple of items and had a decent haul. They were there to kill or rape. Ever since that day, I have never felt entirely safe wherever I'm staying. It really is more a feeling. I don't really do that much differently, but I always double-check locks now since the fact that I happened to lock the door that night was potentially the difference between life and death. Or life and me shooting someone. 

That's trauma. That's the way trauma works. I don't like that my behavior changed due to it, but I don't fucking like that it happened and I don't fucking like that I really can't help the way I feel. I don't want to, but I just do. And what happened to me was mild. It's nothing compared to the victims of violent crimes who suffer physical and emotional damage. It's less than nothing compared to sexual assault survivors or war victims or, hell, soldiers, even. Or kids in a school shooting. But this shit stays with you, even if you made it out physically unscathed.

What happened to the members of Congress, their staffs, the building staff, and the police of January 6 was traumatic. I mean, Jesus fuck, imagine being a Democrat as you hear a crazed mob of conspiracy nuts hooting and yelling down the halls, shouting the names of Nancy Pelosi, the Squad, and others, a bunch of violent white people who broke windows and doors, who overwhelmed the Capitol police, who you know are hopped up on calls for them to "Stop the Steal," who have been talking openly about spilling the blood of those who oppose Donald Trump, their leader who gave them permission to make sure that Democrats and turncoat Republican got the message and ordered them to march on the Capitol. Imagine barricading yourself in an office with others, piling furniture against the door, hiding in closets and under desks, hoping that they don't find you, that you just wanted to come to work and do your job as, say, Rep. Ayanna Pressley's chief of staff and now you don't know if you'll get out alive because right outside the door is a literal lynch mob, one that has sent your boss and you a continuous stream of death threats, one that had set up an actual, useable gallows outside your place of work. The legit fear of being killed rewires you.

We don't have to totally imagine it because we're hearing from members and their staff about how they were traumatized by the events of that day, and, really, all the days after with much of the right's reaction to the riot. Conservatives mocked people who said they felt that their lives were in danger, like Tucker "I Always Look Like I'm Trying to Convince You I Didn't Fart" Carlson saying of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, "When the most harrowing thing you've done in life is pass freshman sociology at Boston University, every day is a brand new drama." He sneered that out of his smug, dumb face on January 14, when the Democrat had said that she and her staff had "narrowly escaped death" in the Capitol. 

On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez explained in detail what happened to her on that day, and, yeah, by any measure, it was gut-wrenchingly frightening. She framed the experience of trauma within another trauma she has suffered in her life, a sexual assault, and the PTSD  that comes after that traumatic event. Of course, dickhead conservatives even mocked her for that, as if those who didn't experience any of this have a single fucking right to say how those who did handle it.

Those in Congress who wish to deny that trauma, those who wish for the ones who incited it to go unpunished, those who just want to move on without figuring out why this happened and how to stop it from ever fucking happening again, they are also participants in traumatizing their colleagues and others. And it's easy to see why. Because the nation as a whole is suffering from series of collective traumas, from the pandemic to the economic turmoil to Trump and the Republicans' effort to overturn the 2020 election. 

That last part is key because it's impossible to get over the abject cruelty (and greed) of what the GOP and conservative media did to this already weakened, beaten down country. And they essentially split the country into those who were driven mad believing the election lies and those who were anywhere from worried to shit-scared about what the mad mob would do. And then they fucking did it, and we are merely fortunate that the insurrection wasn't far, far worse than the 5 people who died that day, along with the over 100 injuries to law enforcement and others.

So when a GOP senator says that impeaching and trying Trump is a waste of time, when Republican senators refuse to even entertain the idea of saying that Trump is guilty of inciting the insurrection, what they are revealing is that they know they are guilty, too, with some, like the odious cockmites Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, directly guilty through encouraging the mob prior to the riot. And they can't even excise the garbage Republicans in the House who have doubled down on threats of violence and the overwhelming majority of whom voted to overturn the presidential election. Frankly, if you supported Trump at all during this attempted coup, you are guilty, too.

These motherfuckers can't wish the trauma away. They know that they fucked up, that they finally went too far. And their refusal to accept responsibility does continuing damage to not just the Congress, but to the country as a whole. We are all the victims of the GOP.

The Terrorists Are in the House. Let's Unify Over Getting Rid of Them.

Let's do this together, shall we? Let's take hands and peer over into the abyss and hope that it doesn't peer back. Okay, into the mouth of madness we go...

Here's what we know that Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene believes just from things she has said, written, or responded to positively, more or less in order from completely barking mad to dangerously batshit (although the line is mighty, mighty thin):

1. She has expressed support for the existence of the so-insane-it-may-as-well-be-scrawled-in-shit-on-a-padded-room-wall QAnon idea know as "frazzledrip." According to the shit scrawlers, the name comes from a file on Anthony Weiner's laptop that contains a video that shows Hillary Clinton and Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, torturing a child, including wearing her face skin as a mask, in order to scare her so her  blood...and it's all fucking awful and dumb and anyone who believes it should not fucking be allowed in Walmart, let alone Congress. Greene commented on a mention of it on Facebook, "I post things sometimes to see who knows things. Most the time people don’t," which is what you say when you don't know what's real and you're a goddamn lunatic.

2. She said that mass shootings like Parkland and Las Vegas are planned events meant to give an excuse to authorities to confiscate your guns, and, holy shit, she loves her fuckin' guns like they're a vibrator she uses so much that she's named it. Of the Vegas massacre at a country music festival, she really said it was chosen specifically to get new gun control laws: "Maybe you accomplish that by performing a mass shooting into a crowd that is very likely to be conservative, very likely to vote Republican, very likely to be Trump supporters, very likely to be pro-Second Amendment and very likely to own guns. You make them scared, you make them victims, and you change their mindset. And then, possibly, you can pass anti-gun legislation." As you could say for every single one of these, she offered no actual evidence. It's like insisting, "My husband comes home late every night smelling of semen and Axe body spray, so he must be pretending to be gay in order to expose the conspiracy to allow transgender people to choose their bathroom."

3. She thinks that the Rothschilds (google it - basically, it's shorthand for "Jews," just like "Soros") and a California energy company used "space solar generators" to fire a laser that started the wildfires in that state in order to clear land for a high-speed rail system that will financially benefit the above and Jerry Brown and, Jesus fuck, I feel dumber just for having written that. In her hilarious Facebook post on the space laser, Greene assures us, "I'm posting this in speculation because there are too many coincidences to ignore." If you've ever wondered who the fuck are the people who post this shit, well, they're in Congress now.

4. She has suggested that Nancy Pelosi should be executed by firing squad for treason and that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should be hanged for something something Iran, and you gotta imagine that that kind of shit is an HR nightmare.

5. Oh, this is not to mention her racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and generally despicable world view where white Christians who support Donald Trump are the only people who should have any say. In one truly fucking idiotic act, she marched into the Capitol in February 2019 to try to get Reps. Omar and Tlaib (you know, part of the Squad, the Moby Dick to the nutzoids Ahab) to retake their oaths of office on a Bible rather the Quran they had used because she thinks that's illegitimate. Except you can take your oath with your hand on anything: "I swear by the crisp and stuck-together pages of this copy of the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom..." The oath is important, not the book you fondle while taking it.

And that's just Greene. Gun nut and food poisoning enthusiast Lauren Boebert and Nazi-lover (and that's not hyperbole) Madison Cawthorn, both also actually at least as dumb as Louis Gohmert, deserve their own lists of bullshit. By the way, none of these are working class, everyday people suffering from economic anxiety. Greene is fucking wealthy, so she's just attention hungry, power mad, and bugfuck insane.

This is the kind of shit that Republicans and the news media ignore when they're asking Democrats why they're not "unifying" the Congress or the country. It's beyond ludicrous. Democrats are being asked to work with people who have stated that they should be killed by mob law. You don't "unify" with your terrorists. You unify with others to get rid of the terrorists, and you tell anyone who wants to let the terrorists terrorize without consequences to go fuck themselves.

The question should be posed to Republicans: "Why won't you join with Democrats to condemn the fucking violent assholes in your caucus and call for their removal? Wouldn't that make Congress function better? Why do you hate unity?"

But, instead, we're supposed to be worried because President Joe Biden is signing a lot of executive orders to unfuck the country that the terrorist leader fucked. 

Hawley, Greene, and the Erasure of Violence on Right

Every once in a while, I'm damned to click on a clip from Fox "news" to see what one of their cabal of vile, brainwashing, pillow-hawking psychopaths has on their nightly snuff programs. Last night, Sean Hannity, who is desperately trying to show that he's still as racist and cruel as new network slime king Tucker Carlson, talked to Missouri Senator Josh "Future Supplement-Selling Talk Radio Douche" Hawley about Hawley being silenced by "big tech" and "the mob" in the media and the left because, as Hannity put it, "you happen to have a view that you want to audit an election."

Then Hawley and Hannity jerked each other off for a few minutes about how all those entities are engaged in an effort "to try to censor all dissent, to try to shut down all opposition to try to silence half of America," as Hawley hawed to millions of viewers non-silently. Hannity scoffed hannitily, "Not only did they want your book cancelled, but they also wanted you removed." And Hawley hawed, "I'm not going to be intimidated by the liberal mob" before they both ejaculated when Hannity brought up Hunter Biden and the segment was over.

You notice what was missing there? Yeah, the fact that shit was happening to Hawley because he helped inspire a riot at the Capitol where 5 people lost their lives and over 100 cops were injured. No one gave a happy monkey fuck about Josh Hawley and his yammering ultra-Christian bullshit until people fucking died. That's why he lost his book deal (although he got another). That's why he should be kicked out of the Senate. Not because he "happens to have a view," but because he cheered on an insurrection and then was a syphilitic cock about it after. And it's fucking rich to see Hawley talk about a "liberal mob" when it was a real mob, some with actual pitchforks, that stormed the joint where he works.

Sometimes this refusal to acknowledge violence reaches completely deranged denialism, like those who believe that school shootings are false flags or simply didn't happen. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from a particularly batshit district of Georgia (no, seriously, it's the area that inspired James Dickey to write the book Deliverance) happens to have agreed with other crazies that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was a false flag "planned" event in order to, I suppose, allow the government to take away guns, even though Florida and the U.S. were totally run by Republicans then.

One of the survivors of that shooting was David Hogg, who has since become a political activist, especially on gun control legislation, something that doesn't really seem to be that hard to comprehend. But in 2020, Greene posted a video of herself stalking Hogg through the streets of DC near the Capitol to hector him about his support of red flag laws, which say that authorities can take firearms away from people "who are deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or to others." 

Greene repeatedly badgers Hogg, who walks on ignoring her, until she finally gives up to face the camera and say, with all outrage, that Hogg had meetings with 30 senators while she couldn't meet with any. "This guy, with his George Soros funding and his major liberal funding, has got everything," she really says while whining that she "got zero." Then she says of Hogg, "He's a coward. He can't say one word because he can't defend his stance."

Putting aside that no one owes someone who harangues them in the middle of the street while filming a single fucking second of their time, there is one major goddamn thing that Greene leaves out. That, of course, would be the fact that, less than two years before Marjorie Taylor Greene went all Karen at him, David Hogg had to hide in a fucking closet with his classmates while a motherfucking gunman was shooting his fellow students to death at his school. The fact that Greene either willfully ignores this or is too fucking stupid with bullshit conspiracy theories to grasp it speaks to the way in which the right has found it necessary to simply act as if horrific violence has not occurred. It's the only fucking way in which anything they believe can make sense: Ignore the unpleasant shit that shows how fucked their beliefs are. 

Last week, also on Hannity's dumb show, Rep. Jim "Wow, I Look Exactly Like the Kind of Guy Who Would Cover Up Sexual Assault" Jordan described the impeachment of Donald Trump after the Capitol riot as "this obsession with going after the president even after he's now left office." In the same hour, which is all about licking Hannity's dinky scrote, Rep. Matt "Twelvehead" Gaetz mocked the idea that Republicans encouraged violence: "I guess they've got caught us. Lauren Boebert is giving recon tours for insurrectionists, I abducted the Lindbergh baby, Jim Jordan knows what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, and Devin Nunes was on the grassy knoll." That's hilarious because I'd totally believe that creepy-ass Matt Gaetz would kidnap a baby.

And speaking of babies, this is not even to get into the most deceitful whore on Fox, Tucker Carlson, calling opposition to QAnon fucknuttery the government's "attempt to control what you believe." You could say the same fucking thing about Osama bin Laden.

This erasure of violence by the insurrectionist right is legitimately enraging, and it's of a piece with their whole effort to simply deny reality. It's not "a view" that the election was fraudulent. It's a lie, a clear lie, in that the facts demonstrate that it's not true. You can't have an opinion that's a lie unless you're a fucking idiot or a con artist. So it's a deliberate, manipulative attempt to sow discord in the population. 

If that leads to violence, if your intentional effort to rile people up to the point where they take action ends up in violence, then fucking own that shit. Either embrace it and say it's what you wanted or be a fucking adult and say your were wrong. But ignoring it or pretending it didn't happen or wasn't a big deal is cowardly and cruel and very Republican.

(Note: Of course, the flip side of this is the way in which conservatives will unrelentingly bring up violence that they can manipulate for their benefit. See: any crimes they can use to scare people or the violence at the mostly peaceful Black Lives Matters protests, which was condemned by nearly all Democrats. Of course, to flip it back, the denial of systemic violence against Black people is an article of faith for conservatives.)

"Unity" Is Another Word for "Clean Up the Fucking Mess Republicans Made"

Republicans are returning to dickish form with the speed of a rabid chipmunk that got into the meth stash. It was to be expected. They should feel chastened, humbled even, by the events of the last few weeks. They should be offering a hand to Democrats, you know, the party that's not responsible for attempting to overturn the election, the party that isn't filled with assholes who took a shit in the Capitol, the party that didn't enable a twice-impeached president commit every depravity he could conceive of. They should have gone to the leaders in each house of Congress (who are both Democrats) and President Joe Biden (also a Democrat) and admitted that they fucked up before begging for forgiveness and saying that they are willing to get behind some shit. 

But they didn't because they're Republicans, and Republicans are always and forever motherfuckers. And fucking mothers is just what motherfuckers do. It's right there in the word.

Yesterday and even before, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (wow, it feels awesome to write both of those) spoke of the need for unity in the country. Harris ended her speech at the Inauguration concert by saying Biden will lead us "To do what is hard, to do what is good. To unite, to believe in ourselves, believe in our country, believe in what we can do together." Biden mentioned the word "unity" 8 times in his Inaugural Address.

So, of course, Republicans were instantly cockheads about it. Senator Rand Paul, who always looks like he just finished having his dog lick peanut butter off his balls, decried Biden's speech because "much of it is thinly veiled innuendo calling us white supremacists," which Biden didn't say, but Rand Paul sure heard because, well, it's true. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (pretty fuckin' awesome to write that, too) is shitcanning whatever brief moment of comity he felt after nearly being butchered by the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol and is now being very much himself in demanding the Democrats play nice on the filibuster. All of this is just the start, along with Senator Josh "Fisted Himself" Hawley blocking one of Biden's cabinet nominees and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy saying about the concept of unity, "You can’t achieve that if your focus is more on the Paris accord, ending the Keystone Pipeline." Even reporters have gotten on board with questions that are essentially "Oh, you're not allowing the GOP to run the government you just go elected to run. Where's your unity god now?"

Except Biden didn't say that he wanted to kiss the filthy GOP ass to get unity. He just wanted everyone to calm the hell down while he and the Democrats try to unfuck the country that Republicans under Trump ran a train on. He was pretty fuckin' clear on what he meant: "I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real...History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity. We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward."

Unity ain't singing "Kumbaya" around the campfire. It's not being a dick while cleaning up the fucking mess that the GOP made and asking, "You wanna help out with this? Grab a fucking broom or sit the fuck down."

Lemme give you an example of this. I was having a socially-distanced visit with my pal Doug, who is an electrician. This was after the election, and I brought up how Biden was going to implement an actual national plan on dealing with COVID-19. Doug, who insists he's not a Trump-humper (and he's criticized Trump in the past), said he thought Biden's family would profit in some way from the vaccine and that all politicians are corrupt. I said that was a thing that Republicans generally say to excuse their much larger corruption. And he said, "What about Hunter Biden?"

Now, I could have lost my shit and attacked, except Doug would have just been hurt and it wouldn't have achieved anything. So, instead, I took a breath and asked what he thought he knew about Hunter Biden. And we went through it, point by point, calmly, with both of us listening to each other (even though I was totally correct). I'll write about that conversation another time, but the point is that this is what President Biden meant by "unity." Figure shit out. Don't scream at each other and walk away. And, frankly, it's Republicans who have done the screaming and walking. 

Yesterday was good. The push to wipe up after Trump's legacy of dropping his pants and frantically jacking off on everything around him has been great so far. But don't let yesterday's good feelings delude you into believing that Republicans have changed at all. Don't let the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment trick you. They are a pit of vipers, looking for an excuse to strike.

However, as someone who was opposed to Biden during the Democratic primaries, I've now reached a point where I'm glad it's him in the Oval Office. The man has been there and seen it all. He's negotiated with Republicans when they did so in good faith and when they did so in bad faith. And it's entirely possible that Biden has reached the "don't give a single fuck" age and point where he really means, "Unity with us or death to your party." Or that's just wishful thinking.

Martin Luther King Would Fuck the Insurrectionists' Shit Up (2021 Edition)

Throughout his too-short life, Martin Luther King, Jr. called "bullshit" on what was motivating racists who violently opposed the Civil Rights Movement and the work that King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference were doing non-violently. He saw through the rhetoric and called it what it was: lies. 

Here he is in December 1959 in his Address at the Fourth Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks had taken her stand by not giving up her seat a few years earlier: "There is great need for positive leadership from the moderates of the white South in this tense period of transition. Unfortunately today, the leadership of the white South is by and large in the hands of close-minded extremists. These persons gain prominence and power by the dissemination of false ideas, and by appealing to the deepest fears and hates within the human mind." See, King understood that lying and fearmongering were the tools of those trying to maintain their white power structures. 

That fear even bled over to other whites, ones who didn't believe what the racists believed but didn't act to stop them. King said, "There are in the white South millions of people of goodwill whose voices are yet unheard, whose course is yet unclear, and whose courageous acts are yet unseen. Such persons are in Montgomery today. These persons are often silent today because of fear of social, political, and economic reprisals."

And it's all, all, all just so fucking familiar, even now. 

King was a realist about how long it would take to achieve the goals of the SCLC and how difficult it would be. But he also saw hope in reaching out to those fearful whites: " In the name of God, in the interest of human dignity, and for the cause of democracy, I appeal to these white brothers to gird their courage, to speak out, to offer the leadership that is needed. Here in Montgomery we are seeking to improve the whole community, and we call upon the whites to help us. Our message to the white community is simply this: We who call upon you are not so-called outside agitators. We are your Negro brothers whose sweat and blood have also built Dixie."

Later in his life, King articulated in terms of morality the fight between Blacks who wanted to live with the same rights as white people and the whites who desperately tried to prevent that, and he warned that Black Americans should not imitate the immorality of whites in power. This is from his August 1967 Address Delivered at the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention, titled "Where Do We Go From Here?" King said, "What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. Now what has happened is that we've had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times."

Damn, that last sentence is such a brilliant explanation of how power is used against the powerless. This ideal of power that is moral has always seemed like pipe dream, but it always seemed possible until the last 4 years under this most immoral of presidents. 

So Martin Luther King would fuck the shit up of the racist insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the legitimate government because he had seen through the same bullshit that was used as justification for their uprising. It wasn't to protect the vote or the Constitution or any of that. It was because they believed the lies and they acted on the fear and they wanted to assert the immoral power of their whiteness. King saw them all for who they are: cowards who cannot stand a future where that shield of whiteness doesn't grant them the shield of privilege.

We Could Have Dealt With This Shit Years Ago If Republicans Hadn't Been Dicks About Their Extremists

I keep thinking about Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who became Barack Obama's first Secretary of Homeland Security. In April 2009, Republicans and conservative groups were demanding that she resign because her department had so deeply insulted right-wing Americans. See, DHS's Extremism and Radicalization Branch (Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division) in coordination with the FBI, released a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," and it was pretty much straight up and down accurate in describing how nutzoid right-wingers, almost all of them white people, were becoming terrorists, driven to utter despair by the dual insults of the Bush-induced, severe economic downturn and the election of the first black president. To the writers of the report, those factors "present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment." 

What pissed off Republicans? Well, truth be told, it's because they recognized even then that their base was made up largely of assholes who were part of this toxic soup of racism and delusion. But they said that it was because, as then-House Minority Leader John "Human Ashtray" Boehner put it, "When you look at this report on right-wing extremism, it includes ... about two- thirds of Americans, who, you know, who might go to church, who may have served in the military, who may be involved in community activities." The report actually warned that religion was one of the driving factors behind right-wing extremist violence, as seen by, oh, hell, the murders and bombings connected to clinics where abortions were performed. 

The part that really upset ranting Republicans representatives like then-chief spokesjerk Michelle Bachmann and still-in-Congress Virginia Foxx and John Carter was that the report said, "Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities."

Carter, who was a big-time birther conspiracy nut and who voted last week to overturn the election results, whined, "One of the things they tell us in this report is very sad in light of what our Army has been going through, which is to watch out for returning, disgruntled military veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan in that they have the potential to be right-wing terrorists." You'll note that there is no call for greater mental health care or financial assistance to veterans.

For the complaining assholes, it's like Gulf War vet and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had never existed. And Napolitano apologized to veterans for any misunderstanding after Republicans lost their shit more, even calling a hearing where Napolitano ended up backing away from the report instead of shoving it down their fucking throats. It wasn't just in Congress, of course. Right-wing media and conservatives groups attacked, like the American Legion (motto: "Our halls smell like old ass"), whose leader said, stupidly, "I think it is important for all of us to remember that Americans are not the enemy." 

Yeah, except they are. And everything that's happened not just last Wednesday at the Capitol but all around this country for the decade plus since that report was issued has proved it true. We're learning that more and more American military veterans were part of the insurrection on January 6, including Ashli Babbit, the Air Force veteran who went full QAnon and got shot and killed for trying to break into the Capitol.

They were fucking right back in 2009. Here's another part about what drove the militia movement in the 1990s that was still going in 2009:  "Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties."

Want more? Here: "Prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and 'end times' prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons." Pretty scarily on point, right? 

And there's a whole fucking section about how extremists used fear of undocumented immigrants coming into the country to recruit for militias and other groups. (I'm using "militia" because that's the lingo in the report. A militia is more rightly called a "domestic terrorist cell.")

I'll say it again: They were fucking right in 2009. We were fucking right when we on the left were yelling about right-wing extremists. But when Republicans and conservative dickheads lost their shit over the report, the new Obama administration backed down on DHS going after white terrorists. I guess they still had the naive hope that they could reason with Republicans, and this was a bone they tossed them. 

But let's be clear that Republicans threw a shit fit at the idea that their base was a bunch of violent crackpots, racists, and assholes. Wait, lemme clarify that. They were upset that they would have to admit that their base was a bunch of violent crackpots, racists, and assholes. So they fucked over the country to score cheap political points and show how they could stand up to the black president. That's how we got dozens of right-wing extremist attacks in the last 12 years. That's how we got Charlottesville. That's how we got Trump being able to be openly, wildly racist with no consequences for that until this past week. That's how we got members of Congress afraid of other members of Congress harming them. If Republicans had seen that report and said, "Yeah, wow, fuck, that's bad. We should act on it," how different might things be now. Instead, they took it and shit on it and handed it back and said, "Go fuck yourself with it." And then they shot down just about every opportunity to really do something about the white terrorists who are their base because to admit they were terrorists was to admit that their whiteness wouldn't protect them. 

Maybe now. Maybe at last. Maybe this dam finally broke.

So there should be no fucking mercy anymore for the Republicans who abetted this madness. It's all out there now, motherfuckers. You decided to sow. Now reap that shit and accept that you deserve to be tossed into the political trashcan. 

They Have to Acknowledge Biden Won Fair and Square

The nation cannot move past the events of last Wednesday without one simple, obvious step: our leaders have to say, clearly, with no equivocation, with no bullshit conditions, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 general election fairly and legitimately, with no voter fraud, no cheating, no Dominion machine fuckery, none of that. If the MAGA-huffing members of Congress and state officials won't do that, then they need to be sanctioned, censured, expelled and/or fired. 

There. That should be the bottom line before we talk about "healing" and "unity," two hopeful words that have been used as weapons of intimidation by Republicans desperate to shed their complicity in the insurrection at the Capitol. And I'm saying that all Republicans have been complicit, for, truly, to have been a Republicans for the last four years means, almost to a person, to have enabled Donald Trump, which led to the attacking shitheels to even get close to murdering legislators and the Vice President. 

Besides, the country already needed to heal and unify in the wake of this destructive fucknado of a presidency. Joe Biden was talking about it constantly. Instead, after the election, Republicans whipped their cretins and troglodytes into a fever pitch, telling them to shit on unity and piss on healing, with some telling them implicitly and some telling them explicitly that "war" and "combat" and "threats" were going to be needed to keep power. With perhaps a couple of particular dumbasses as exceptions (looking at you, Gohmert), it was a cynical ploy that either whipsawed against them or ended up exactly where they wanted it: with violence and coup and assassination threats hanging over anyone who would challenge the rabble's belief in Trump's fantasy victory. 

Yeah, you sons and daughters of bitches don't get to set the terms of how to get over this. You already failed the basic decency test, along with civics class. Prove you deserve anything more than condemnation and exile. So you motherfuckers gotta start by cleaning up the goddamn mess you made and say the truth: Trump lost. Biden won. 

The whiniest shit you hear from the MAGA/Q crowd (for, really, there is barely separation between them now) is that Democrats never accepted Trump's victory in 2016, which is utter bullshit. Yeah, we were pissed off about it because, you know, we fucking lost. We knew there were factors that influenced the vote, like Russian hacking and trolling and James Comey's big fucking mouth. We thought it was fucked up that Clinton won won the popular vote by millions but still lost. We know for a fact that Republicans pass laws to suppress the votes of non-white (and likely Democratic) voters. They've admitted as much. But the belief that there was actual machine hacking and other vote-changing or ballot-stuffing chicanery was limited to one corner of the Left, and virtually no one in Congress or Democratic leadership said anything of the sort. No one gave those things any oxygen. We did find it frightening that Trump denied any Russian interference and refused to acknowledge that reality because the interference was in his favor. It needed to be investigated. But he still won the goddamn election. And don't fucking talk about impeachment being the same thing as "overturning an election." Just fuck off with that stupidity.

The both-sides shit is psychotic. Tonight, in the debate over the symbolic resolution calling on Mike "Riding Bitch to the Bitter End" Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and get Trump out of power, GOP Rep. Lisa McClain compared Trump riling people into storming the Capitol to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking why there aren't more uprisings (which was about migrant parents uprising over having their kids taken from them at the border) and other supposedly intemperate remarks. McClain said everyone is to blame in order to appeal to a fake idea of unity, to letting this little kerfuffle at the Capitol that killed 6 people go because Maxine Waters said Democrats should harass Sarah Huckabee at restaurants. Except the difference is that, and let me make this perfectly clear so that even fucking indecent, ignorant shits like McClain can hear it: Trump. Is. Lying. All the Republicans are lying about the election. Democrats were reacting to real shit. Families were being broken up at the border. Black men and women are being murdered by the cops. We protest the real world. MAGA cretins are protesting a fiction. That's the motherfucking difference. 

Right now, as more Republicans start to realize that they'd better get off the Trump-tanic before it breaks in two, they need to understand that there is a price to heal, and they have to pay it. Tell the truth. Joe Biden won. You lied about the rest. Say it like the truth you know it is. Or fucking sink.

Oh, and sacrifice the Republicans who fanned the flames most, like devolved cockmites like Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, and the mightiest cockmite of them all, Ted Cruz. Purge the government of these bastards. Don't forget to kick out the Q nuts. And then we can get to the healing and unifying over destroying Trump.

Random Observations on an Insurrection

1. This was inevitable. Anyone even casually observing the last five years knew that the Trump reign was going to end in violence. Unless you willfully put blinders on and truly believe the bullshit fairy tale of "This is not who we are." This is very much who we are. We have always been a nation filled with racist, incoherent yahoos who are on the verge of violence and whose white privilege protects them in ways that no Black or Muslim person would ever be. Those yahoos just needed a leader to tell them to go and they were gonna go, and, in Donald Trump, they found their leader, someone who is as devolved and cretinous as they are, with the illusion of strength and courage and success, all lies, all fantasy. 

So when Trump asked his MAGA drones to show up in Washington, DC for a rally on the day that Congress would certify that Trump lost and Joe Biden won the presidency, what the fuck else would you expect to happen? And then he implored them to march to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting. Oh, sure, he dropped in the word "peacefully," but he also told them, "You have to show strength, and you have to be strong." Whether he intended violence or not (and I think he was desperately hoping for violence because that's the kind of bitch he is), the idiots who think Joe Biden is a pedophile and hundreds of thousands of votes just disappeared heard exactly what they wanted to hear: It was finally, at long last, go time.

2. It could have been much, much worse. The motherfuckers built a gallows in front of the Capitol building. They talked about hanging members of Congress. And if you want to blindly dismiss that as hyperbolic bluster, go fuck yourself. These fucking animals had zip ties with them. There were fucking pipe bombs found, as well as a cooler filled with Molotov cocktails. They fucking vandalized the joint, wrecking shit and scrawling "Murder the media" on a door. The intention was to harm people. They killed a member of the Capitol police with a fire extinguisher. Do not have a single iota of doubt: If they could have gotten their hands on a Democratic member of Congress or Mitt Romney or another Republican they see as disloyal to their Orange King, they would have murdered them. Christ, imagine if they got to Ilhan Omar or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representatives who they have been told are enemy agents. And if you think that's paranoid nonsense, then you put yourself in the shoes of the Senators and Representatives in that building, hearing the doors and windows break while a hooting mob of dullards who have been told that you hate them and their America come streaming down the hallway towards where you are. You'd have shit yourself in fear. They wanted to take over by force. They wanted a coup. This was an insurrection by people who believe a gigantic lie that is being cynically propagated by Republicans. You don't bring a Confederate flag into the Capitol unless you're making a pretty clear point about what you think of the United States government.

3. Every single Republican who ever enabled Donald Trump, and that includes supporting his campaign, voting for his judges and his fucking bullshit wall, voting against his impeachment and removal from office, separating families and caging children, going along with and encouraging his denial about how deadly COVID-19 is, and so much more horrible shit, cannot be allowed to weasel out of their complicity. This didn't happen without Republicans rolling their eyes at and waving off Trump's extravagant fuckery. They made a deal with the Devil, and that spike-dicked motherfucker is ready to sodomize some souls. So I don't wanna hear about how brave and patriotic Mitch McConnell's speech was where he said that Biden won and Trump lost. I don't wanna hear how Lindsey Graham redeemed himself with his call to speak the truth to MAGA cretins. Even Republicans like Adam Kinzinger, who has been outspoken in his outrage at Trump's refusal to concede, don't get a pass when they spent their entire time in Congress helping Trump.  I don't wanna hear about the conscience that the now-resigning members of the administration have suddenly discovered like a long-lost, beat-up teddy bear. No, fuck all of you. This didn't happen without your blithe acceptance of every bowl of shit Trump fed you. You anonymously spoke against Trump while being too fucking cowardly to go on the record. You should all have a large "Trump" carved into your foreheads so that for the rest of your lives, everyone will know where you stood when your country was falling the fuck apart. 

3a. By the way, hope you enjoyed when Donald Trump, Jr. declared that "This isn't their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump's Republican Party." Yeah, you're fucking owned by these grifters. 

3b. And, always, fuck Mike Pence.

4. What a bunch of pussies these MAGA cretins are. They started claiming almost immediately that Antifa (which is not an organization) leftists had infiltrated their nice peaceful march and caused the mayhem. Well, that'd be fucking news to Trump, who, in one of his now-deleted tweets, talked about what "great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long" they are, and that he loved them.  I thought the Nazi tattoos were a pretty good indicator of who was there. Jesus fuck, just own this shit, MAGA fucknuts. This is something your movement did. Stop trying to blame others for your violence. Goddamn, Black Lives Matter protesters owned their violence. And they were treated a fuck of a lot worse by police because they didn't glisten in whiteness. Half of Trump supporters are celebrating the violence and another half are saying, "Whoa, that's not my club." Sorry, but you're the Muslims now. Show them the picture of the fuckin' MAGA troglodyte grinning in Nancy Pelosi's chair and ask them, "Won't you condemn the violence committed by your fellow believers?"

5. If nothing is done to constrict Trump, whether through impeachment and removal or the 25th Amendment, then you can bet that shit is going to go crazy again on January 20, when Biden and Harris are inaugurated. That's the response to anyone saying that we need to look to the future. Punishing people is about the future. It tells others that there are consequences to their actions in order to stop people from doing this shit in the future, and those consequences cannot just be that, well, gosh, maybe they'll lose their reelection. Actually charge people with sedition, including members of Congress and Trump, not just the regular assholes who have had their heads filled conspiracies and lies from every piece of media they consume. Yeah, those pathetic fucks should be punished, but they are far from acting in a vacuum. (Right after posting this, Nancy Pelosi said 25th him or we'll impeach the motherfucker. Good on her.)

5a. Honestly, is there a single goddamn reason to leave Trump in office other than you don't want to bother with removing him? It's not like he's been doing the job.

6. And, in the future, listen to us on the left when we say that someone is a goddamned danger. We were right about George W. Bush. We were right about Trump. We knew the former was a vile dunderhead; we knew the latter was a maniac who couldn't handle the job and couldn't give a shit about learning it and whose followers were going to turn violent. We were right. Everyone who said not to worry was wrong. Everyone who said that there's no difference between Democratic and Republican candidates was wrong. Everyone who told us that Trump didn't mean what he said was wrong. Every media outlet that thought Trump was a joke was wrong. We were right, all of us sad Cassandras. And we'll be right in the future. 

7. By the way, Democrats won the fucking Senate. That happened yesterday with two Senate runoff victories in Georgia. And Trump's and the Republicans' failures continue as we had the highest number of COVID deaths on a single day yesterday. We have so fucking much work to do.

Trump's Madness Has Made Fools of Everyone Who Thought He'd Give Up on Overturning the Election

I'd like to say a hearty "eat shit" and "go fuck yourselves" to all the oh-so-clever pundits and politicians who assured us that Donald Trump was just throwing a little tantrum back in November when he first started declaring there were massive illegalities in voting in the presidential election and he really won. That starts with the unnamed "GOP official" who said, "What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?... It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave." Motherfucker, you were about as wrong as Lin Wood screech-tweeting QAnon gobbledygook where John Roberts eats or assaults babies or something. 

To anyone who once said this was about real concerns about voter fraud or hinky behavior by election officials or Dominion whatevers, including all the members of Congress who have decided to shitcan the votes of millions of Americans because they didn't vote for the right candidate, as well as the conservative media shit factory that takes pride in nuzzling up to Trump's waxy taint, he made fucking fools out of you. The moment Trump said, "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state," the whole fucking pretext for any of this spurious shit was swept away. This was about one goddamn thing: Making sure Trump doesn't go to prison...oh, wait, I mean...Making sure that Trump stays in the White House.

The thing that struck me about Trump's hourlong crime spree over the phone with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is how wildly sexist the whole thing was. He shut down his own attorney, a woman with the unfortunate name of Cleta Deatherage Mitchell (no, really, the female "Cletus"). He  accused a woman who is a Georgia election worker of running ballots multiple times, or, as Trump dunderheadedly put it, "She stuffed the ballot boxes. They were stuffed like nobody has ever seen them stuffed before," which, to be fair, is so dumb that it's fucking hilarious. But, of course, it's not dumb to the woman, who has been smeared all over right-wing Nutsylvania, and thus has gotten the now-expected litany of death threats from the rabid MAGA mongrels. The only decent women to Trump are the ones who kiss his ass or the ones he sees as rape-worthy.

Trump was especially pissed off at super-organizer and force of nature Stacey Abrams, telling Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the lawyer for the office of the Georgia Secretary of State,  "Stacey, in my opinion, Stacey is as dishonest as they come. She has outplayed you . . . at everything." And, later, "And Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying these guys are dumber than a rock. What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell you." 

At his boring-ass, frantic, desperate rally in Dalton, Georgia (motto: "We're a decent piss break between Chattanooga and Atlanta") yesterday, Trump continued on his Abrams animus, ranting, "Stacey Abrams. What’s with this Stacey Abrams? Your governor and your secretary of state, they’re petrified of Stacey Abrams. What’s that all about?" After saying of Raffensperger that Abrams "took him to the cleaners," Trump finally said what he fucking well meant: "The Dominion voting machines employed in Fulton County. That’s the home of Stacey." 

And there it is. See, it's not just that Trump got beaten in Georgia. It's that one of the people who is most responsible for him getting beaten is a woman. A black woman. A black woman and the votes in a majority non-white county. That fucking galls the shit out of him. And he can't get his fellow white Republicans to go along with teaching that uppity black woman a lesson. His appeal to Raffensperger is racist and sexist, and that's the kind of shit that's worked for years for this motherfucker.

I could go on about tons of shit in the phone call and in the rally speech. I could talk about Trump's mobster mentality of cajoling Raffensperger and Germany by saying "you know that" the fraud is real. I could explain the bugfuck insanity of the exchange where Raffensperger said, "Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say anything" and Trump really responded, "Oh, this isn’t social media. This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not; it’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less." I could dive into how Trump threatened and begged and appealed to Raffensperger's Republican loyalty. What Trump didn't realize is that he finally met some officials who didn't want to owe anything to him. Yeah, they may still be Republican motherfuckers, but they are motherfuckers who decided not to piss off the entire, huge work force that counted the ballots and ran the election. That shit matters, too.

Instead, as we await the outcome of the Georgia Senate races (after which I'm sure I'll update this), as we await the ratification of the Electoral College vote and the last official declaration that Joe Biden is the president-elect, I'll just say that none of what Trump is doing is the least bit surprising. Of course, it was always going to end with him trying to blow the joint up. It's what he's always done. He defiles everything by making sure that his name is attached to it forever, like his terrible buildings and, now, the presidency. We will have so much work erasing that stain. 

Haiku Review of 2020 (Part 4 and Last): Live Forever

Last round for 2020 in this year's haiku spectacular. Big thanks to the oh-so-many of you who sent in great little poems. This year, there were haiku from Europe, Asia, and North and South America. That's pretty damn cool. 

Let's give the year past the finger and turn our weary eyes to the hope that 2021 may be the first year to suck less than the previous one in quite some time. 

From El-Man in New Zealand

Hooray, he's leaving

Kamala, pass me the mop

This will take a while

From Sel in Jacksonville, Florida

If I had no couth 

I would piss on the snarling

masses of morons

From papadoo52 in Pennsylvania

The Rally

Trump cult gathers tight

Shit pours from Trump's anus mouth

Trump cult laps it up

From Becky in Chicago

Me before all you

That's not how a nation thinks 

I hate this country 

From JM in Chicago

2020: The

Year The Sirens Never Stopped

In My Neighborhood

From Jeff in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

We may never know

If our president is sane

Hope we never learn

From James in Minneapolis

Say his name: George Floyd

His last words were ‘I can’t breathe’

All cops are bastards

From Kevin in North Minneapolis

News Happens Here

My city on fire

Black man under a white knee

Will we ever learn?

From Skye in England

This year caught our breath

Jammed like a knee on the neck

Alone together

From Ruth Ann in Madison, Wisconsin

Sports/Democracy/Same?

Bubble confinement

Kneeling for America

Masked on the sidelines

From Fortune in Honduras

Calls Us A Shit Hole?

Fuck You To Hell, Rank Shit Stain,

And Your Failed Shit State

From Amanda in West Virginia

Mitch McConnell is

Worst hidden Reptilian

Velociraptor

From Opus 131

One day closer to

The end of the pandemic

My mantra each night

From Paul in Fairfax, Virginia

Three Deaths

Martha died in March,

Mr. Dec in September,

Ralph in December.

(From Paul: Martha was my 27-year-old neighbor who killed herself just as the pandemic was starting to spread; Mr. Dec my older, other neighbor who watched me grow up and died of an abdominal cancer; and Ralph my friend of 30+ years who passed away of colon cancer at the age of 64.)

The title comes from Bartee Strange's weird and wonderful album from 2020. Do yourself a favor and check it out.