Today marks one hell of a milestone/millstone. It's been 15 years since the first post here at the Rude Pundit. And, sadly, except for a few words that I used to say with regularity that are not worth the trouble to say (often), not much has changed.
Oh, we had a good run there for a couple of years, but the same fuckers in charge are still in charge (and I mean that literally in some cases). The same Fox "news" template still runs the media narrative (aided and abetted by its devolved offspring like Breitbart and nutzoid message boards). The same battles over race and sex and sexuality and abortion and health care are still going on.
And, while some of us asshole bloggers have gone on to bigger and better things (looking at you, Ezra Klein and Joy Reid), a good many of us are still asshole bloggers, raging in hopes of causing the dying of the right. We can't stop, people like me and Digby and Atrios and Driftglass and Emptywheel and so many others. That is our curse, while our blessing is our readers, new and old.
I'll have a bit more to say on Monday (along with a big plug for my Patreon).
And while I'm not doing a big fundraiser this year, hey, if you wanna toss some change into the ol' tip jar, I won't stop ya. You can click here or over there on the side.
Onward, and, dear sweet fuckin' Jesus, hopefully upward.
9/28/2018
Random Observations on a Raging, Privileged, Alcoholic Rapist's Testimony
1. It should have been over when Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in his opening statement, accused Democrats and "the left" of conspiring to leak the allegation of sexual assault by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. When he yelled at the Senate Judiciary Committee, "This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. And millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups," Kavanaugh was clearly stating that he would never even pretend to be an impartial judge. He was a member of Ken Starr's penis warriors and George W. Bush's scabrous legal team; he merely confirmed that once a political hack, always a political hack.
2. It should have been over when Senator Amy Klobuchar asked, "So you’re saying there’s never been a case where you drank so much that you didn’t remember what happened the night before, or part of what happened" and Kavanaugh replied, "It’s — you’re asking about, you know, blackout. I don’t know. Have you?" and Klobuchar retorted, "Could you answer the question, Judge? I just — so you — that’s not happened. Is that your answer?" and Kavanaugh answered, "Yeah, and I’m curious if you have." At that moment, confronted with a woman who was questioning his honesty, Kavanaugh revealed he is the kind of asshole that Klobuchar would have known well, since she had just fucking said that her father is a recovering alcoholic. He turned an accusation against him into a chance to shame her. (He did the same thing with Sheldon Whitehouse, asking, "Do you like beer?" when the senator asked Kavanaugh about his drinking.)
3. It should have been over when Senator Dick Durbin asked, "Judge Kavanaugh, will you support an FBI investigation right now?" and Kavanaugh replied, "I will do whatever the committee wants to-" and Durbin interrupted, "Personally, do you think that’s the best thing for us to do?" and Kavanaugh was utterly silent. He would not call for reopening his FBI background check to look into his past because, at a bare minimum, it would reveal that Kavanaugh has lied repeatedly while under oath about his partying habits, his definition of slang, his treatment of female classmates, and many other things short of rape and assault that would call into question his fitness to be a judge. And I'd be willing to bet money that it would find that he did the things that Ford and other women have said he did.
4. It should have been over when it was apparent that Kavanaugh is a raging alcoholic, a privileged prick who got away with all kinds of shit because he's white and male and wealthy and has a mother who was an attorney for the Maryland State's Attorney office in Montgomery County. Kavanaugh's unrepentant belligerence and his bristling that anyone would dare to question his honesty was especially pronounced when women on the committee asked him to explain himself.
5. It's clear that Republicans are willing to vote for someone to the Supreme Court who couldn't suppress his sense of entitlement and essentially promised to get back at groups that acted against him (Kavanaugh said, "As we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around"). Even putting aside the truly awful allegations by at least 3 women against him, Kavanaugh has shown through his complete lack of grace under pressure that he has no right to even be a tourist at the Supreme Court. If any Democratic nominee had behaved like Kavanaugh, Republicans would have torched the hearing room to prevent the nomination from moving forward.
6. More importantly, though, is that Republicans know that Kavanaugh did attack Ford and others. They know it because they refuse to call for an FBI investigation, which is far different than having the staff of GOP senators question people. They know it because they aren't attacking Ford's story, just her ability to remember who tried to rape her. And they are choosing to ignore it because it inconveniences their timeline and irritates their mad president. This is a profound failure of ethics and morality, but, well, it is the GOP.
7. And Kavanaugh went at Democrats the way he did for the very reason that he attacked women and drank until he blacked out: he knew he would get away with it because there are men like him making sure he does.
8. One final observation: I have been drinking since the 1980s. I know drinking and I know drinkers. Brett Kavanaugh was every fucking piece of shit who used alcohol as an excuse to be a fucking piece of shit. And then they denied they were pieces of shit when they were sober. Except you couldn't hide it. You get them into a situation with even a little stress, and that fucking piece of shit part of them rears its stinking head. Because that's who they are at their core.
9. Ford was amazing, wasn't she?
(Last night on Twitter, I asked how HR at people's workplace would have reacted to Kavanaugh. The responses are enlightening.)
2. It should have been over when Senator Amy Klobuchar asked, "So you’re saying there’s never been a case where you drank so much that you didn’t remember what happened the night before, or part of what happened" and Kavanaugh replied, "It’s — you’re asking about, you know, blackout. I don’t know. Have you?" and Klobuchar retorted, "Could you answer the question, Judge? I just — so you — that’s not happened. Is that your answer?" and Kavanaugh answered, "Yeah, and I’m curious if you have." At that moment, confronted with a woman who was questioning his honesty, Kavanaugh revealed he is the kind of asshole that Klobuchar would have known well, since she had just fucking said that her father is a recovering alcoholic. He turned an accusation against him into a chance to shame her. (He did the same thing with Sheldon Whitehouse, asking, "Do you like beer?" when the senator asked Kavanaugh about his drinking.)
3. It should have been over when Senator Dick Durbin asked, "Judge Kavanaugh, will you support an FBI investigation right now?" and Kavanaugh replied, "I will do whatever the committee wants to-" and Durbin interrupted, "Personally, do you think that’s the best thing for us to do?" and Kavanaugh was utterly silent. He would not call for reopening his FBI background check to look into his past because, at a bare minimum, it would reveal that Kavanaugh has lied repeatedly while under oath about his partying habits, his definition of slang, his treatment of female classmates, and many other things short of rape and assault that would call into question his fitness to be a judge. And I'd be willing to bet money that it would find that he did the things that Ford and other women have said he did.
4. It should have been over when it was apparent that Kavanaugh is a raging alcoholic, a privileged prick who got away with all kinds of shit because he's white and male and wealthy and has a mother who was an attorney for the Maryland State's Attorney office in Montgomery County. Kavanaugh's unrepentant belligerence and his bristling that anyone would dare to question his honesty was especially pronounced when women on the committee asked him to explain himself.
5. It's clear that Republicans are willing to vote for someone to the Supreme Court who couldn't suppress his sense of entitlement and essentially promised to get back at groups that acted against him (Kavanaugh said, "As we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around"). Even putting aside the truly awful allegations by at least 3 women against him, Kavanaugh has shown through his complete lack of grace under pressure that he has no right to even be a tourist at the Supreme Court. If any Democratic nominee had behaved like Kavanaugh, Republicans would have torched the hearing room to prevent the nomination from moving forward.
6. More importantly, though, is that Republicans know that Kavanaugh did attack Ford and others. They know it because they refuse to call for an FBI investigation, which is far different than having the staff of GOP senators question people. They know it because they aren't attacking Ford's story, just her ability to remember who tried to rape her. And they are choosing to ignore it because it inconveniences their timeline and irritates their mad president. This is a profound failure of ethics and morality, but, well, it is the GOP.
7. And Kavanaugh went at Democrats the way he did for the very reason that he attacked women and drank until he blacked out: he knew he would get away with it because there are men like him making sure he does.
8. One final observation: I have been drinking since the 1980s. I know drinking and I know drinkers. Brett Kavanaugh was every fucking piece of shit who used alcohol as an excuse to be a fucking piece of shit. And then they denied they were pieces of shit when they were sober. Except you couldn't hide it. You get them into a situation with even a little stress, and that fucking piece of shit part of them rears its stinking head. Because that's who they are at their core.
9. Ford was amazing, wasn't she?
(Last night on Twitter, I asked how HR at people's workplace would have reacted to Kavanaugh. The responses are enlightening.)
9/27/2018
When We Discuss Brett Kavanaugh, We Need to Understand Rape and Assault in the 1980s
In 1983, at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, members of the Alpha Tau Delta fraternity were accused of committing a gang rape on a drunk young woman at a frat house party. Asked about the allegations, one fraternity member said, "The young lady went out and got herself in trouble. She was loose and wild, imbibing many things and she was flaunting herself."
After an investigation by the administration, UPenn decided to revoke recognition of the fraternity. They felt there was enough evidence to warrant a campus death penalty. Indeed, the administration was so concerned by what they found that they considered individual internal punishment for the students involved.
However, they did not go to the police. They did not have the fraternity members who were accused of the gang rape arrested. This happened during a period of time where there was an upswing in the reported gang rapes on college campuses and elsewhere.
In the New York Times in 1983, a lawyer who was a member of the New York Family Violence Board wrote about how the law dealt with rapes where the victim was drunk or drugged (and with the assumption that the crime involved a man raping a woman), "When lack of consent is based on physical incapacity, mental incapacity or mental defect, the male can win acquittal by proving that he was unaware of the victim's incapacity to consent." This led to many men being found innocent by pleading they were unaware. And, in New York, the previous sexual history of the victim could be used in court, with defense attorneys often aggressively questioning women on the stand.
Even in 1987, "in courtrooms nationwide, many women still find that their legal claims and credibility or character are being judged on the basis of factors that seem to many legal experts and feminists to be antiquated, irrelevant and prejudicial: the company they keep, their sexual mores and how they walk, talk, dress and handle their emotions." When it came to date rape, a sex crimes prosecutor said, "Little things work against [the victim], like the fact that she invited the guy in for a cup of coffee or for a nightcap, or even went to his place. There is then the presumption that she wouldn't be there unless it was a sexual encounter.''
The same thing went if a woman went to a party where there was heavy drinking and drug use. And that's not getting into the horror of laws that essentially allowed a man to get away with raping his wife.
No, obviously, rape was not just a problem in the 1980s. But something was going on in the 1980s, and that was that women were coming out of the battles for equality in the 1960s and 1970s to assert a place in American society that upended the gender hierarchy. For instance, between 1970 and 1988, the proportion of young women attending college went from 26.3 percent to 36.8 percent.
Susan Faludi's classic book Backlash traced how the media and politicians, including President Ronald Reagan, reacted against the feminist movement's successes. I'm not saying that movies like Porky's (one of the top-grossing films of 1982) caused anyone to rape or sexually assault a woman. But I am saying that the message of the time was that men were being emasculated by the feminist movement and needed to assert dominance (and many, many men thought this was utter garbage). Now when we hear incels and MRAs say these kinds of things, it's laughable. It was mainstream in the 1980s.
I was there in the 1980s, a young man coming of age. I went for a short period to an elite college, Tulane, with the privileged sons of privileged families. I heard stories about assaults and rapes of incapacitated women, all of which were presented as if "she was asking for it." I don't want to make this about me, but, as someone whose hero was Alan Alda, who actively campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, I thought it was all disgusting. And it was one of the major reasons I left Tulane. I had amazing friends and professors who changed my life, but I couldn't stand the coked-up, pampered jerks who debased anyone not like them, including my roommate, who was a member of the fraternity banned from campus, the DKE, same as Brett Kavanaugh up at Yale during the same time.
You can't understand the Kavanaugh allegations unless you understand the way rape and sexual assault was still dealt with and thought of then. Let me explain this with an example.
In 1981, in the TV sitcom Facts of Life, one of the high school girls, Natalie, is attacked and almost raped on her way home from a costume party. Her PTSD from the event is played for laughs, as she refuses to go outside from fear. Offered tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert, Natalie at first is excited and then says, "Sorry, I can't go. I just remembered that I'm no longer allowing myself to experience joy or laughter." The laugh track surged.
She is eventually convinced to go to a self-defense class, where the instructor, a male, accuses Natalie of having brought on the attack herself. He asks her, "Was it night time when the attack happened?" and "Did you ask someone to walk with you?" and "Did you stick to a well lighted path?" and "Were you carrying a purse?" before showing her all the things in her purse she should have used as weapons. Natalie concludes that she should have left the party by herself and she should have done more to defend herself.
In 1981, in one of the most popular shows on TV, the message was that women were to blame for their sexual assault.
After an investigation by the administration, UPenn decided to revoke recognition of the fraternity. They felt there was enough evidence to warrant a campus death penalty. Indeed, the administration was so concerned by what they found that they considered individual internal punishment for the students involved.
However, they did not go to the police. They did not have the fraternity members who were accused of the gang rape arrested. This happened during a period of time where there was an upswing in the reported gang rapes on college campuses and elsewhere.
In the New York Times in 1983, a lawyer who was a member of the New York Family Violence Board wrote about how the law dealt with rapes where the victim was drunk or drugged (and with the assumption that the crime involved a man raping a woman), "When lack of consent is based on physical incapacity, mental incapacity or mental defect, the male can win acquittal by proving that he was unaware of the victim's incapacity to consent." This led to many men being found innocent by pleading they were unaware. And, in New York, the previous sexual history of the victim could be used in court, with defense attorneys often aggressively questioning women on the stand.
Even in 1987, "in courtrooms nationwide, many women still find that their legal claims and credibility or character are being judged on the basis of factors that seem to many legal experts and feminists to be antiquated, irrelevant and prejudicial: the company they keep, their sexual mores and how they walk, talk, dress and handle their emotions." When it came to date rape, a sex crimes prosecutor said, "Little things work against [the victim], like the fact that she invited the guy in for a cup of coffee or for a nightcap, or even went to his place. There is then the presumption that she wouldn't be there unless it was a sexual encounter.''
The same thing went if a woman went to a party where there was heavy drinking and drug use. And that's not getting into the horror of laws that essentially allowed a man to get away with raping his wife.
No, obviously, rape was not just a problem in the 1980s. But something was going on in the 1980s, and that was that women were coming out of the battles for equality in the 1960s and 1970s to assert a place in American society that upended the gender hierarchy. For instance, between 1970 and 1988, the proportion of young women attending college went from 26.3 percent to 36.8 percent.
Susan Faludi's classic book Backlash traced how the media and politicians, including President Ronald Reagan, reacted against the feminist movement's successes. I'm not saying that movies like Porky's (one of the top-grossing films of 1982) caused anyone to rape or sexually assault a woman. But I am saying that the message of the time was that men were being emasculated by the feminist movement and needed to assert dominance (and many, many men thought this was utter garbage). Now when we hear incels and MRAs say these kinds of things, it's laughable. It was mainstream in the 1980s.
I was there in the 1980s, a young man coming of age. I went for a short period to an elite college, Tulane, with the privileged sons of privileged families. I heard stories about assaults and rapes of incapacitated women, all of which were presented as if "she was asking for it." I don't want to make this about me, but, as someone whose hero was Alan Alda, who actively campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, I thought it was all disgusting. And it was one of the major reasons I left Tulane. I had amazing friends and professors who changed my life, but I couldn't stand the coked-up, pampered jerks who debased anyone not like them, including my roommate, who was a member of the fraternity banned from campus, the DKE, same as Brett Kavanaugh up at Yale during the same time.
You can't understand the Kavanaugh allegations unless you understand the way rape and sexual assault was still dealt with and thought of then. Let me explain this with an example.
In 1981, in the TV sitcom Facts of Life, one of the high school girls, Natalie, is attacked and almost raped on her way home from a costume party. Her PTSD from the event is played for laughs, as she refuses to go outside from fear. Offered tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert, Natalie at first is excited and then says, "Sorry, I can't go. I just remembered that I'm no longer allowing myself to experience joy or laughter." The laugh track surged.
She is eventually convinced to go to a self-defense class, where the instructor, a male, accuses Natalie of having brought on the attack herself. He asks her, "Was it night time when the attack happened?" and "Did you ask someone to walk with you?" and "Did you stick to a well lighted path?" and "Were you carrying a purse?" before showing her all the things in her purse she should have used as weapons. Natalie concludes that she should have left the party by herself and she should have done more to defend herself.
In 1981, in one of the most popular shows on TV, the message was that women were to blame for their sexual assault.
9/24/2018
The Pathetic Incredulity of Republicans: Benghazi and Kavanaugh
When I see GOP Senators talk about the women accusing Brett Kavanaugh of myriad sorts of sexual assault, I keep coming back to the things that Republicans are ready to believe (or pretend to believe for the sake of political gain) with no evidence or evidence so bizarre as to be nonsensical at best, and downright dangerous at worst.
For instance, I keep thinking about the 2012 Benghazi attack, where 4 Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, were killed in a raid on the consulate there, and how, no matter how many times Republicans were told that there was no conspiracy of silence or conspiracy of inaction or conspiracy of any sort, even after one Senate committee and five fucking House hearings and investigations, all led by Republicans, as well as one by a Senate Select Committee, current Judiciary Committee Member Republican Senator Ted "Don't Hit Me, Beto" Cruz was still not satisfied. In 2014, he went on Fox "news" and demanded more answers, more goddamned investigations. And so there were more. There was a House Select Committee that investigated and found nothing other than random fuck-ups that should be avoided in the future. That's on top of an FBI and State Department investigation right after it happened.
Goddamnit, they were after the truth, these brave Republicans willing to believe any weird ass theory barked at them from Breitbart or shat straight into their open hands by Sean Hannity. And then, once the election of 2016 was over and Hillary Clinton had lost, not a goddamn word from Ted Cruz. That motherfucker was talking Benghazi all the way through 2016, as were his fellow Judiciary Committee fuckfaces like John Cornyn. The election was over and it was done. Hell, Orrin Hatch, another of those fuckfaces, even suggested that they just forget about Benghazi. Shit, last year, fuckin' Ted Cruz co-sponsored a bill to cut in half the security budget for embassies and consulates, in direct contradiction of what every goddamned investigation said.
From e-mails to uranium sales to President Obama's birth certificate, these shitheels and ratfuckers couldn't believe bullshit fast enough. If it was the barest of anti-Obama or anti-Hillary hints of scandal, Republicans would jump on that like white cops on a black grandmother waving her cane too much. Everyone believes shit when it's to their advantage. That's human nature. But fuckin' Republicans, man, they believe it like their lives depended on it. They take things that require more leaps of faith than that the earth was made in 7 days and hold them up as absolute, delivered from God's mouth truth. And even when it's proven that they're just fuckin' lying or, you know, wrong, Republicans say, "Well, yeah, but what if we have more hearings?" They're like a bunch of idiot shepherds standing around an animal carcass, saying, "Maybe if we fuck this dead goat more, it'll come back to life."
So we're not talking run-of-the-mill hypocrisy when it comes to their treatment of the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. We're talking a kind of meta-hypocrisy, one that is about how they approach those things that need evidence. Whenever it benefits them, they will gnaw at it like a pit bull on a cow bone. And when it doesn't, well, shit, they don't want to be bothered to support even a minimal investigation. But they'll support Kavanaugh, damnit, because that's what they're supposed to do because something, something midterm turnout. (I'd argue they want to assure the nutzoid evangelicals that they're gonna get their Roe overturning vote on the court before the midterms.)
Yet, if you go back to the fake scandals of the Bill Clinton presidency, and you'll see that it was almost always Democrats, including Clinton's attorney general, who were calling for an investigation, with the idea being that finding the facts would shut Republicans the fuck up. Of course, that was wishful thinking at its most pathetically wishful. It can't go without saying that Kavanaugh himself sought to get "answers" on one of the scuzziest of the Clinton "scandals," that the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster was really a murder, a hit done by the Clintons. To this day, there are people who believe that is true, along with the idea that Hillary Clinton did 45 murders (no, really, look that shit up).
The point here is that the abject refusal on the part of Republicans to call for any kind of investigation, beyond Senate staff, of the multiple allegations against Kavanaugh, involving everything from dick-waving to participating in running a train on a drunk woman, speaks to the fucked up sexism of the Republicans. Democrats have forced out Al Franken and Anthony Weiner and want Keith Ellison to be investigated. Republicans not only refuse to believe Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez and, potentially, others, but they won't even allow ask for law enforcement to look into it in the course of an expanded background check. Plainly, they are afraid of what will be discovered. (And it can't be said enough: Any investigation into Ford's allegations would have been over by now.)
We've known for a long time that Republicans basically couldn't give a flea fart about women. They are hurt and confused by the #MeToo movement, like spider monkeys who don't know where to go once their rainforest has been mowed down so they just throw shit at everyone around them. So it's not that there is anything shocking in the behavior of Republicans.
But the brazenness of their unrelenting fuckery is going off the charts. And it's just so obvious that they have learned not a goddamned thing since the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearing in 1991. The difference, of course, is that the other side has learned a thing or two. Hopefully, it's enough for Democrats to cause a reckoning that has been nearly 30 years in the making.
For instance, I keep thinking about the 2012 Benghazi attack, where 4 Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, were killed in a raid on the consulate there, and how, no matter how many times Republicans were told that there was no conspiracy of silence or conspiracy of inaction or conspiracy of any sort, even after one Senate committee and five fucking House hearings and investigations, all led by Republicans, as well as one by a Senate Select Committee, current Judiciary Committee Member Republican Senator Ted "Don't Hit Me, Beto" Cruz was still not satisfied. In 2014, he went on Fox "news" and demanded more answers, more goddamned investigations. And so there were more. There was a House Select Committee that investigated and found nothing other than random fuck-ups that should be avoided in the future. That's on top of an FBI and State Department investigation right after it happened.
Goddamnit, they were after the truth, these brave Republicans willing to believe any weird ass theory barked at them from Breitbart or shat straight into their open hands by Sean Hannity. And then, once the election of 2016 was over and Hillary Clinton had lost, not a goddamn word from Ted Cruz. That motherfucker was talking Benghazi all the way through 2016, as were his fellow Judiciary Committee fuckfaces like John Cornyn. The election was over and it was done. Hell, Orrin Hatch, another of those fuckfaces, even suggested that they just forget about Benghazi. Shit, last year, fuckin' Ted Cruz co-sponsored a bill to cut in half the security budget for embassies and consulates, in direct contradiction of what every goddamned investigation said.
From e-mails to uranium sales to President Obama's birth certificate, these shitheels and ratfuckers couldn't believe bullshit fast enough. If it was the barest of anti-Obama or anti-Hillary hints of scandal, Republicans would jump on that like white cops on a black grandmother waving her cane too much. Everyone believes shit when it's to their advantage. That's human nature. But fuckin' Republicans, man, they believe it like their lives depended on it. They take things that require more leaps of faith than that the earth was made in 7 days and hold them up as absolute, delivered from God's mouth truth. And even when it's proven that they're just fuckin' lying or, you know, wrong, Republicans say, "Well, yeah, but what if we have more hearings?" They're like a bunch of idiot shepherds standing around an animal carcass, saying, "Maybe if we fuck this dead goat more, it'll come back to life."
So we're not talking run-of-the-mill hypocrisy when it comes to their treatment of the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. We're talking a kind of meta-hypocrisy, one that is about how they approach those things that need evidence. Whenever it benefits them, they will gnaw at it like a pit bull on a cow bone. And when it doesn't, well, shit, they don't want to be bothered to support even a minimal investigation. But they'll support Kavanaugh, damnit, because that's what they're supposed to do because something, something midterm turnout. (I'd argue they want to assure the nutzoid evangelicals that they're gonna get their Roe overturning vote on the court before the midterms.)
Yet, if you go back to the fake scandals of the Bill Clinton presidency, and you'll see that it was almost always Democrats, including Clinton's attorney general, who were calling for an investigation, with the idea being that finding the facts would shut Republicans the fuck up. Of course, that was wishful thinking at its most pathetically wishful. It can't go without saying that Kavanaugh himself sought to get "answers" on one of the scuzziest of the Clinton "scandals," that the suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster was really a murder, a hit done by the Clintons. To this day, there are people who believe that is true, along with the idea that Hillary Clinton did 45 murders (no, really, look that shit up).
The point here is that the abject refusal on the part of Republicans to call for any kind of investigation, beyond Senate staff, of the multiple allegations against Kavanaugh, involving everything from dick-waving to participating in running a train on a drunk woman, speaks to the fucked up sexism of the Republicans. Democrats have forced out Al Franken and Anthony Weiner and want Keith Ellison to be investigated. Republicans not only refuse to believe Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez and, potentially, others, but they won't even allow ask for law enforcement to look into it in the course of an expanded background check. Plainly, they are afraid of what will be discovered. (And it can't be said enough: Any investigation into Ford's allegations would have been over by now.)
We've known for a long time that Republicans basically couldn't give a flea fart about women. They are hurt and confused by the #MeToo movement, like spider monkeys who don't know where to go once their rainforest has been mowed down so they just throw shit at everyone around them. So it's not that there is anything shocking in the behavior of Republicans.
But the brazenness of their unrelenting fuckery is going off the charts. And it's just so obvious that they have learned not a goddamned thing since the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearing in 1991. The difference, of course, is that the other side has learned a thing or two. Hopefully, it's enough for Democrats to cause a reckoning that has been nearly 30 years in the making.
9/21/2018
Enjoying the Toxic Shit and Coal Water, Carolinas?
Every flood is a filthy stew of garbage, shit, and chemicals, and that's mainly because we live in garbage, shit, and chemicals. But the post-Hurricane Florence floods in North and South Carolina have an extra soupcon of nastiness because of just how much those states decided to fuck their environment. Right now, pig shit and poison are leaking into flood waters, which will go into the rivers, lakes, and water supply, and there is a good chance that, as the rivers continue to rise, a great deal more pig shit and poison will wash into the food chain.
You've no doubt heard by now about the pig shit lagoons, which sounds like some punishment in Hell but is actually a real thing where the industrial pig farms collect the literal millions upon millions of gallons of manure into open-air ponds. Then, because life is just one big joke, a bacteria is tossed into the shit slurry that turns it as bright pink as a princess's ball gown.
Already, over 20 of the shit lakes have had flood waters cause them to overflow, and at least one has had a breach. Now, there are about 3000 of these manure lagoons in North Carolina alone, according to the NC Pork Council (which is not nearly as fun an organization as it sounds). That's for 2100 pig farms. Another 90 or so have the potential to overflow. So, yeah, 110 out of 3000 is not bad except for the fact that it's 110 giant pools of pig shit and piss.
And if that wasn't delicious enough, a Duke Energy landfill in North Carolina has been breached, causing coal ash, which is totally not clean, to be spilled. This is on top of another spill at a coal-fired electric plant, with the chance very high that a retired plant's coal ash pit will be overtopped by flood waters. The leakage of coal ash is also a fear in South Carolina. It means that, on top of pig shit, mercury, arsenic, and other nasty stuff will get into the water. Already, over 180 dump truckloads worth of coal ash have leaked out. Again, it doesn't seem like much, except that it's fucking arsenic and mercury. (Update: A few minutes after posting this, AP reported that a dam was breached at that retired plant, and coal ash is likely flowing into the Cape Fear River.)
When he visited the region this week, President Donald Trump, who is just a grown-up, racist, and rapey Garbage Pail Kid, declared, "Washington is with you. Trump is with you. We are all with you 100 percent. And we’ll get through it. And I think the most exciting part is going to be that rebuild, because you’re going to have a lot of rebuilding." Putting aside his fuckin' weirdo third-person quirk and fucked-up delight at rebuilding, it's utterly untrue that Washington is with the Carolinas 100 percent.
Because, see, the Trump EPA won't do a thing about the pig shit lagoons or the coal ash heaps. It won't do a thing about climate change (just like North Carolina refused to), which is what has exacerbated the flooding, especially along the coast. The federal government will help rebuild, sure, but it's just providing more places to be wrecked by the next toxic floods, which will be more frequent, more severe, and more toxic. But, hey, as Trump said to a victim in North Carolina, "Have a good time."
By the way, just to make this all more disgusting, right now tankers are traversing North Carolina with the pig shit that was sucked out of lagoons that were in danger of spilling over. So you've got shit trucks going from shit lagoon to shit lagoon, which seems about an accurate description of where we find ourselves now as a nation.
You've no doubt heard by now about the pig shit lagoons, which sounds like some punishment in Hell but is actually a real thing where the industrial pig farms collect the literal millions upon millions of gallons of manure into open-air ponds. Then, because life is just one big joke, a bacteria is tossed into the shit slurry that turns it as bright pink as a princess's ball gown.
Already, over 20 of the shit lakes have had flood waters cause them to overflow, and at least one has had a breach. Now, there are about 3000 of these manure lagoons in North Carolina alone, according to the NC Pork Council (which is not nearly as fun an organization as it sounds). That's for 2100 pig farms. Another 90 or so have the potential to overflow. So, yeah, 110 out of 3000 is not bad except for the fact that it's 110 giant pools of pig shit and piss.
And if that wasn't delicious enough, a Duke Energy landfill in North Carolina has been breached, causing coal ash, which is totally not clean, to be spilled. This is on top of another spill at a coal-fired electric plant, with the chance very high that a retired plant's coal ash pit will be overtopped by flood waters. The leakage of coal ash is also a fear in South Carolina. It means that, on top of pig shit, mercury, arsenic, and other nasty stuff will get into the water. Already, over 180 dump truckloads worth of coal ash have leaked out. Again, it doesn't seem like much, except that it's fucking arsenic and mercury. (Update: A few minutes after posting this, AP reported that a dam was breached at that retired plant, and coal ash is likely flowing into the Cape Fear River.)
When he visited the region this week, President Donald Trump, who is just a grown-up, racist, and rapey Garbage Pail Kid, declared, "Washington is with you. Trump is with you. We are all with you 100 percent. And we’ll get through it. And I think the most exciting part is going to be that rebuild, because you’re going to have a lot of rebuilding." Putting aside his fuckin' weirdo third-person quirk and fucked-up delight at rebuilding, it's utterly untrue that Washington is with the Carolinas 100 percent.
Because, see, the Trump EPA won't do a thing about the pig shit lagoons or the coal ash heaps. It won't do a thing about climate change (just like North Carolina refused to), which is what has exacerbated the flooding, especially along the coast. The federal government will help rebuild, sure, but it's just providing more places to be wrecked by the next toxic floods, which will be more frequent, more severe, and more toxic. But, hey, as Trump said to a victim in North Carolina, "Have a good time."
By the way, just to make this all more disgusting, right now tankers are traversing North Carolina with the pig shit that was sucked out of lagoons that were in danger of spilling over. So you've got shit trucks going from shit lagoon to shit lagoon, which seems about an accurate description of where we find ourselves now as a nation.
9/19/2018
Conservatives Are Right: This Is About Abortion
Making the rounds in conservative shit-tossing circles in the last day or so is that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her in 1982 when they were both in high school wouldn't have been heard at all if Kavanaugh were a solid vote to uphold Roe v. Wade. "It's about abortion," they say, these bloated white men who rarely see the sun from their snake holes. And it really is an all-star line-up of demi-human fuck rags that are asserting this
Erick "Erick" Erickson, over on his website The Regurgitant, stated flatly that Democrats are supporting Ford and attacking Kavanaugh "in order to protect the right to kill girls in utero." Yes, this pasty motherfucker, who tells us over and over to love each other because GodJeebus wrote it in his wacky book of fairy tales, said, "This entire thing is about the right to kill kids, not about the veracity of the accusation." Although, you know, no one accused Neil Gorsuch of attempted rape, so were Democrats just lazy then?
Over on his radio show, Shakey the Deaf Clown's Masturbatorium of Rage, Rush Limbaugh blurbled, "This is all about abortion. It is about nothing else as far as the left is concerned. They want to be able to continue uninterrupted with their behavior when it comes to abortion. Sex without consequence, life without consequence. They are scared to death that a Republican or a conservative majority is going to overturn Roe vs. Wade." And then he unhinged his jaw to eat the array of puppies laid before him at the start of every episode.
On his Fox "news," Tucker Carlson spoke up before being bitch-slapped on his show, Everyone Bitch Slaps Tucker Carlson, offering, "Does anyone really believe the story would have surfaced if Brett Kavanaugh had pledged allegiance to Roe v Wade? Of course, it wouldn't have." And then he went on to burn a cross, salute Hitler, and get bitch slapped by whichever vaguely liberal guest he had on to bitch slap him, all while he stared out at us like the most racist and confused cocker spaniel ever.
And, you know, let's be fair: they're right that this is about abortion. Except not in the way they're putting it. 'Cause, see, what it's really about is that woman-hating conservatives know that Kavanaugh is the final vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that's the fuckin' goal here. Kavanaugh is the pay-off for decades of support, through money and votes, of the evangelical nutzoid right.
They've been wearing their knees out since the Reagan era, praying and drooling over the prospect of shitcanning abortion rights and forcing all those whores to have their goddamn babies. They thought that Robert Bork would be their black-robed savior back in 1987, but those liberal motherfuckers made a case about Bork being batshit insane, and so Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy after the Senate voted Bork down, and that heathen son of a bitch Kennedy kept upholding Roe. It's fuckin' poetic to these savage zealots that Kavanaugh would take Kennedy's place and do what Kennedy didn't and what Bork would have.
So let's reverse this shit here. Yeah, it's about abortion. Because, see, I don't know if Democrats would have brought up the Ford allegations if Kavanaugh were a liberal nominee. I'd like to think they would have, especially considering how quickly they turned against Al Franken and Anthony Weiner. But I sure as shit know that if Kavanaugh did believe Roe was settled law, Republicans would have been screaming for the FBI to be involved.
Now, though, the GOP wants this shit to go away, and they are sticking with Kavanaugh because they're scared to death that a blue wave will sweep the Senate away from their filthy hands before they can get another misogynist on the bench. They will do or say whatever they can because they can fuckin' taste the end of Roe, with the shitty states gearing up to end abortion rights. And then they can tell the Christian fucknuts that all their faith and prayers paid off because they get to control women's bodies.
Which is exactly what Kavanaugh tried to do in 1982.
Erick "Erick" Erickson, over on his website The Regurgitant, stated flatly that Democrats are supporting Ford and attacking Kavanaugh "in order to protect the right to kill girls in utero." Yes, this pasty motherfucker, who tells us over and over to love each other because GodJeebus wrote it in his wacky book of fairy tales, said, "This entire thing is about the right to kill kids, not about the veracity of the accusation." Although, you know, no one accused Neil Gorsuch of attempted rape, so were Democrats just lazy then?
Over on his radio show, Shakey the Deaf Clown's Masturbatorium of Rage, Rush Limbaugh blurbled, "This is all about abortion. It is about nothing else as far as the left is concerned. They want to be able to continue uninterrupted with their behavior when it comes to abortion. Sex without consequence, life without consequence. They are scared to death that a Republican or a conservative majority is going to overturn Roe vs. Wade." And then he unhinged his jaw to eat the array of puppies laid before him at the start of every episode.
On his Fox "news," Tucker Carlson spoke up before being bitch-slapped on his show, Everyone Bitch Slaps Tucker Carlson, offering, "Does anyone really believe the story would have surfaced if Brett Kavanaugh had pledged allegiance to Roe v Wade? Of course, it wouldn't have." And then he went on to burn a cross, salute Hitler, and get bitch slapped by whichever vaguely liberal guest he had on to bitch slap him, all while he stared out at us like the most racist and confused cocker spaniel ever.
And, you know, let's be fair: they're right that this is about abortion. Except not in the way they're putting it. 'Cause, see, what it's really about is that woman-hating conservatives know that Kavanaugh is the final vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that's the fuckin' goal here. Kavanaugh is the pay-off for decades of support, through money and votes, of the evangelical nutzoid right.
They've been wearing their knees out since the Reagan era, praying and drooling over the prospect of shitcanning abortion rights and forcing all those whores to have their goddamn babies. They thought that Robert Bork would be their black-robed savior back in 1987, but those liberal motherfuckers made a case about Bork being batshit insane, and so Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy after the Senate voted Bork down, and that heathen son of a bitch Kennedy kept upholding Roe. It's fuckin' poetic to these savage zealots that Kavanaugh would take Kennedy's place and do what Kennedy didn't and what Bork would have.
So let's reverse this shit here. Yeah, it's about abortion. Because, see, I don't know if Democrats would have brought up the Ford allegations if Kavanaugh were a liberal nominee. I'd like to think they would have, especially considering how quickly they turned against Al Franken and Anthony Weiner. But I sure as shit know that if Kavanaugh did believe Roe was settled law, Republicans would have been screaming for the FBI to be involved.
Now, though, the GOP wants this shit to go away, and they are sticking with Kavanaugh because they're scared to death that a blue wave will sweep the Senate away from their filthy hands before they can get another misogynist on the bench. They will do or say whatever they can because they can fuckin' taste the end of Roe, with the shitty states gearing up to end abortion rights. And then they can tell the Christian fucknuts that all their faith and prayers paid off because they get to control women's bodies.
Which is exactly what Kavanaugh tried to do in 1982.
9/17/2018
Kavanaugh Is a Creep (And Ford Is Courageous)
When Judge Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearing began on September 4, I was totally skeeved out by the guy. It wasn't just his mushy, pale complexion, retrograde politics, and fake "aw-schucks" demeanor that made my skin crawl. His opening statement was just fuckin' weird. I tweeted, "I gotta tell ya: Between spurning the handshake of Fred Guttenberg and name-checking all the girls on his daughter's basketball team, Kavanaugh came across as one creepy bastard." I stand uncorrected on that. And I'm not even talking about his ultra-creepy attention to Bill Clinton's dick and semen and Monica Lewinsky's vagina back when he worked for Ken Starr.
So many of his first words to the committee were about how much he really, really loves and respects women that I thought it was just a way to mitigate his opposition to Roe v. Wade. I mean, c'mon. Between going on about how great his mom is to his coaching of his daughter's basketball team to "A majority of my 48 law clerks have been women," Kavanaugh may as well have just winked at Dianne Feinstein and said, "See? I have no problem with the ladies."
During the questioning, Kavanaugh revealed that there were already two other letters from groups of women talking about what a great guy he is. No, really. Here's Kavanaugh, responding to Sen. Orrin Hatch: "You've received a letter from 10 college friends of mine who were women, who were women athletes at Yale. Talked about how I treated them and women's sports with respect and as equal, even when I was in college. You have a letter from 84 women I worked with in the Bush administration who talked about my efforts to work with them in the intense environment of the West Wing, especially after September 11th."
Prior to the revelation that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford wrote a letter to Feinstein saying that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when she was 15 and he was 17, this could easily be seen as a kind of inoculation against all those liberals saying that he's going to send women to their deaths in back alleys (even if, you know, he really is going to send women to their deaths in back alleys). I mean, his creepy-ass dissent in Garza v. Hargan, where he argued a 17 year-old undocumented girl could be blocked from getting an abortion, speaks volumes about what he really thinks about young women, more so than coaching them.
But now, with the addition of the already-prepped letter from 65 women who claim Kavanaugh was aces in high school, it's clear that Republicans knew something was up with this creepy motherfucker, and they were ready with the signatures to soften the blow. And, frankly, it ought to make us wonder what else Republicans are hiding in all those pages of documents they have refused to release or even allowed Democrats to see.
Any attack on Ford's credibility has to start with the simple question of what she has to gain from all of this. She initially wanted to remain anonymous, but then the information on Ford's letter was leaked by "multiple sources" to The Intercept, as well as to Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker. She's a professor at Palo Alto University, connected with Stanford, so she has a successful career. Hell, she's written on recovery and growth after the trauma of 9/11. Now, she's going to face an unending shitstorm from the right. If she hasn't already, she'll get death threats, her college will be inundated with fake complaints trying to get her fired, and she'll have her looks torn to shreds. Hell, the fuckin' brain trust of conservative nutzoids, including gender traitor Laura Ingraham, already tried to go after her but ended up attacking another Christine Ford.
Some of us also remember the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, which was about egregious sexual harassment. I wrote then in the college paper about it, saying that Thomas wasn't going to go to jail or even lose his job. He just won't get the promotion. "Only one of them is telling the truth," I wrote. "One of them is an insane liar, and I believe he now sits on the Supreme Court." And every fucking decision that Thomas has made about women's rights has proven how little he thinks of women's agency beyond being objects for male sexuality, fit for subservience. But Hill was dragged through the mud, degraded and insulted, and ultimately treated as if she were just making it all up for shits and giggles. Those hearings, led by Joe Biden (who later apologized for them), were a national embarrassment.
Twenty-seven years later, how difficult is it to take Ford at face value when she says that Kavanaugh held her down, tried to take off her clothes, and covered her mouth to silence her screams, that she thought she might be killed? Is it really that difficult to imagine that she didn't tell anyone about this deep trauma until years later? Is it really that difficult to believe that a preppy little douchebag senior from an elite all-boy's high school in the DC suburbs would get shit-faced at a preppy douchebag party in 1982 and think he could get away with raping the sophomore from the girl's school?
There's another letter, this one from over 200 women who went to Ford's high school around the same time period, and it says, essentially, "Yeah, this is the way these little rapist shits acted."
Motherfuckers, I grew up in the 1980s. Half our pop culture, from Sixteen Candles to the book Less Than Zero to MTV's Spring Break, was about getting girls so drunk or high that they couldn't say, "No," when it wasn't about trying to tear their clothes off or peep at them in their showers or bedrooms or locker rooms. Most of us knew that it was all fantasy bullshit about a lack of consequences for assholes. But a fuck of a lot of young men thought it was a license to bust a nut whenever and wherever and however.
Yeah, I fuckin' think Kavanaugh did it. I don't give a shit if it happened in high school because I think he's lying about it now, which even some Republicans have said is enough to get him voted down. There should be an investigation. And there are going to be hearings next week. A smart administration would pull the nomination. Hell, when George W. Bush pulled Harriet Miers, he got Samuel Alito. But, you know, we're dealing with Trump here.
Kavanaugh's creepy need to demonstrate how much he cares about women was there all the time, showing us, by protesting so vociferously, who he really is. We should thank Ford for putting her trauma out there for the world to judge, which is another kind of trauma, and being brave enough to take on this cyclone of condemnation and rage.
So many of his first words to the committee were about how much he really, really loves and respects women that I thought it was just a way to mitigate his opposition to Roe v. Wade. I mean, c'mon. Between going on about how great his mom is to his coaching of his daughter's basketball team to "A majority of my 48 law clerks have been women," Kavanaugh may as well have just winked at Dianne Feinstein and said, "See? I have no problem with the ladies."
During the questioning, Kavanaugh revealed that there were already two other letters from groups of women talking about what a great guy he is. No, really. Here's Kavanaugh, responding to Sen. Orrin Hatch: "You've received a letter from 10 college friends of mine who were women, who were women athletes at Yale. Talked about how I treated them and women's sports with respect and as equal, even when I was in college. You have a letter from 84 women I worked with in the Bush administration who talked about my efforts to work with them in the intense environment of the West Wing, especially after September 11th."
Prior to the revelation that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford wrote a letter to Feinstein saying that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when she was 15 and he was 17, this could easily be seen as a kind of inoculation against all those liberals saying that he's going to send women to their deaths in back alleys (even if, you know, he really is going to send women to their deaths in back alleys). I mean, his creepy-ass dissent in Garza v. Hargan, where he argued a 17 year-old undocumented girl could be blocked from getting an abortion, speaks volumes about what he really thinks about young women, more so than coaching them.
But now, with the addition of the already-prepped letter from 65 women who claim Kavanaugh was aces in high school, it's clear that Republicans knew something was up with this creepy motherfucker, and they were ready with the signatures to soften the blow. And, frankly, it ought to make us wonder what else Republicans are hiding in all those pages of documents they have refused to release or even allowed Democrats to see.
Any attack on Ford's credibility has to start with the simple question of what she has to gain from all of this. She initially wanted to remain anonymous, but then the information on Ford's letter was leaked by "multiple sources" to The Intercept, as well as to Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker. She's a professor at Palo Alto University, connected with Stanford, so she has a successful career. Hell, she's written on recovery and growth after the trauma of 9/11. Now, she's going to face an unending shitstorm from the right. If she hasn't already, she'll get death threats, her college will be inundated with fake complaints trying to get her fired, and she'll have her looks torn to shreds. Hell, the fuckin' brain trust of conservative nutzoids, including gender traitor Laura Ingraham, already tried to go after her but ended up attacking another Christine Ford.
Some of us also remember the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, which was about egregious sexual harassment. I wrote then in the college paper about it, saying that Thomas wasn't going to go to jail or even lose his job. He just won't get the promotion. "Only one of them is telling the truth," I wrote. "One of them is an insane liar, and I believe he now sits on the Supreme Court." And every fucking decision that Thomas has made about women's rights has proven how little he thinks of women's agency beyond being objects for male sexuality, fit for subservience. But Hill was dragged through the mud, degraded and insulted, and ultimately treated as if she were just making it all up for shits and giggles. Those hearings, led by Joe Biden (who later apologized for them), were a national embarrassment.
Twenty-seven years later, how difficult is it to take Ford at face value when she says that Kavanaugh held her down, tried to take off her clothes, and covered her mouth to silence her screams, that she thought she might be killed? Is it really that difficult to imagine that she didn't tell anyone about this deep trauma until years later? Is it really that difficult to believe that a preppy little douchebag senior from an elite all-boy's high school in the DC suburbs would get shit-faced at a preppy douchebag party in 1982 and think he could get away with raping the sophomore from the girl's school?
There's another letter, this one from over 200 women who went to Ford's high school around the same time period, and it says, essentially, "Yeah, this is the way these little rapist shits acted."
Motherfuckers, I grew up in the 1980s. Half our pop culture, from Sixteen Candles to the book Less Than Zero to MTV's Spring Break, was about getting girls so drunk or high that they couldn't say, "No," when it wasn't about trying to tear their clothes off or peep at them in their showers or bedrooms or locker rooms. Most of us knew that it was all fantasy bullshit about a lack of consequences for assholes. But a fuck of a lot of young men thought it was a license to bust a nut whenever and wherever and however.
Yeah, I fuckin' think Kavanaugh did it. I don't give a shit if it happened in high school because I think he's lying about it now, which even some Republicans have said is enough to get him voted down. There should be an investigation. And there are going to be hearings next week. A smart administration would pull the nomination. Hell, when George W. Bush pulled Harriet Miers, he got Samuel Alito. But, you know, we're dealing with Trump here.
Kavanaugh's creepy need to demonstrate how much he cares about women was there all the time, showing us, by protesting so vociferously, who he really is. We should thank Ford for putting her trauma out there for the world to judge, which is another kind of trauma, and being brave enough to take on this cyclone of condemnation and rage.
9/15/2018
I'm on the UnPresidented Podcast - Check It Out
Yesterday, I chatted for over an hour with Americablog's John Aravosis and Cliff Schecter of The Daily Beast on their UnPresidented Podcast. We got filthy about creepy Kavanaugh, creepy Manafort, and Trump's creepy denial of deaths in Puerto Rico. Lots of fun.
Check out the 20 minute excerpt below and you can subscribe to hear the full 79 minute version, along with other episodes where they talk to Bill Scher, Molly Jong-Fast, and more.
Check out the 20 minute excerpt below and you can subscribe to hear the full 79 minute version, along with other episodes where they talk to Bill Scher, Molly Jong-Fast, and more.
9/12/2018
What Did That Dumb Orange Motherfucker Say Now? (Hurricane and 9/11 Edition)
Yesterday, at his press briefing on Hurricane Florence, which is likely to fuck up South Carolina, along with possibly North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and/or Maryland, Donald Trump, a man whose every word and hand gesture makes him seem like a carny barker trying to get people to see the "mermaid" that's just a dead monkey with a fish tail sewn on, shit all over Puerto Rico. Devastation from Hurricane Maria last year was exacerbated, according to the goddamn president of the United States, because those freakin' Ricans were completely incompetent and that the island was already fucked before Maria arrived.
He really said, "Puerto Rico got hit not with one hurricane but with two. And the problem with Puerto Rico is their electric grid and their electric generating plant was dead before the storms ever hit. It was in very bad shape. It was in bankruptcy. It had no money. It was largely — you know, it was largely closed. And when the storm hit, they had no electricity — essentially before the storm. And when the storm hit, that took it out entirely."
The plant wasn't dead. Like the grid itself, it was in shitty shape. It needed a ton of work and money. A wise leader might say that this is an opportunity to help Puerto Rico get an electric grid that is at least part of the 21st century. But not Trump. For him, it was a chance to pass off any blame for the fuckery that contributed to the deaths of nearly 3000 Americans. He blamed the mayor of San Juan, even though many deaths occurred in rural areas where she's not the fuckin' mayor. He blamed the fact that the place is an island, as if the Federal Emergency Management Agency shouldn't be prepared for island disasters, considering that one state and all U.S. territories are goddamned islands.
But a man who, with a straight face, can say that the government didn't need to learn jackshit about any failures in Puerto Rico, who can actually verbalize that it was "an incredible, unsung success," is not a man who really gives a sad donkey fuck about anyone. He just keeps barreling ahead, presenting every massive cock-up as someone else's problem or some way that evil motherfuckers want to hold him back and keep him down. Just wait until he blames the trillion dollar deficit on Obamacare or something and not his goddamned tax cuts.
And there is always some stupid in whatever Trump says, some thing that everyone fuckin' knows already that he's gotta act like is the biggest discovery in the world, like, "Holy shit, you know a man can piss standing up?" In this case, it was hurricane research: "You know, we go out there; you have people that actually go fly through these storms. These are very brave people. But they fly through." Yeah, brain dead King Louie, we've watched the news. They've been doing it for like 75 years. He wouldn't care if you told him because he's got no damn shame.
The level of decorum he displayed yesterday as he walked on the tarmac near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, pumping his wee fists and doing that lip bite he thinks looks tough, but mostly looks like he's letting out a big, wet fart, was when he was heading to a 9/11 memorial ceremony, America's holiest of holy days. Even there, before and after his speech, he pointed at people in the crowd and gave his stubby thumbs up, like a douchebro at a frat mixer approving of who his bud is hitting on. Yet he gave a speech that was so sleepy, it was as if John Kelly told him no Big Macs if he veered off text to talk about "fake news" or the electoral college totals. He did get to say, "radical Islamic terrorism," which probably gave a half-stiffie.
But that's nothing compared to the weirdo fuckin' video posted to his social media where Trump talked about 9/11 from "the really beautiful lawn of the Rose Garden," as he put it. He praised the "incredible" people on Flight 93 who prevented their plane from crashing into "the White House or the Capitol or wherever it was heading," which, fine, yeah, the target is up for debate, but it's just a strange, dismissive way to put it. He continued, "These were 3000 incredible people, and we never will let this happen again."
You just wanna shout at the your phone or your computer or tablet, "Motherfucker, you let it happen again. You let it happen in Puerto Rico. It. Fucking. Happened. Except this time you were the hijacker and the federal government was the plane."
I have lots of friends and some family in Florence's path. The hurricane is gonna be awful. I'm expecting the aftermath is going to be even worse because this fuckin' president doesn't know how to land, how to save the passengers in case of emergency. He only knows how to crash.
9/10/2018
Barack Obama, Serena Williams, and the White People Unable to Handle Black Rage
Barack and Michelle Obama were always aware of how too many white people would portray any sign of negative feelings from them. For both, it was specifically gendered and specifically racialized. Michelle Obama talked about how she was called an "angry black woman" when she appeared on the national stage, as if a black woman who fights for anything must be diminished by making her into a caricature. Senator and then candidate and then President Obama constantly, and consciously, fought against the image of the angry black man, the allusion to someone who riots or can't be controlled, as well as to the black men who were lynched. Both images are rooted not just in stereotypes, but in a historical dehumanization of African Americans by whites. It didn't matter, though, whether they ever betrayed any hints of anger. These two kind, loving, and smart people were constantly portrayed as violent, terroristic, and savage.
This weekend, Barack Obama made his first public statements in a long time that directly criticized the presidency of Donald Trump. It was pointed, but pretty mild in comparison to what Trump and most Republicans say. But it was very much Obama-esque, with its constant pleas to common sense against the idiocies of others. "How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?" he asked the crowd in Illinois, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. And Obama is always ready to contextualize the problems of today within recent history. He said that Trump is "just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes."
From the reaction of the conservative media and from Trump's minions, you'd've thought that Obama called for the White House to burn. Columnist Michael Graham said Obama was speaking with "condescension, arrogance." Another was outraged that Obama called Republicans' ludicrous overreaction to the Benghazi attack a "conspiracy theory" in "an outrageous partisan speech." The Conservative Review (which I guess is a thing) declared, "Obama the demagogue is back." Republican politicians went after Obama, with Mike Pence giving that pinched face look and saying he found Obama's words "disappointing" because it breaks with some kind of unspoken precedent of ex-presidents staying away from criticizing current Oval Office occupants.
Does it even need saying that Donald Trump can take a sledgehammer to every precedent and every bit of decorum and the very people attacking Obama will praise Trump for his refusal to play by any rules?
Does it even need saying that Trump goes after Obama every single chance he gets and when Obama dares to say something in his own defense, it's just dismissed as sour grapes?
Does it even need saying that Trump gets away with his rule-breaking because he's white and Obama must stay within the lines at all time, that any deviation from a proscribed respectability makes him an object of derision and degradation by a large racist faction that still can't get over his election?
Which brings us to Serena Williams, perhaps the greatest athlete ever, and her outrage about her treatment at the U.S. Open women's final on Saturday. Many better writers than me have dealt with the sexism and the toxic combination of racism and sexism that allowed umpire Carlos Ramos to pile on penalties because Williams was angry at him for accusing her of cheating.
Whether or not you think Williams was justified in her confrontations with Ramos, if you know anything about tennis, you know that white male players routinely aggressively, angrily, and violently attack the umpires, their rackets, and anyone within range of their spit. Williams was being more respectful than any one of them, and I'm not even talking about regularly explosive icons like John McEnroe or Jimmy Connors. I'm talking about Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, all of whom have blown up without penalty. (And let's not even get into the fact that just about every coach makes hand gestures in the stands.)
The response on the right ranged from mocking Williams for arguing with the refs "only when she's losing" (which, again, is pretty much true for any athlete in any sport who ever argued with officials) to the blatantly racist work from Australian editorial cartoonist Mark Knight in the Herald Sun, which you will not be shocked to hear is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. That image, with its exaggerated features on Williams, including large lips and fuzzy hair that look straight out of a KKK flyer, with the drawing of a wispy, blonde Osaka in contrast, shows you how black rage is perceived by racists, as animalistic, childish, devolved.
What you see time and again is a white fear of black rage, a rage that is more often than not self-repressed and self-censored. And it doesn't matter how mild the rage - as in Obama's criticism of Trump - or how pronounced - as with Williams or Black Lives Matters or football players taking a knee or Maxine Waters - it will be interpreted as a threat to a sanctimonious white hegemony. Those invested in that power structure will react as if being attacked personally.
That reaction, the immediate need to diminish, to derogate, to distort the words and actions of black people who show even a hint of rage demands an answer. Barack Obama and Serena Williams answer it by keeping on, by historicizing their rage and by negating their detractors, time and again by the radical act of simply being present and black and unbowed.
At her press conference after the match, Williams said, "The fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person that has emotions, and that want to express themselves, and want to be a strong woman. They’re going to be allowed to do that because of today. Maybe it didn’t work out for me, but it’s going to work out for the next person." I can't imagine white people being in a position to have to say that, one day, the culture around them will allow them to fully express their feelings.
This weekend, Barack Obama made his first public statements in a long time that directly criticized the presidency of Donald Trump. It was pointed, but pretty mild in comparison to what Trump and most Republicans say. But it was very much Obama-esque, with its constant pleas to common sense against the idiocies of others. "How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?" he asked the crowd in Illinois, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. And Obama is always ready to contextualize the problems of today within recent history. He said that Trump is "just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes."
From the reaction of the conservative media and from Trump's minions, you'd've thought that Obama called for the White House to burn. Columnist Michael Graham said Obama was speaking with "condescension, arrogance." Another was outraged that Obama called Republicans' ludicrous overreaction to the Benghazi attack a "conspiracy theory" in "an outrageous partisan speech." The Conservative Review (which I guess is a thing) declared, "Obama the demagogue is back." Republican politicians went after Obama, with Mike Pence giving that pinched face look and saying he found Obama's words "disappointing" because it breaks with some kind of unspoken precedent of ex-presidents staying away from criticizing current Oval Office occupants.
Does it even need saying that Donald Trump can take a sledgehammer to every precedent and every bit of decorum and the very people attacking Obama will praise Trump for his refusal to play by any rules?
Does it even need saying that Trump goes after Obama every single chance he gets and when Obama dares to say something in his own defense, it's just dismissed as sour grapes?
Does it even need saying that Trump gets away with his rule-breaking because he's white and Obama must stay within the lines at all time, that any deviation from a proscribed respectability makes him an object of derision and degradation by a large racist faction that still can't get over his election?
Which brings us to Serena Williams, perhaps the greatest athlete ever, and her outrage about her treatment at the U.S. Open women's final on Saturday. Many better writers than me have dealt with the sexism and the toxic combination of racism and sexism that allowed umpire Carlos Ramos to pile on penalties because Williams was angry at him for accusing her of cheating.
Whether or not you think Williams was justified in her confrontations with Ramos, if you know anything about tennis, you know that white male players routinely aggressively, angrily, and violently attack the umpires, their rackets, and anyone within range of their spit. Williams was being more respectful than any one of them, and I'm not even talking about regularly explosive icons like John McEnroe or Jimmy Connors. I'm talking about Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, all of whom have blown up without penalty. (And let's not even get into the fact that just about every coach makes hand gestures in the stands.)
The response on the right ranged from mocking Williams for arguing with the refs "only when she's losing" (which, again, is pretty much true for any athlete in any sport who ever argued with officials) to the blatantly racist work from Australian editorial cartoonist Mark Knight in the Herald Sun, which you will not be shocked to hear is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. That image, with its exaggerated features on Williams, including large lips and fuzzy hair that look straight out of a KKK flyer, with the drawing of a wispy, blonde Osaka in contrast, shows you how black rage is perceived by racists, as animalistic, childish, devolved.
What you see time and again is a white fear of black rage, a rage that is more often than not self-repressed and self-censored. And it doesn't matter how mild the rage - as in Obama's criticism of Trump - or how pronounced - as with Williams or Black Lives Matters or football players taking a knee or Maxine Waters - it will be interpreted as a threat to a sanctimonious white hegemony. Those invested in that power structure will react as if being attacked personally.
That reaction, the immediate need to diminish, to derogate, to distort the words and actions of black people who show even a hint of rage demands an answer. Barack Obama and Serena Williams answer it by keeping on, by historicizing their rage and by negating their detractors, time and again by the radical act of simply being present and black and unbowed.
At her press conference after the match, Williams said, "The fact that I have to go through this is just an example for the next person that has emotions, and that want to express themselves, and want to be a strong woman. They’re going to be allowed to do that because of today. Maybe it didn’t work out for me, but it’s going to work out for the next person." I can't imagine white people being in a position to have to say that, one day, the culture around them will allow them to fully express their feelings.
9/06/2018
Hey, Look Over Here. I'm Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump White House, Too
I can remember the moment clearly: the young daughter of one of President Donald Trump's top aides brought a puppy to the office. Her father had asked Chief of Staff John Kelly if it was okay. Kelly, in that irascible way of his, said, "Who gives a fuck?" before he went back to prying the nuclear football out of the screaming president's hands.
Everyone of us in the West Wing knows that President Trump is afraid of dogs. "Dingoes are dogs," I once heard him say. "They eat babies. They eat souls." And then he leaned back in his chair and softly wept as he stared out at nothing, whispering, "So many babies. So many souls."
The president was wandering around the halls, having gotten loose from the Oval Office, when he saw the puppy. It was a pug, so it was truly adorable. He gestured at the girl, who smiled angelically at the man her father had told her deserves everyone's respect and loyalty. "I want to fuck it," he said. The Secret Service agents looked at each other and then went for the aide's daughter. "No, not the girl," he scoffed. "The dog."
Later, the aide told me, "I'm glad it was the dog. It would have been hard to let him take my daughter, but I would have because of the Supreme Court." I nodded. We all nodded because we all would have done the same.
We are the Resistance inside the Trump White House. We are not crazy liberals like Nancy Pelosi. No, we are conservatives who believe in conservative things like lower taxes for the poor rich people and regulation cutting for our struggling trillion-dollar corporations and a bigger military that's bigger just so we can say, "See? Look how big it is" and our voters will lap it up. We like when President Trump agrees to cut taxes and the rest, but we sure don't like it when he's wacky-crazy.
Like the dog. See, the aide handed the puppy over to Trump, who sniffed it and then quickly ambled back to the Oval Office. I got Secretary of Defense Mattis on the phone and said, "We have a situation. A fucking situation." Mattis happened to be in the building, and he rushed over. We burst into the Oval Office to see the president with his pants down, about to start having sex with the dog.
Mattis looked at me and said, "Quick, on Ivanka's desk. There's a stuffed animal. It looks like a dog. Get it."
"Ivanka has a desk?" I asked.
"Yes. Get the doll!"
I ran to the anteroom, and there was a small, tan unicorn on a white desk next to a pile of unsold, fake fashionable clothes. I ripped off the doll's horn, ran back, and tossed it to Mattis, who yelled, "Wait, Mr. President!" Trump turned, the pug in one hand, his penis in the other. "You can't fuck that puppy."
Trump gave that look that said he didn't believe you, you know, where he pulls back his head and it looks like he face goes right into his neck. "I'm the president of the United States. That was some election night, wasn't it? You see that map? So I can fuck any puppy I want."
Mattis said, "You can't fuck it because...it needs to be lubed up first or it'll hurt."
The president paused. He contemplated the situation. Then he said, "You're right. Good man. This guy. Always looking out for me." He handed the puppy over to Mattis. "Lube up the dog." Mattis turned his back, put the puppy in his jacket, pumped out some hand cream that was on the president's desk, rubbed it on the doll, and handed it to the anxious president.
Trump started slamming the dog against his semi-erect penis over and over, crying out, "Yeah, yeah, that's what you get for eating souls!" If it had been the real puppy, the cries would have been horrible, the bone breaking a nightmare. Mattis pushed me out of the room, telling me to give the pug back to the little girl and "get them both out of this Hell House." As the door shut, I could hear the President of the United States grunt in orgasm before he fell over onto the floor. Mike Pence was rushing over to lick the floor clean, as he does.
We in the Resistance know that Donald Trump needs to be institutionalized and that Russia owns him and his family like a hog farmer owns a pen of pigs. Sure, it'd be easy to just go to the press, admit that I'm someone really high up in the administration, and reveal all the awful things I see on an hourly basis, like how racist he is, how he'll shit on his desk and announce, "Look, I made another Ben Carson" after which he tosses the shit at Sarah Sanders and laughs as she runs out of the room, crying.
But I'm not going to do that because we are this close to taking away abortion rights from women and who knows? Maybe we'll teach those queers they don't have a right to get married. Constantly being on the verge of Armageddon is a small price to pay. We're good as long as we can steer this hulking, mentally-deficient manchild to keep signing the documents we put in front of him. He's happy just to show off that he can write his name.
Besides, by writing this, I'm getting you all to wonder who I am rather than worry about Brett Kavanaugh, who is going to make liberals so sad, or those kids we're never going to reunite with their parents. And that's a good day's work.
Everyone of us in the West Wing knows that President Trump is afraid of dogs. "Dingoes are dogs," I once heard him say. "They eat babies. They eat souls." And then he leaned back in his chair and softly wept as he stared out at nothing, whispering, "So many babies. So many souls."
The president was wandering around the halls, having gotten loose from the Oval Office, when he saw the puppy. It was a pug, so it was truly adorable. He gestured at the girl, who smiled angelically at the man her father had told her deserves everyone's respect and loyalty. "I want to fuck it," he said. The Secret Service agents looked at each other and then went for the aide's daughter. "No, not the girl," he scoffed. "The dog."
Later, the aide told me, "I'm glad it was the dog. It would have been hard to let him take my daughter, but I would have because of the Supreme Court." I nodded. We all nodded because we all would have done the same.
We are the Resistance inside the Trump White House. We are not crazy liberals like Nancy Pelosi. No, we are conservatives who believe in conservative things like lower taxes for the poor rich people and regulation cutting for our struggling trillion-dollar corporations and a bigger military that's bigger just so we can say, "See? Look how big it is" and our voters will lap it up. We like when President Trump agrees to cut taxes and the rest, but we sure don't like it when he's wacky-crazy.
Like the dog. See, the aide handed the puppy over to Trump, who sniffed it and then quickly ambled back to the Oval Office. I got Secretary of Defense Mattis on the phone and said, "We have a situation. A fucking situation." Mattis happened to be in the building, and he rushed over. We burst into the Oval Office to see the president with his pants down, about to start having sex with the dog.
Mattis looked at me and said, "Quick, on Ivanka's desk. There's a stuffed animal. It looks like a dog. Get it."
"Ivanka has a desk?" I asked.
"Yes. Get the doll!"
I ran to the anteroom, and there was a small, tan unicorn on a white desk next to a pile of unsold, fake fashionable clothes. I ripped off the doll's horn, ran back, and tossed it to Mattis, who yelled, "Wait, Mr. President!" Trump turned, the pug in one hand, his penis in the other. "You can't fuck that puppy."
Trump gave that look that said he didn't believe you, you know, where he pulls back his head and it looks like he face goes right into his neck. "I'm the president of the United States. That was some election night, wasn't it? You see that map? So I can fuck any puppy I want."
Mattis said, "You can't fuck it because...it needs to be lubed up first or it'll hurt."
The president paused. He contemplated the situation. Then he said, "You're right. Good man. This guy. Always looking out for me." He handed the puppy over to Mattis. "Lube up the dog." Mattis turned his back, put the puppy in his jacket, pumped out some hand cream that was on the president's desk, rubbed it on the doll, and handed it to the anxious president.
Trump started slamming the dog against his semi-erect penis over and over, crying out, "Yeah, yeah, that's what you get for eating souls!" If it had been the real puppy, the cries would have been horrible, the bone breaking a nightmare. Mattis pushed me out of the room, telling me to give the pug back to the little girl and "get them both out of this Hell House." As the door shut, I could hear the President of the United States grunt in orgasm before he fell over onto the floor. Mike Pence was rushing over to lick the floor clean, as he does.
We in the Resistance know that Donald Trump needs to be institutionalized and that Russia owns him and his family like a hog farmer owns a pen of pigs. Sure, it'd be easy to just go to the press, admit that I'm someone really high up in the administration, and reveal all the awful things I see on an hourly basis, like how racist he is, how he'll shit on his desk and announce, "Look, I made another Ben Carson" after which he tosses the shit at Sarah Sanders and laughs as she runs out of the room, crying.
But I'm not going to do that because we are this close to taking away abortion rights from women and who knows? Maybe we'll teach those queers they don't have a right to get married. Constantly being on the verge of Armageddon is a small price to pay. We're good as long as we can steer this hulking, mentally-deficient manchild to keep signing the documents we put in front of him. He's happy just to show off that he can write his name.
Besides, by writing this, I'm getting you all to wonder who I am rather than worry about Brett Kavanaugh, who is going to make liberals so sad, or those kids we're never going to reunite with their parents. And that's a good day's work.
9/04/2018
The Kavanaugh Battle Was Over Before It Ever Got Started, So We Have to Think Ahead
It was heartening as hell to see Democrats put up a fight this morning over the confirmation hearing of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, as average a nutzoid conservative as you're going to find. Seriously, he is no more fucking grotesque and retrograde than Samuel Alito or Neil Gorsuch. But, obviously, there are some extrinsic concerns here that made the Democratic minority on the Senate Judiciary Committee hulk out for a while.
For instance, the committee was not allowed to see any documents for the period of time when Kavanaugh was George W. Bush's White House Staff Secretary, which is a kind of counsel, from 2003-2006. He was only supposed to be there for a year but his nomination to the DC Circuit Court in 2004 stalled because, well, shit, he didn't really have the fucking qualifications to be a circuit court judge. In 2006, it finally got rammed through, and that was his reward for having been a savage dogfucker working for Kenneth Starr's pursuit of Bill Clinton's penis. Kavanaugh was responsible for getting lots of asshole judges through for Bush during those three years, so, you know, those records might be relevant to his, lemme see, judgment.
And then there's the minor issue of who nominated Kavanaugh, which would be Donald Trump, a man whose presidency is sitting there while a dump truck of shit slowly tilts up and we're all just waiting until the whole load comes pouring out on it. Democrats and anyone with a goddamn brain are thinking that maybe a motherfucker who is accused of fucking mothers shouldn't get to pick a judge who might sit in, lemme see, judgment over him.
So, yeah, way to go, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. The base needs to see that kind of fight. Hell, if nothing else, the Democratic side looks a bit more like America, with women and people of color mixing it up alongside the white dudes. Over on the GOP side, it's all white guys (well, Ted Cruz is half-Cuban, but fuck that guy).
But it was all for nothing, really. The corpse of Chuck Grassley stuck to his guns and refused any motions to even have a vote that would fail on delaying the hearing. Grassley was his usual dickish self, commenting about every Democratic opening statement like he was on the couch and bellowing at Hannity on his TV. And Republicans like Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake, who had expressed dismay about shit that Trump had done even recently, like tweeting out an attack on the Department of Justice for indicting two GOP members of Congress, raised their haunches so that Trump would have easy access to fucking their asses. It is fait a-motherfuckin'-ccompli on Kavanaugh (barring some major revelation or fuck-up in the next couple of days).
It goes without saying that, in this fight and the Gorsuch fight, Democrats were playing catch-up for the mistakes they made in not blowing up the Senate over the Republicans' refusal to even consider the nomination by Barack Obama of Merrick Garland in 2016. By putting up only a relatively minor fuss with the hope that Hillary Clinton would be elected and thus would put more liberals on the court, Democrats gambled and lost hugely. Of course, they were also hoping that, post-election, Republicans would be honorable in their actions, and that fuckin' unicorn was murdered sometime around 2009, if not before.
Republicans were never going to be honorable. They were going to fuck shit up and then pretend that Democrats did it first, always going back to the Robert Bork hearings and vote in 1987, always forgetting that Bork had six Republicans vote against his nomination (and that Democrats were in control of the Senate). When Harriet Miers had to withdraw her nomination in 2005, Republicans were in the majority in the Senate. So where is the blame there?
Besides, Republicans kept talking about the sanctity of the process when every fucking one of those pricks blocked Garland's nomination, even when they admitted he was totally qualified. The worst was querulous worm Lindsey Graham, who had the audacity to say to Democrats, "You had a chance and you lost. If you want to pick judges from your way of thinking you better win an election." This bitch-faced cockscab had no problem preventing President Obama from appointing judges. Jesus, what life must be like for these jackoffs with their heads pressed so hard on Mitch McConnell's anus that they can't breathe.
So what are Democrats to do? We could fight now, however useless the battle. Hell, push Republicans to say stupid shit, like Sasse whining that pro-choice protesters are "hysterical," and use it in ads. Get Kavanaugh on record saying that he won't recuse himself from cases that involve Trump personally. One senator could make a big show, like refuse to stop talking until he or she is dragged out by security. Or all of them could just refuse to participate. Walk the fuck out and flip off the majority. Fuck, that's way more interesting than watching Republicans circle jerk around Kavanaugh as they drool over a future where women die from unsafe, illegal abortions and environmental regulations are ground into asbestos dust.
Or you could think ahead. And that's where you gotta get fucking badass. What if Democrats issued a statement saying that, if they get a majority or one or both chambers of Congress, they will launch an investigation of the records that were kept from them? That they will crawl into the asses of every judge appointed by Trump and, if they find any reason to, have them charged with contempt or perjury for the answers given under oath? For instance, you know, like Kavanaugh seems to have done in 2006. And that if they get enough Democrats elected, they will impeach and remove from the bench any Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump because Republicans have so tainted the process?
Can they do all that? Who the fuck cares? You think Republicans wonder if they can get away with shit before they do it? They fuckin' do it and let the chips fall where they may. If they wreck something on the way, then they say it deserved wrecking.
Playing nice has lost us the Supreme Court. You wanna get it back? Stop playing and start behaving like there are lives at stake.
For instance, the committee was not allowed to see any documents for the period of time when Kavanaugh was George W. Bush's White House Staff Secretary, which is a kind of counsel, from 2003-2006. He was only supposed to be there for a year but his nomination to the DC Circuit Court in 2004 stalled because, well, shit, he didn't really have the fucking qualifications to be a circuit court judge. In 2006, it finally got rammed through, and that was his reward for having been a savage dogfucker working for Kenneth Starr's pursuit of Bill Clinton's penis. Kavanaugh was responsible for getting lots of asshole judges through for Bush during those three years, so, you know, those records might be relevant to his, lemme see, judgment.
And then there's the minor issue of who nominated Kavanaugh, which would be Donald Trump, a man whose presidency is sitting there while a dump truck of shit slowly tilts up and we're all just waiting until the whole load comes pouring out on it. Democrats and anyone with a goddamn brain are thinking that maybe a motherfucker who is accused of fucking mothers shouldn't get to pick a judge who might sit in, lemme see, judgment over him.
So, yeah, way to go, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. The base needs to see that kind of fight. Hell, if nothing else, the Democratic side looks a bit more like America, with women and people of color mixing it up alongside the white dudes. Over on the GOP side, it's all white guys (well, Ted Cruz is half-Cuban, but fuck that guy).
But it was all for nothing, really. The corpse of Chuck Grassley stuck to his guns and refused any motions to even have a vote that would fail on delaying the hearing. Grassley was his usual dickish self, commenting about every Democratic opening statement like he was on the couch and bellowing at Hannity on his TV. And Republicans like Ben Sasse and Jeff Flake, who had expressed dismay about shit that Trump had done even recently, like tweeting out an attack on the Department of Justice for indicting two GOP members of Congress, raised their haunches so that Trump would have easy access to fucking their asses. It is fait a-motherfuckin'-ccompli on Kavanaugh (barring some major revelation or fuck-up in the next couple of days).
It goes without saying that, in this fight and the Gorsuch fight, Democrats were playing catch-up for the mistakes they made in not blowing up the Senate over the Republicans' refusal to even consider the nomination by Barack Obama of Merrick Garland in 2016. By putting up only a relatively minor fuss with the hope that Hillary Clinton would be elected and thus would put more liberals on the court, Democrats gambled and lost hugely. Of course, they were also hoping that, post-election, Republicans would be honorable in their actions, and that fuckin' unicorn was murdered sometime around 2009, if not before.
Republicans were never going to be honorable. They were going to fuck shit up and then pretend that Democrats did it first, always going back to the Robert Bork hearings and vote in 1987, always forgetting that Bork had six Republicans vote against his nomination (and that Democrats were in control of the Senate). When Harriet Miers had to withdraw her nomination in 2005, Republicans were in the majority in the Senate. So where is the blame there?
Besides, Republicans kept talking about the sanctity of the process when every fucking one of those pricks blocked Garland's nomination, even when they admitted he was totally qualified. The worst was querulous worm Lindsey Graham, who had the audacity to say to Democrats, "You had a chance and you lost. If you want to pick judges from your way of thinking you better win an election." This bitch-faced cockscab had no problem preventing President Obama from appointing judges. Jesus, what life must be like for these jackoffs with their heads pressed so hard on Mitch McConnell's anus that they can't breathe.
So what are Democrats to do? We could fight now, however useless the battle. Hell, push Republicans to say stupid shit, like Sasse whining that pro-choice protesters are "hysterical," and use it in ads. Get Kavanaugh on record saying that he won't recuse himself from cases that involve Trump personally. One senator could make a big show, like refuse to stop talking until he or she is dragged out by security. Or all of them could just refuse to participate. Walk the fuck out and flip off the majority. Fuck, that's way more interesting than watching Republicans circle jerk around Kavanaugh as they drool over a future where women die from unsafe, illegal abortions and environmental regulations are ground into asbestos dust.
Or you could think ahead. And that's where you gotta get fucking badass. What if Democrats issued a statement saying that, if they get a majority or one or both chambers of Congress, they will launch an investigation of the records that were kept from them? That they will crawl into the asses of every judge appointed by Trump and, if they find any reason to, have them charged with contempt or perjury for the answers given under oath? For instance, you know, like Kavanaugh seems to have done in 2006. And that if they get enough Democrats elected, they will impeach and remove from the bench any Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump because Republicans have so tainted the process?
Can they do all that? Who the fuck cares? You think Republicans wonder if they can get away with shit before they do it? They fuckin' do it and let the chips fall where they may. If they wreck something on the way, then they say it deserved wrecking.
Playing nice has lost us the Supreme Court. You wanna get it back? Stop playing and start behaving like there are lives at stake.
9/03/2018
A Poem for the Laborers
These Hands, These Roots
By John Olivares Espinoza
Go on, tell me
My hands look like yours,
Nail clipped, filed, buffed, shined.
They weren’t always so.
My hands were
Forged from
Gardening, working so deep
In the soil, they could have been roots.
Fingers splintered by wooden
Rakes and shovels.
Some gardener—
Whose face and name get lost
Like loose coins in my memory’s
backseat—told me women
Look at men’s hands
For dark half-circles
Between their nails, which give away
Your blue-collar status like a pair of torn jeans.
This is no matter how handsome your face.
I knew I had hope.
But what about
Lupe, whose mower chopped
His fingertips instead of blades of grass,
Who then preserved them in an ice chest
Next to some plums?
So I scrub, clip,
And lotion my hands with aloe,
Fearing bachelorhood and Internet dating.
I take pride in my hands now,
But what about when
The skin gathers at the knuckle,
And arthritis tangles my fingers for
Cracking my knuckles since I was ten?
But until then, hold my hand
Tightly with yours
As my other hand
Wipes the sweat from my brow
Under the perspiration of work and love
And the fact I know no other way
To wrestle out a life for us.
By John Olivares Espinoza
Go on, tell me
My hands look like yours,
Nail clipped, filed, buffed, shined.
They weren’t always so.
My hands were
Forged from
Gardening, working so deep
In the soil, they could have been roots.
Fingers splintered by wooden
Rakes and shovels.
Some gardener—
Whose face and name get lost
Like loose coins in my memory’s
backseat—told me women
Look at men’s hands
For dark half-circles
Between their nails, which give away
Your blue-collar status like a pair of torn jeans.
This is no matter how handsome your face.
I knew I had hope.
But what about
Lupe, whose mower chopped
His fingertips instead of blades of grass,
Who then preserved them in an ice chest
Next to some plums?
So I scrub, clip,
And lotion my hands with aloe,
Fearing bachelorhood and Internet dating.
I take pride in my hands now,
But what about when
The skin gathers at the knuckle,
And arthritis tangles my fingers for
Cracking my knuckles since I was ten?
But until then, hold my hand
Tightly with yours
As my other hand
Wipes the sweat from my brow
Under the perspiration of work and love
And the fact I know no other way
To wrestle out a life for us.
8/30/2018
For Labor Day, Trump Wants to Take Away Federal Employees' Raises
Kierstin Aanenson is a nurse at the VA in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, making about $37,000 a year.
Chan Aaron is a soil conservation technician in Ashland, Oregon, making around $33,000.
Latisha Aaron is a pharmacist at the VA in Chicago, making a bit over $36,000.
Marcus Aaron is a pharmacist at the VA in Shreveport, Louisiana, also making around $33,000.
Fidarie Abasovski makes $31,000 as a food service worker at the VA in Milwaukee.
Keith Abara makes $30,000 as a forestry technician in California.
Those are workers in the federal government, the ones whose salaries are funded by the taxpayers, and I didn't even make it past the beginning of the A's when it came to looking up those salaries.
Now, just in time for Labor Day, President Donald Trump, a man who is the most miserable allegedly rich person in history, wants to deny workers who are not making even close to the median income of their states, let alone the country, a simple 2.1 percent raise. He also wants to shitcan locality adjustments to their pay so that someone living in, say, Chicago can afford to live instead of being on the same pay as someone in South Dakota.
Nope. Fuck those hundreds of thousands of Veterans Affairs employees and national park employees and more. Fuck the 2 million federal workers, a good percentage of whom work for all of us for pretty damn low pay.
Why? Because Donnie Bumblefuck wants to save the country money. He wrote (and, no, of course, he didn't write this), "We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases." Trump says the raises would cost $25 billion, and, yeah, you're right: the motherfuckin' tax cut is gonna cost a trillion over ten years, but that's rich people money and don't fuckin' dare touch that. (And it also is as much as he wanted for his worthless wall, so maybe that's in the calculation. Who the fuck knows with this heaping pile of rotting orange rinds we have for a president.)
Even the Wall Street Journal has a "What the fucking fuck?" moment in reporting on this bullshit. "The U.S. economy grew in the second quarter at the strongest pace in nearly four years," it said, adding, "Mr. Trump touted the data on Twitter Wednesday, saying, 'Our country is doing great!'" Again, for the wealthy. During the early part of the economic recovery, President Obama froze salaries in 2011 (under pressure from the Republican Congress, he froze them for longer than he wanted), but when the economy started expanding, he put the raises back into gear.
So the only reason to do this is because Trump is being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole, and he knows he's blown a hole in the budget with the tax cut. Fuck you, people taking care of veterans and all the veterans in the federal workforce, which is over a half-million. Don't worry, though. Trump says he loves you.
By the way, the only way this freeze on salaries won't go into effect is if Congress passes a raise and Trump signs off on it. So, yeah, it's gonna happen because if the GOP can dick over federal workers, they will do it in a heartbeat.
Chan Aaron is a soil conservation technician in Ashland, Oregon, making around $33,000.
Latisha Aaron is a pharmacist at the VA in Chicago, making a bit over $36,000.
Marcus Aaron is a pharmacist at the VA in Shreveport, Louisiana, also making around $33,000.
Fidarie Abasovski makes $31,000 as a food service worker at the VA in Milwaukee.
Keith Abara makes $30,000 as a forestry technician in California.
Those are workers in the federal government, the ones whose salaries are funded by the taxpayers, and I didn't even make it past the beginning of the A's when it came to looking up those salaries.
Now, just in time for Labor Day, President Donald Trump, a man who is the most miserable allegedly rich person in history, wants to deny workers who are not making even close to the median income of their states, let alone the country, a simple 2.1 percent raise. He also wants to shitcan locality adjustments to their pay so that someone living in, say, Chicago can afford to live instead of being on the same pay as someone in South Dakota.
Nope. Fuck those hundreds of thousands of Veterans Affairs employees and national park employees and more. Fuck the 2 million federal workers, a good percentage of whom work for all of us for pretty damn low pay.
Why? Because Donnie Bumblefuck wants to save the country money. He wrote (and, no, of course, he didn't write this), "We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases." Trump says the raises would cost $25 billion, and, yeah, you're right: the motherfuckin' tax cut is gonna cost a trillion over ten years, but that's rich people money and don't fuckin' dare touch that. (And it also is as much as he wanted for his worthless wall, so maybe that's in the calculation. Who the fuck knows with this heaping pile of rotting orange rinds we have for a president.)
Even the Wall Street Journal has a "What the fucking fuck?" moment in reporting on this bullshit. "The U.S. economy grew in the second quarter at the strongest pace in nearly four years," it said, adding, "Mr. Trump touted the data on Twitter Wednesday, saying, 'Our country is doing great!'" Again, for the wealthy. During the early part of the economic recovery, President Obama froze salaries in 2011 (under pressure from the Republican Congress, he froze them for longer than he wanted), but when the economy started expanding, he put the raises back into gear.
So the only reason to do this is because Trump is being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole, and he knows he's blown a hole in the budget with the tax cut. Fuck you, people taking care of veterans and all the veterans in the federal workforce, which is over a half-million. Don't worry, though. Trump says he loves you.
By the way, the only way this freeze on salaries won't go into effect is if Congress passes a raise and Trump signs off on it. So, yeah, it's gonna happen because if the GOP can dick over federal workers, they will do it in a heartbeat.
8/29/2018
Trump and the Ass-Eating Evangelicals
On Monday night, Donald Trump, who is still the goddamn president of the fucked United States for some reason, hosted a dinner with evangelical Christian leaders. You might know them better as "those bugfuck insane religious fakers who wouldn't know an actual Christian if one bit them on the nipple."
When Trump spoke with reporters in the room, it was the usual litany of lies and ignorance about supposed accomplishments he's achieved for the nutzoid evangelicals.
He said, "We have stopped the Johnson Amendment from interfering with your First Amendment rights," except the Johnson Amendment, which is supposed to prevent religious leaders and churches from endorsing candidates or campaigning against them, has rarely ever been enforced in the way it could be.
He said of the policy that prevents any federal funds for NGOs to be used for abortion, "Reinstated the Mexico City Policy we first put into place. And if you know, if you study it –- and most of you know about this –- first under President Ronald Reagan, not since then –- the Mexico City Policy." If you study it, or, indeed, read a single goddamn thing about it, you'd know that it was in place under Reagan and Bush 41, rescinded by Clinton, reinstated by Bush 43, and rescinded by Obama. So, sorry, Donald, you're not God's most special angel since the Gipper.
He recited part of the John Adams quote that's carved into the fireplace of the State Dining Room in the White House: "I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House." He left out two other sections which refer to future occupants of the joint, including "May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof." That's such an obvious tell that it's almost comical.
Then, when the reporters were led out of the room, Trump continued with another kind of rant, one that is more in the apocalyptic mode that the nutzoid evangelicals love to threaten their bleating congregations with. Trump talked about the upcoming midterms and warned that, if Democrats win, "they will overturn everything that we've done and they'll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There's violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups — these are violent people." Even some idiot right-wing bloggers were confused by the idea that Democrats would need violence if they won. Mostly, Trump probably means that black people might get elected.
And, bizarrely, he just went on even more of a lying tear, claiming that "Now one of the things I'm most proud of is getting rid of the Johnson Amendment," which he simply didn't do. And also he once again said that Trump Tower has 68 floors when the documents for the fucking ugly thing say it's only 58, which is still a damn tall building.
Finally, as is the tradition at all Trump events, the president dropped his pants and said, "Now it's my favorite part." Then, one by one, the men and women who tell their followers that adultery and sex outside of marriage are affronts to God, that lying and cheating are terrible sins, that baby Jesus cries blood tears over abortion, and that giving money to the church is one sure way to get your foot in the pearly gates, walked up to Trump, a lying adulterer who has paid for abortions and given virtually nothing in charity, and kissed him right on his droopy ass cheeks.
"Get your face in there good," Trump smirked as Franklin Graham went nose deep between his buttocks, as James and Shirley Dobson each leaked a side, as Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins fairly competed for who could get their tongue further up. When Trump sharted as Jerry Falwell, Jr, was nuzzling the president's posterior, you could hear the sighs of disappointment from the rest of the group that they had not been anointed by his shit spray.
As they caressed and moistened his ass, Trump reached under his stomach with two fingers and started to jack off. The muffled praise of the kissers only worked to get him to the quarter erection that's all he can manage with his blood pressure. When Paula White said, "History will record the greatness that you have brought for generations" while her mouth was filled with Trump tush, or when another grabbed a handful of ass and announced, "We have a warrior at the helm who is willing to stand up and fight," Trump moaned in tepid orgasm.
Then he pulled up his pants, sat at the dais, and fell asleep as the righteous applauded his stamina.
When Trump spoke with reporters in the room, it was the usual litany of lies and ignorance about supposed accomplishments he's achieved for the nutzoid evangelicals.
He said, "We have stopped the Johnson Amendment from interfering with your First Amendment rights," except the Johnson Amendment, which is supposed to prevent religious leaders and churches from endorsing candidates or campaigning against them, has rarely ever been enforced in the way it could be.
He said of the policy that prevents any federal funds for NGOs to be used for abortion, "Reinstated the Mexico City Policy we first put into place. And if you know, if you study it –- and most of you know about this –- first under President Ronald Reagan, not since then –- the Mexico City Policy." If you study it, or, indeed, read a single goddamn thing about it, you'd know that it was in place under Reagan and Bush 41, rescinded by Clinton, reinstated by Bush 43, and rescinded by Obama. So, sorry, Donald, you're not God's most special angel since the Gipper.
He recited part of the John Adams quote that's carved into the fireplace of the State Dining Room in the White House: "I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House." He left out two other sections which refer to future occupants of the joint, including "May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof." That's such an obvious tell that it's almost comical.
Then, when the reporters were led out of the room, Trump continued with another kind of rant, one that is more in the apocalyptic mode that the nutzoid evangelicals love to threaten their bleating congregations with. Trump talked about the upcoming midterms and warned that, if Democrats win, "they will overturn everything that we've done and they'll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There's violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups — these are violent people." Even some idiot right-wing bloggers were confused by the idea that Democrats would need violence if they won. Mostly, Trump probably means that black people might get elected.
And, bizarrely, he just went on even more of a lying tear, claiming that "Now one of the things I'm most proud of is getting rid of the Johnson Amendment," which he simply didn't do. And also he once again said that Trump Tower has 68 floors when the documents for the fucking ugly thing say it's only 58, which is still a damn tall building.
Finally, as is the tradition at all Trump events, the president dropped his pants and said, "Now it's my favorite part." Then, one by one, the men and women who tell their followers that adultery and sex outside of marriage are affronts to God, that lying and cheating are terrible sins, that baby Jesus cries blood tears over abortion, and that giving money to the church is one sure way to get your foot in the pearly gates, walked up to Trump, a lying adulterer who has paid for abortions and given virtually nothing in charity, and kissed him right on his droopy ass cheeks.
"Get your face in there good," Trump smirked as Franklin Graham went nose deep between his buttocks, as James and Shirley Dobson each leaked a side, as Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins fairly competed for who could get their tongue further up. When Trump sharted as Jerry Falwell, Jr, was nuzzling the president's posterior, you could hear the sighs of disappointment from the rest of the group that they had not been anointed by his shit spray.
As they caressed and moistened his ass, Trump reached under his stomach with two fingers and started to jack off. The muffled praise of the kissers only worked to get him to the quarter erection that's all he can manage with his blood pressure. When Paula White said, "History will record the greatness that you have brought for generations" while her mouth was filled with Trump tush, or when another grabbed a handful of ass and announced, "We have a warrior at the helm who is willing to stand up and fight," Trump moaned in tepid orgasm.
Then he pulled up his pants, sat at the dais, and fell asleep as the righteous applauded his stamina.
8/27/2018
Dead Senator
Senator John McCain was an asshole. But he was the kind of smart, sarcastic asshole that, when he was on your side, you were just jazzed to have fight with you. When you were on the opposite side from him, he was just a fuckin' asshole. To understand the "complexity" of McCain, as so many like to say, is to misunderstand something basic in his nature: he obviously loved being an asshole.
Look, anything anyone writes about McCain, who died this weekend after battling brain cancer, has to acknowledge that the central part of his story is balls-to-the-wall badass, tragic, and heroic. McCain, who was a shitty pilot and a shitty student at the Naval Academy, was shot down in his fighter plane in North Vietnam and was beaten and tortured by his captors. He declined early release because he knew the NVA wanted a propaganda coup for doing it, so he was subjected to more and worse torture. For five years, he endured and then came home. If you want to know why McCain has engendered more sympathy than most figures in American politics, it boils down to the horror he experienced. We saw his sacrifice in every step his damaged body took.
It's too bad that he went through that for a completely useless war, but we're not supposed to say that. We're not supposed to acknowledge that McCain took pleasure in killing "gooks," as he himself said, or that he was likely hitting civilian targets in his bombing runs. But it doesn't take anything away from McCain's genuine heroism in the Hanoi Hilton. It doesn't take away an iota of the pain he suffered or the fact that it would have killed most of us. It's just that we tend to think in simple terms about the complicated reality.
For instance, yeah, McCain worked with Russ Feingold to pass a weak campaign finance reform law, but at least it was something. Then, when it was pretty much wiped out by the fuckery of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision in 2010, McCain bemoaned it and then did dick about the tsunami of corporate cash in elections except makes sure he got his. His one great legislative achievement was burnt to the ground, and McCain gave it a eulogy instead of trying to rebuild. You'll generally only hear about how much of a "maverick" McCain was for even working with a Democrat, not that he threw in the towel and said, "Fuck it, I'm done" when it was challenged.
That's because McCain has always been a good GOP soldier. He didn't so much as squeak over the odious prick mite Mitch McConnell's declaration that all legislation would die in the Senate during President Obama's two terms. He didn't flinch in backing McConnell on preventing Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing on his Supreme Court nomination.
But, goddamn, he could talk a good game. He could say all those pretty, useless words about "regular order" while doing nothing to bring the Senate to it. He got praise for just not being a racist dick towards Barack Obama, but he treated Obama like shit otherwise. He talked shit about Trump, but he backed the president in nearly every vote. Yeah, he gave a thumbs-down to the skinny repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but shortly after, he agreed to a jammed-through, out-of-regular-order tax bill that included a repeal of the individual mandate, one of the major stabilizing legs of the ACA.
What the fuck else did McCain do? He supported military involvement whenever he could, and, again, sometimes, like in Bosnia, it could be for decent purposes. But he was mostly just a bloodthirsty son of a bitch who really fuckin' loved bombing places. Back in 2002, he wanted to go to Iraq in the worst way, and, only long after the whole thing turned out to be a giant clusterfuck, he said recently he made a mistake. That didn't stop him from advocating for bombing Syria and Iran and being one of Israel's most avid lickspittles in Congress.
Even on one of his signature issues, the end of torture by the United States, he could be an asshole to the Bush administration, leading to a ban on "enhanced interrogation" techniques like waterboarding. Then, he could turn around and vote for Alberto Gonzales, one of the people who came up with legal justification for torture, as attorney general.
McCain was not above pandering to conservatives, whether in the presidential races (especially in 2008) or in his congressional races. From his vote against the holiday for Martin Luther King and his refusal to condemn the Confederate flag (both of which he later said he regretted) to his embarrassing wooing of the Christian right to his ultimate dicking of the nation by elevating the extravagantly vapid and vicious Sarah Palin, McCain wanted the right to know that, even though he sometimes said something vaguely sane, he was still just as bugfuck crazy as the rest of them.
Frankly, much of what McCain did was driven by pissiness and spite. He was nearly drummed out of office for doing the bidding of a donor, Charles Keating, back in the 1980s. So that lit a fire in his ass on campaign finance reform because fuck the rest of you, too. Except, of course, McCain kept raking in that cash and doing favors for the biggest donors. McCain railed against the congressional earmarks process - so-called "pork barrel spending" - which is something that got members of different parties to actually work together.
The easiest way to put this is that, putting aside his torture in Vietnam and his ability to manipulate the media into creating a bullshit myth around him, John McCain wasn't anything particularly special. He was your basic Republican, a conservative who happened to be able to turn a phrase better than the yahoos who populate his party. He was marginally more honorable than most of the GOP because he actually did regret some shit, and he was mightily reamed by the savage Karl Rove in 2000 with the phone calls and flyers in South Carolina that said McCain had a black love child (it was a daughter from Bangladesh he and Cindy had adopted). And Donald Trump isn't worth a single white hair on McCain's balls, but Donald Trump isn't worth most people's pubes.
Mostly, then, we're honoring a lie. If this post isn't as mean and full of anger as you might have liked, it's probably because I've said so many terrible things about McCain over the years that I don't fucking want to repeat myself. I can't think of what more to say about him. Besides, everyone gets so upset if you say one negative word. People love and are so deeply invested in the lie of McCain, of the honorable public servant, of the war hero, that they don't give a shit that he didn't really do much of anything to help people. They need the lie.
Mourning McCain for most of the nation feels less like mourning a man than mourning an illusion of a lost America where people worked together for a common purpose. It was an illusion that McCain talked about all the time, even in his final message to the American people. Throughout his career, though, McCain did as much as anyone to keep the illusion from becoming reality.
However fucked we are now, he is one of the people who fucked us. That he did it with a limp and a quick wit fooled just about everyone.
Look, anything anyone writes about McCain, who died this weekend after battling brain cancer, has to acknowledge that the central part of his story is balls-to-the-wall badass, tragic, and heroic. McCain, who was a shitty pilot and a shitty student at the Naval Academy, was shot down in his fighter plane in North Vietnam and was beaten and tortured by his captors. He declined early release because he knew the NVA wanted a propaganda coup for doing it, so he was subjected to more and worse torture. For five years, he endured and then came home. If you want to know why McCain has engendered more sympathy than most figures in American politics, it boils down to the horror he experienced. We saw his sacrifice in every step his damaged body took.
It's too bad that he went through that for a completely useless war, but we're not supposed to say that. We're not supposed to acknowledge that McCain took pleasure in killing "gooks," as he himself said, or that he was likely hitting civilian targets in his bombing runs. But it doesn't take anything away from McCain's genuine heroism in the Hanoi Hilton. It doesn't take away an iota of the pain he suffered or the fact that it would have killed most of us. It's just that we tend to think in simple terms about the complicated reality.
For instance, yeah, McCain worked with Russ Feingold to pass a weak campaign finance reform law, but at least it was something. Then, when it was pretty much wiped out by the fuckery of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision in 2010, McCain bemoaned it and then did dick about the tsunami of corporate cash in elections except makes sure he got his. His one great legislative achievement was burnt to the ground, and McCain gave it a eulogy instead of trying to rebuild. You'll generally only hear about how much of a "maverick" McCain was for even working with a Democrat, not that he threw in the towel and said, "Fuck it, I'm done" when it was challenged.
That's because McCain has always been a good GOP soldier. He didn't so much as squeak over the odious prick mite Mitch McConnell's declaration that all legislation would die in the Senate during President Obama's two terms. He didn't flinch in backing McConnell on preventing Merrick Garland from even getting a hearing on his Supreme Court nomination.
But, goddamn, he could talk a good game. He could say all those pretty, useless words about "regular order" while doing nothing to bring the Senate to it. He got praise for just not being a racist dick towards Barack Obama, but he treated Obama like shit otherwise. He talked shit about Trump, but he backed the president in nearly every vote. Yeah, he gave a thumbs-down to the skinny repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but shortly after, he agreed to a jammed-through, out-of-regular-order tax bill that included a repeal of the individual mandate, one of the major stabilizing legs of the ACA.
What the fuck else did McCain do? He supported military involvement whenever he could, and, again, sometimes, like in Bosnia, it could be for decent purposes. But he was mostly just a bloodthirsty son of a bitch who really fuckin' loved bombing places. Back in 2002, he wanted to go to Iraq in the worst way, and, only long after the whole thing turned out to be a giant clusterfuck, he said recently he made a mistake. That didn't stop him from advocating for bombing Syria and Iran and being one of Israel's most avid lickspittles in Congress.
Even on one of his signature issues, the end of torture by the United States, he could be an asshole to the Bush administration, leading to a ban on "enhanced interrogation" techniques like waterboarding. Then, he could turn around and vote for Alberto Gonzales, one of the people who came up with legal justification for torture, as attorney general.
McCain was not above pandering to conservatives, whether in the presidential races (especially in 2008) or in his congressional races. From his vote against the holiday for Martin Luther King and his refusal to condemn the Confederate flag (both of which he later said he regretted) to his embarrassing wooing of the Christian right to his ultimate dicking of the nation by elevating the extravagantly vapid and vicious Sarah Palin, McCain wanted the right to know that, even though he sometimes said something vaguely sane, he was still just as bugfuck crazy as the rest of them.
Frankly, much of what McCain did was driven by pissiness and spite. He was nearly drummed out of office for doing the bidding of a donor, Charles Keating, back in the 1980s. So that lit a fire in his ass on campaign finance reform because fuck the rest of you, too. Except, of course, McCain kept raking in that cash and doing favors for the biggest donors. McCain railed against the congressional earmarks process - so-called "pork barrel spending" - which is something that got members of different parties to actually work together.
The easiest way to put this is that, putting aside his torture in Vietnam and his ability to manipulate the media into creating a bullshit myth around him, John McCain wasn't anything particularly special. He was your basic Republican, a conservative who happened to be able to turn a phrase better than the yahoos who populate his party. He was marginally more honorable than most of the GOP because he actually did regret some shit, and he was mightily reamed by the savage Karl Rove in 2000 with the phone calls and flyers in South Carolina that said McCain had a black love child (it was a daughter from Bangladesh he and Cindy had adopted). And Donald Trump isn't worth a single white hair on McCain's balls, but Donald Trump isn't worth most people's pubes.
Mostly, then, we're honoring a lie. If this post isn't as mean and full of anger as you might have liked, it's probably because I've said so many terrible things about McCain over the years that I don't fucking want to repeat myself. I can't think of what more to say about him. Besides, everyone gets so upset if you say one negative word. People love and are so deeply invested in the lie of McCain, of the honorable public servant, of the war hero, that they don't give a shit that he didn't really do much of anything to help people. They need the lie.
Mourning McCain for most of the nation feels less like mourning a man than mourning an illusion of a lost America where people worked together for a common purpose. It was an illusion that McCain talked about all the time, even in his final message to the American people. Throughout his career, though, McCain did as much as anyone to keep the illusion from becoming reality.
However fucked we are now, he is one of the people who fucked us. That he did it with a limp and a quick wit fooled just about everyone.
8/23/2018
Note to Democrats: Don't Let Republicans Make You Abandon Impeachment Talk
It's as much of a truism as you can manage in these chaotic political times: Republicans force everyone to play on their field. No idea is good or valid if just Democrats support it; it must have some Republicans, in or out of government, say it's good. Or so says the media all the goddamn time. When it comes to elections, Republicans always dare Democrats to campaign on some issue with the promise that it will boomerang back and smack them in the tits. It's why Democrats ran scared from Bill Clinton in 2000, it's why they were cowed into silence on terrorism and the Iraq "war" in 2002 and 2004, and it's why they avoided talking about the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Democrats always agree to be the visitors on the Republicans' home turf.
The thing is that, in all those cases and in just about any case you can think of, the motherfuckers in the GOP just went ahead and acted as if Democrats were campaigning on those issues anyways. It didn't matter if Democrats idiotically ran scared from Obamacare because some fuckstumps in colonial hats were teabagging each other in 2010. Republicans made the midterms about an evil Kenyan socialist Muslim Negro taking away your doctor.
And so, now, with the conviction of Donald Trump's former campaign manager and guy in Cell Block B most likely to sell cigarettes out of his anus, Paul Manafort, and the guilty plea of Trump's former lawyer and guy most likely to smoke those anus cigarettes, Michael Cohen, where Cohen directly implicates Trump in the commission of a felony, Republicans are doing it again for the upcoming midterms.
They are double-dog daring Democrats to talk about impeachment. "It will doom them," say Republicans, who just care so much that they're advising Democrats what they can and can't discuss. And many Democrats are buying it. House Minority Leader and the most evil woman in power now that Hillary is gone, Nancy Pelosi, said of impeachment, "It's not someplace that I think we should go...I believe that whatever we do, we have a responsibility to first and foremost to unify the nation."
That's a fundamentally wrong reading of the nation at this moment in our history. The first responsibility of Democrats should be to shit in the face of Republicanism and then turn it over and piss on it and then turn it back and shit on its face again, just to make sure Republicans got the message. And then ask if anyone wants to be part of this shit-covered, piss-soaked ideology. Unification will not do a goddamn thing except to tell conservatives that they fuckin' got away with it again.
Fuckin' promise impeachment. Fuckin' promise that you're gonna hold Trump and anyone else accountable for everything they've done to fuck this country. Lay out clearly what the conditions for impeachment are. You can explain that the most patriotic thing you can do is get rid of Trump. Why the hell do you think the election is looking like a blue wave? It's not because a Democratic House is going to get shit done. It's because people want these motherfuckers punished.
Republicans have already made the election about impeachment. Yeah, back in April, they were running ads declaring that Chuck Schumer wants to impeach Trump. Deranged, toothy ghoul Rudy Giuliani declared, "This election is going to be about impeachment or no impeachment." Sen. John Cornyn said that it's just sour grapes and that Democrats are trying to "reverse" the 2016 election (which leaves aside that Trump and the Republicans have been trying to reverse the 2008 and 2012 elections).
We will see endless ads about how Democratic candidates will impeach Trump. That shouldn't stop anyone. Vile carrion-beast Ted Cruz is making Beto O'Rourke's support of impeachment an issue, but at least O'Rourke is being honest about it. In Fucking Texas. And he's still gaining a head of steam on Cruz.
Let's do this. Let's take the ball and go back to our field. Yeah, we're talking impeachment because that's the Legislative branch doing its fucking job. Rush right at Republican talking points. Campaign on health care, on immigration reform, and on impeachment. It's as clear as can be. And GOP candidates are shitting themselves about having to defend Trump. Good. Force them to either support him or say they want him out.
The one thing that Republicans do have right here is that, whether we talk about it or not, the election is about stopping and/or removing Trump. We have no reason to hide that or ignore that. It's already in play. And that means to go for the Senate, too.
Impeachment is all well and good, but it's trial, conviction, and removal from office that really matters.
The thing is that, in all those cases and in just about any case you can think of, the motherfuckers in the GOP just went ahead and acted as if Democrats were campaigning on those issues anyways. It didn't matter if Democrats idiotically ran scared from Obamacare because some fuckstumps in colonial hats were teabagging each other in 2010. Republicans made the midterms about an evil Kenyan socialist Muslim Negro taking away your doctor.
And so, now, with the conviction of Donald Trump's former campaign manager and guy in Cell Block B most likely to sell cigarettes out of his anus, Paul Manafort, and the guilty plea of Trump's former lawyer and guy most likely to smoke those anus cigarettes, Michael Cohen, where Cohen directly implicates Trump in the commission of a felony, Republicans are doing it again for the upcoming midterms.
They are double-dog daring Democrats to talk about impeachment. "It will doom them," say Republicans, who just care so much that they're advising Democrats what they can and can't discuss. And many Democrats are buying it. House Minority Leader and the most evil woman in power now that Hillary is gone, Nancy Pelosi, said of impeachment, "It's not someplace that I think we should go...I believe that whatever we do, we have a responsibility to first and foremost to unify the nation."
That's a fundamentally wrong reading of the nation at this moment in our history. The first responsibility of Democrats should be to shit in the face of Republicanism and then turn it over and piss on it and then turn it back and shit on its face again, just to make sure Republicans got the message. And then ask if anyone wants to be part of this shit-covered, piss-soaked ideology. Unification will not do a goddamn thing except to tell conservatives that they fuckin' got away with it again.
Fuckin' promise impeachment. Fuckin' promise that you're gonna hold Trump and anyone else accountable for everything they've done to fuck this country. Lay out clearly what the conditions for impeachment are. You can explain that the most patriotic thing you can do is get rid of Trump. Why the hell do you think the election is looking like a blue wave? It's not because a Democratic House is going to get shit done. It's because people want these motherfuckers punished.
Republicans have already made the election about impeachment. Yeah, back in April, they were running ads declaring that Chuck Schumer wants to impeach Trump. Deranged, toothy ghoul Rudy Giuliani declared, "This election is going to be about impeachment or no impeachment." Sen. John Cornyn said that it's just sour grapes and that Democrats are trying to "reverse" the 2016 election (which leaves aside that Trump and the Republicans have been trying to reverse the 2008 and 2012 elections).
We will see endless ads about how Democratic candidates will impeach Trump. That shouldn't stop anyone. Vile carrion-beast Ted Cruz is making Beto O'Rourke's support of impeachment an issue, but at least O'Rourke is being honest about it. In Fucking Texas. And he's still gaining a head of steam on Cruz.
Let's do this. Let's take the ball and go back to our field. Yeah, we're talking impeachment because that's the Legislative branch doing its fucking job. Rush right at Republican talking points. Campaign on health care, on immigration reform, and on impeachment. It's as clear as can be. And GOP candidates are shitting themselves about having to defend Trump. Good. Force them to either support him or say they want him out.
The one thing that Republicans do have right here is that, whether we talk about it or not, the election is about stopping and/or removing Trump. We have no reason to hide that or ignore that. It's already in play. And that means to go for the Senate, too.
Impeachment is all well and good, but it's trial, conviction, and removal from office that really matters.
8/21/2018
Brett Kavanaugh's Lewinsky Memo Makes One Hell of a Poem
If Monica Lewinsky Says...
A poem by Brett Kavanaugh
That you inserted a cigar
into her vagina while
you were in the Oval
Office area
That you had phone
sex with her on
approximately 15
occasions
That on several occasions
in the Oval
Office area,
you used your fingers
to stimulate her vagina and
bring her to
orgasm
That she gave you oral
sex on nine
occasions in the Oval
Office area
That you ejaculated
into her mouth on two
occasions in the Oval
Office area
That on several occasions
you had her
give her oral sex,
made her
stop,
and then
ejaculated
into the sink
in the bathroom
off the Oval
Office
That you masturbated
into a trash
can in your secretary's
office
Would she
be
lying?
(Note: All of this is from a memo Kavanaugh wrote urging prosecutors to attack President Bill Clinton in 1998. Kavanaugh was working for Kenneth Starr during the "investigation" into Clinton lying under oath about blow jobs, something that so outraged the future judge and current nominee to the Supreme Court that he blew a fucking gasket over it. He demanded that Starr tear into Clinton, and the man who would smile and bow and scrape to Donald fuckin' Trump said of Clinton, "The president has disgraced his office, the legal system and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles — callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle." Apparently, that only goes for Democrats. He'll gladly allow his entire career to come down to the blessings of a man who Kavanaugh has no qualms pretending hasn't disgraced the presidency.
While he supposedly would later "regret" this memo, he wrote it as an official document. If Twitter had been around and he had tweeted this kind of shit out, his career might well be over. Instead, he'll probably get a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land and fuck with the lives of Americans for decades.
Someone in this story is a cocksucker. And it ain't Monica Lewinsky.)
A poem by Brett Kavanaugh
That you inserted a cigar
into her vagina while
you were in the Oval
Office area
That you had phone
sex with her on
approximately 15
occasions
That on several occasions
in the Oval
Office area,
you used your fingers
to stimulate her vagina and
bring her to
orgasm
That she gave you oral
sex on nine
occasions in the Oval
Office area
That you ejaculated
into her mouth on two
occasions in the Oval
Office area
That on several occasions
you had her
give her oral sex,
made her
stop,
and then
ejaculated
into the sink
in the bathroom
off the Oval
Office
That you masturbated
into a trash
can in your secretary's
office
Would she
be
lying?
(Note: All of this is from a memo Kavanaugh wrote urging prosecutors to attack President Bill Clinton in 1998. Kavanaugh was working for Kenneth Starr during the "investigation" into Clinton lying under oath about blow jobs, something that so outraged the future judge and current nominee to the Supreme Court that he blew a fucking gasket over it. He demanded that Starr tear into Clinton, and the man who would smile and bow and scrape to Donald fuckin' Trump said of Clinton, "The president has disgraced his office, the legal system and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles — callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle." Apparently, that only goes for Democrats. He'll gladly allow his entire career to come down to the blessings of a man who Kavanaugh has no qualms pretending hasn't disgraced the presidency.
While he supposedly would later "regret" this memo, he wrote it as an official document. If Twitter had been around and he had tweeted this kind of shit out, his career might well be over. Instead, he'll probably get a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land and fuck with the lives of Americans for decades.
Someone in this story is a cocksucker. And it ain't Monica Lewinsky.)
8/16/2018
Vatican Likely Won't Punish Those Who Covered Up Child Sexual Abuse
According to the just-released grand jury report, in 1990, Bishop James Timlin of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was first made aware that a priest who had recently been transferred to his Diocese, Father Arthur Long, had admitted to having sex with underage girls in his parish in Harrisburg. Timlin was the bishop in the Scranton Diocese, which encompasses the entire northeast section of Pennsylvania, from 1984 to 2003.
Prior to being the bishop, Monsignor Timlin had been told as early as 1968 that one of the priests in his parish, Robert Caparelli, had been "contributing to the delinquency" of at least two altar boys, ages 11 and 12. Another priest, Mark Mecca, described working with Caparelli as being "under an incubus" because of Caparelli's sexual abuse of children. Caparelli was transferred to different parishes in Pennsylvania, and, even when required by the state in 1985 to report any incidents of such abuse, Timlin did not and allowed Caparelli to continue his ministry.
In 1991, Caparelli was charged with sexual abuse of a child. By this point, Timlin had personally heard complaints about Caparelli's rape of young boys. A civil lawsuit by the victim said that the priest had sexually abused him from September 1985 to June 1986, including forcible sodomy at the church. Despite saying that the Diocese would cooperate with authorities, "Timlin specifically took actions to protect the secret archives of the Diocese from legal discovery during the course of the litigation." The Diocese's records had multiple letters alleging more incidents of rape and abuse by Caparelli, including at least one incident where the priest admitted he had done it.
The number of incidents involving Caparelli was staggering, going back to 1967, involving boys between 10 and 12. In prison, it was revealed that Caparelli knew he was HIV-positive for years, so while he was sodomizing children. He died there in 1994. Bishop Timlin still stood by Caparelli, refusing to take responsibility for covering up the crimes. Indeed, in 1993, "Timlin requested that Caparelli be released from prison to a Catholic treatment facility - like those that had so often authorized the return of Pennsylvania's predatory priests to active ministry."
Another priest in the Scranton Diocese, Father Thomas Skotek, carried on a sexual relationship with an underage girl from 1980 to 1985. When she got pregnant, Skotek helped her get an abortion. Bishop Timlin was aware of this, and he accepted Skotek's resignation by responding, "This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are. I too share your grief. … With the help of God, who never abandons us and who is always near when we need him, this too will pass away, and all will be able to pick up and go on living." After Skotek went to a Catholic treatment center, he was reassigned in 1987 to a Wilkes-Barre parish.
Another priest in the Scranton Diocese, Father Robert J. Brague, had ongoing sexual relationships with several teenage girls, and, in 1988, one of them became pregnant. While Timlin removed Brague from his office, Timlin did offer support for Brague receiving new appointments at churches in New York and Florida.
Another priest in the Scranton Diocese, Father Ralph Ferraldo, was accused by a mother of "immorally" touching her young son and other boys in 1974. Then-Chancellor Timlin asked Ferraldo, who "did admit that he had older boys visit his room in the rectory, but nothing wrong had occurred. He was asked not to do that anymore." Timlin told the mother that her son was mistaken. In 1985 and 1986, Ferraldo was accused of "inappropriate behavior" with hospital patients he was ministering to. Then, in 2002, a male reported that Ferraldo had sexually abused him when he was 16 back in the early 1980s.
Another priest in the Scranton...but you get the idea. Timlin was also constantly commenting on how the stories needed to be kept quiet, lest it upset the parishioners (and cost the church even more).
This is a small part of a heartbreaking, sickening 1000-page grand jury report on sexual abuse in nearly every diocese in Pennsylvania. And the focus here is Bishop James Timlin, who is retired now but still has an active role in the church. According to an expert on the way such cases are handled, Timlin "likely will not face any sanctions from the Vatican for concealing reports of sexual abuse committed by priests."
Yeah, the Vatican is more likely to slap bishops on the wrist than kick them the hell out of the church. "The Vatican has removed some offenders from office, but it rarely takes action to permanently remove a priest from the priesthood — an action known as laicization, more commonly referred to as defrocking." The first statement from the Vatican has emphasized that the crimes took place before 2002, when the U.S. Catholic Church finally took a stronger stand on how it handles such crimes.
In other words, the ones who shifted the rapist priests around, the ones who swept things under a very lumpy rug, like James Timlin, will have gotten away with it.
Prior to being the bishop, Monsignor Timlin had been told as early as 1968 that one of the priests in his parish, Robert Caparelli, had been "contributing to the delinquency" of at least two altar boys, ages 11 and 12. Another priest, Mark Mecca, described working with Caparelli as being "under an incubus" because of Caparelli's sexual abuse of children. Caparelli was transferred to different parishes in Pennsylvania, and, even when required by the state in 1985 to report any incidents of such abuse, Timlin did not and allowed Caparelli to continue his ministry.
In 1991, Caparelli was charged with sexual abuse of a child. By this point, Timlin had personally heard complaints about Caparelli's rape of young boys. A civil lawsuit by the victim said that the priest had sexually abused him from September 1985 to June 1986, including forcible sodomy at the church. Despite saying that the Diocese would cooperate with authorities, "Timlin specifically took actions to protect the secret archives of the Diocese from legal discovery during the course of the litigation." The Diocese's records had multiple letters alleging more incidents of rape and abuse by Caparelli, including at least one incident where the priest admitted he had done it.
The number of incidents involving Caparelli was staggering, going back to 1967, involving boys between 10 and 12. In prison, it was revealed that Caparelli knew he was HIV-positive for years, so while he was sodomizing children. He died there in 1994. Bishop Timlin still stood by Caparelli, refusing to take responsibility for covering up the crimes. Indeed, in 1993, "Timlin requested that Caparelli be released from prison to a Catholic treatment facility - like those that had so often authorized the return of Pennsylvania's predatory priests to active ministry."
Another priest in the Scranton Diocese, Father Thomas Skotek, carried on a sexual relationship with an underage girl from 1980 to 1985. When she got pregnant, Skotek helped her get an abortion. Bishop Timlin was aware of this, and he accepted Skotek's resignation by responding, "This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are. I too share your grief. … With the help of God, who never abandons us and who is always near when we need him, this too will pass away, and all will be able to pick up and go on living." After Skotek went to a Catholic treatment center, he was reassigned in 1987 to a Wilkes-Barre parish.
Another priest in the Scranton Diocese, Father Robert J. Brague, had ongoing sexual relationships with several teenage girls, and, in 1988, one of them became pregnant. While Timlin removed Brague from his office, Timlin did offer support for Brague receiving new appointments at churches in New York and Florida.
Another priest in the Scranton Diocese, Father Ralph Ferraldo, was accused by a mother of "immorally" touching her young son and other boys in 1974. Then-Chancellor Timlin asked Ferraldo, who "did admit that he had older boys visit his room in the rectory, but nothing wrong had occurred. He was asked not to do that anymore." Timlin told the mother that her son was mistaken. In 1985 and 1986, Ferraldo was accused of "inappropriate behavior" with hospital patients he was ministering to. Then, in 2002, a male reported that Ferraldo had sexually abused him when he was 16 back in the early 1980s.
Another priest in the Scranton...but you get the idea. Timlin was also constantly commenting on how the stories needed to be kept quiet, lest it upset the parishioners (and cost the church even more).
This is a small part of a heartbreaking, sickening 1000-page grand jury report on sexual abuse in nearly every diocese in Pennsylvania. And the focus here is Bishop James Timlin, who is retired now but still has an active role in the church. According to an expert on the way such cases are handled, Timlin "likely will not face any sanctions from the Vatican for concealing reports of sexual abuse committed by priests."
Yeah, the Vatican is more likely to slap bishops on the wrist than kick them the hell out of the church. "The Vatican has removed some offenders from office, but it rarely takes action to permanently remove a priest from the priesthood — an action known as laicization, more commonly referred to as defrocking." The first statement from the Vatican has emphasized that the crimes took place before 2002, when the U.S. Catholic Church finally took a stronger stand on how it handles such crimes.
In other words, the ones who shifted the rapist priests around, the ones who swept things under a very lumpy rug, like James Timlin, will have gotten away with it.
8/15/2018
One Little Thing: The Defense Bill Is Almost as Long as the Affordable Care Act
Here's something that shouldn't matter at all but, because of prior Republican fuckery, it sure as shit does.
Check this out. Here is a screenshot from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare," in case you're a fuckin' moron). It's the first page from the version that was passed by the House and Senate in January 2010.
What's important here is the number at the top there. See it? It's 906 pages in a PDF downloaded from the Government Publishing Office. If you'll remember, Republicans freaked the fuck out over the length of the law and how no one had read it before it was passed. It was variously described as having 2300 or 2700 or 16,000 or 20,000 pages, depending on how desperate whichever conservative spoogebucket was spouting off and whether they were counting corrections and regulations issued in its wake. But the bill itself, which affected every single person living in this country directly with its provisions about what health insurance had to cover and who had to be covered, was 906 pages.
Even our current dink president was outraged over how long the bill was because Republicans could do it in fewer pages. Maybe 46, maybe 123, maybe 67. It was all a big fuckin' mystery, but, goddamnit, it was shorter than that fucker Obama could come up with.
This week, Congress passed the John McCain Totally Too Fucking Huge Defense Budget That Is a Giant Giveaway to Weapons Makers and a Continuation of Endless War and Endless Detention Without Trial and Holy Shit, This Is Just For a Single Year. And in remarks to soldiers, President Trump couldn't have been more pleased with himself (who else would he ever be pleased with?). He really said, "The National Defense Authorization Act is the most significant investment in our military and our warfighters in modern history, and I am very proud to be a big, big part of it."
Here's the first page of it, also downloaded as a PDF from the GPO:
You see that fuckin' number up top? It's 788. That's right. The defense budget is just 120 pages shorter than the law that remade a fifth of the entire American economy. And you fuckin' well know that not a single goddamn Republican representation or senator read the whole thing. You fuckin' well know that not one is gonna complain about the length. Complicated shit gets a complicated bill. It's that simple.
But we spend years arguing about how many pages Obamacare was. So the layers of hypocrisy in the Republican Party are so fuckin' deep that there are dinosaurs buried in that bullshit.
(Note: One other thing Trump said in his weirder than usual speech at Fort Drum is that the soldiers would only be real patriots if they gave up their raises to help with the national debt. No, really: "We are proudly giving our troops the biggest pay increase in a decade. And I know you don’t want it because you’re very patriotic. You’ll say, just save the money. We’re going to pay down debt. Does anybody not want it? Please raise your hand. What’s going on here? (Laughter.) Are these real patriots?" It's like the zombie corpse of Henny Youngman trying to articulate a joke through a rotting jaw.)
(Note 2: There are a fuck-ton of more important things going on, but I'm still trying to get my head around the horror of that Pennsylvania Catholic Church child rape report. Might have more on that tomorrow.)
Check this out. Here is a screenshot from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare," in case you're a fuckin' moron). It's the first page from the version that was passed by the House and Senate in January 2010.
What's important here is the number at the top there. See it? It's 906 pages in a PDF downloaded from the Government Publishing Office. If you'll remember, Republicans freaked the fuck out over the length of the law and how no one had read it before it was passed. It was variously described as having 2300 or 2700 or 16,000 or 20,000 pages, depending on how desperate whichever conservative spoogebucket was spouting off and whether they were counting corrections and regulations issued in its wake. But the bill itself, which affected every single person living in this country directly with its provisions about what health insurance had to cover and who had to be covered, was 906 pages.
Even our current dink president was outraged over how long the bill was because Republicans could do it in fewer pages. Maybe 46, maybe 123, maybe 67. It was all a big fuckin' mystery, but, goddamnit, it was shorter than that fucker Obama could come up with.
This week, Congress passed the John McCain Totally Too Fucking Huge Defense Budget That Is a Giant Giveaway to Weapons Makers and a Continuation of Endless War and Endless Detention Without Trial and Holy Shit, This Is Just For a Single Year. And in remarks to soldiers, President Trump couldn't have been more pleased with himself (who else would he ever be pleased with?). He really said, "The National Defense Authorization Act is the most significant investment in our military and our warfighters in modern history, and I am very proud to be a big, big part of it."
Here's the first page of it, also downloaded as a PDF from the GPO:
You see that fuckin' number up top? It's 788. That's right. The defense budget is just 120 pages shorter than the law that remade a fifth of the entire American economy. And you fuckin' well know that not a single goddamn Republican representation or senator read the whole thing. You fuckin' well know that not one is gonna complain about the length. Complicated shit gets a complicated bill. It's that simple.
But we spend years arguing about how many pages Obamacare was. So the layers of hypocrisy in the Republican Party are so fuckin' deep that there are dinosaurs buried in that bullshit.
(Note: One other thing Trump said in his weirder than usual speech at Fort Drum is that the soldiers would only be real patriots if they gave up their raises to help with the national debt. No, really: "We are proudly giving our troops the biggest pay increase in a decade. And I know you don’t want it because you’re very patriotic. You’ll say, just save the money. We’re going to pay down debt. Does anybody not want it? Please raise your hand. What’s going on here? (Laughter.) Are these real patriots?" It's like the zombie corpse of Henny Youngman trying to articulate a joke through a rotting jaw.)
(Note 2: There are a fuck-ton of more important things going on, but I'm still trying to get my head around the horror of that Pennsylvania Catholic Church child rape report. Might have more on that tomorrow.)
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