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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawley, Greene, and the Erasure of Violence on Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Have to Acknowledge Biden Won Fair and Square

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Observations on an Insurrection

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

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

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

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

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

3b. And, always, fuck Mike Pence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From El-Man in New Zealand

Hooray, he's leaving

Kamala, pass me the mop

This will take a while

From Sel in Jacksonville, Florida

If I had no couth 

I would piss on the snarling

masses of morons

From papadoo52 in Pennsylvania

The Rally

Trump cult gathers tight

Shit pours from Trump's anus mouth

Trump cult laps it up

From Becky in Chicago

Me before all you

That's not how a nation thinks 

I hate this country 

From JM in Chicago

2020: The

Year The Sirens Never Stopped

In My Neighborhood

From Jeff in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

We may never know

If our president is sane

Hope we never learn

From James in Minneapolis

Say his name: George Floyd

His last words were ‘I can’t breathe’

All cops are bastards

From Kevin in North Minneapolis

News Happens Here

My city on fire

Black man under a white knee

Will we ever learn?

From Skye in England

This year caught our breath

Jammed like a knee on the neck

Alone together

From Ruth Ann in Madison, Wisconsin

Sports/Democracy/Same?

Bubble confinement

Kneeling for America

Masked on the sidelines

From Fortune in Honduras

Calls Us A Shit Hole?

Fuck You To Hell, Rank Shit Stain,

And Your Failed Shit State

From Amanda in West Virginia

Mitch McConnell is

Worst hidden Reptilian

Velociraptor

From Opus 131

One day closer to

The end of the pandemic

My mantra each night

From Paul in Fairfax, Virginia

Three Deaths

Martha died in March,

Mr. Dec in September,

Ralph in December.

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

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

Haiku Review of 2020 (Part 3): It Is What It Is

Goddamn, 2020 has brought out the haiku-ing. So far, I've gotten more of them than ever, like 300, which is a lot of fuckin' haiku. Big, sincere thanks for all the efforts so far. Here we go with more of the best, from all around the US, North America, and the fuckin' world.

From Liz in Salt Lake City

Self Care

Year twenty twenty

Discover masturbation

As if the first time

From Jeanne in Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia

When there are no real

consequences to lying

democracy dies

From Tony in Milwaukee

Just a Few More Weeks

Your National Nightmare Ends

Not For Us Black Folks.

From Paradoctor in San Francisco

Orange sky all day

Brexit, BLM, Covid

What an awful year

From Hiding from the Corona in San Diego

A cesspool of lies

Seventy-five million dolts

Election facepalm

From Ruth in Oregon

Quarantine

Sitting on my couch

Wearing blankets and a robe

Thousands dead today

From Uncle Larry

Fucking circus clown.                                  

Tried to take the system down.            

You lose, you bitchface.

From Anthony in Washington

Too Much Winning

Hitler and Tojo

Killed fewer Yanks than you, Trump.

Suck their balls in Hell.

From Cerato in Sacramento

Upside

Every day at home

I stare at various screens.

Braless since April.

From Abbott in AZ

Barr ran away quick

tired of sucking Trump's dick

taste never go 'way

From Giacomo in California

Searching for Lindsey 

Was hard.  Jared in the way

Deep inside Trump’s ass.

From one of a handful of liberals in a very red county in Southern California

Senator Hawley

Is surely Joshing us now

Voter Fraud was nil

From Debra in Brinnon

Spot on, Frannie

My dog makes more sense

We talk a lot on dark days

Quarantine visions

From Dave in Maine

the bench

AOC, Abrams

Katie Porter, Buttigieg

To name just a few

From doncjesuis from Eschaton

Not Crazy

QAnon believes

That Trump fights pedophiles

No, seriously

From Bill in Australia

California Dreaming

When ER is full

you can die in the gift shop

the rich get tax cuts

From Tippie in Ottawa

A Canadian Observes

The view from up here?

Well, it's dubious at best.

Time to build a wall.

California girl expat in Saudi Arabia

Quietude

COVID came to town

And while the world was on pause

I learned to bake bread.

I still have about 100 more to get through, so there's gonna be one more day of these. Gird yer loins.

(The title is from Thundercat's amazing 2020 album. Get your funk-jazz fusion on.)

Haiku Review of 2020 (Part 2): The New Abnormal

Sweet Jesus, it's like you've all been holding your haiku all year, denying yourself sweet release until the call went out yesterday to email it to the Rude Pundit. Already, you've sent about a hundred of 'em. Bring 'em on. I want to feel the fullness of your poetic effulgence. Spray your words at me from all over the motherfuckin' world.

Here are some of the best (which means the ones I liked most):

From Sheldon in Germany

Bounce

punch the billionaire

comfy in the guillotine

now greet the basket

From Heaather in Sun City, AZ

Choose which misery:

Stay home in my bubble, or

Put the bra back on?

From Jeff in Omaha, NE

Trump's Lies About Covid

This will go away.

Bleach cleans out the body, right?

It will disappear.

From Rabbitearz in Los Angeles

I watched my mother

Die in a Zoom video.

How is this humane?

From lUomino from Vogosphere

COVID does not care

Whether you believe in it

Distance, mask, stay well!

From Dan in Bellingham

A toilet flushing

The sound of 2020

Turning one year old

From Chris in Hong Kong

Freedom in Hong Kong

Fear and white terror abound

China's just starting

From Mark in Tennessee

A Day in Cookeville, TN

Wear a mask, dickhole!

No, I gotta have Freedom.

We are so damn fucked.

From HWB in Germany

Optimist

So many victims

Surely we have learned something

Oh look a squirrel

From VJ in NJ

A fitting shortage

Toilet paper and cleaner

For a year of shit

I've only been through the first 24 hours of haiku. So keep your hopes alive if you've sent them in. More tomorrow. And probably Saturday. Once again: 5-7-5 syllables. Titled or untitled. Send 'em to: rudepundit (at) yahoo.com. And make sure you tell me your nom de rude and some place somewhere. 

(The title up top is from the new Strokes album, which sounded like an old Strokes album, which means it was really fucking good.)

Haiku Review of 2020: Fetch the Bolt Cutters

This motherfucking year. I mean, we were already on the express train to Fuckedsville even before COVID reared its spiky head and turbocharged this shit, this 2020, these 12 months that felt like a generation burnt up and was gone. Think about it: Even without coronavirus and the economic collapse that accompanied it, we'd have had the Black Lives Matter uprising, the climate-driven conflagrations out West, the friggin' impeachment of our goddamn president (yeah, that was this year), the election, and the deaths of both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Chadwick Boseman (I know, but that one hurt particularly badly). Jesus fuck, I'm nauseous writing all that out, and that's just in the United States. You wanna talk Australian fires? Brexit? Other weather shit in Pakistan, India, and elsewhere? 

And the worst part is that because Trump's fuckery is going to continue into January, we're more or less living in 2020 until January 20, when the Secret Service will be allowed to tackle Trump and drag his saggy ass out of the White House if he refuses to leave. That would start things off on a high note.

So around these parts, we always kick the calendar year's ass out the door with haiku, those little 3-line poems you were forced to write in grade school and everyone made it about farts, except for that one kid who took it seriously and wrote something so beautiful it made the teacher cry and believe, once again, that her career choice was right. What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah, haiku. Send me yours. Here's the deal:

Submit your haiku about anything you want having to do with the cursed 2020 to "rudepundit(at)yahoo(dot)com." I'm the only judge and jury here, and I am generally fickle, drunk, high, and yelling at pigeons.

I'm also a stickler for the form: one line of 5 syllables, one line of 7 syllables, and one line of 5 syllables, in that order. They can be as filthy, funny, or fucked-up as you like. You can be serious, silly, or sanctimonious. Titled or untitled. The ones I like the best get published on here over the next few days, so lemme know what name you want on it (in case your boss or mate or Mom sees it) and where you're from. Like "Trump's Loser Bitch Face from Cockring, NH" or "Linda from San Francisco" or something.

Here's a few to inspire you:

A Work Day

Watch Fox and Friends. Tweet.

Yell at Jared about fraud.

Watch OAN. Tweet.

Task Force 

Pence asked everyone

To pray for cures and treatments

Dr. Fauci wept

America Now

Corpses like cold meat

Laid out in a freezer truck

In a loading dock

Okay, now it's your turn. Send 'em on.

(Note; The title comes from Fiona Apple's amazing album that came out this year. I've been a slavering fan since her first.)

This Year's Madness Might Just Fade Soon

Look, by just about any measure, 2020 was a clusterfuck inside a shit sandwich covered in stupid sauce. I was telling a pal of mine, "This wasn't the worst year ever in the United States because, you know, black people aren't property and we can be gay without getting arrested and women are heading towards equality and we have medicine and technology and all that. But it's the dumbest year in modern times because we have medicine and technology and all that and it was still so fucked up." 

It's not just COVID and the economic crisis that sucked the hair off the balls of 2020. It's not just that Donald Trump was president (and, let's be honest, 2020 doesn't really end until January 20, 2021). It is that so many Americans threw themselves, body and soul, into the delusional world of coronavirus conspiracies, QAnon madness, and Trump worship. Yeah, to an extent, conspiracy theories and Trump worship were ludicrously widespread and interwoven before this year, but it all skyrocketed in 2020 to the point where Trump got far more votes than anyone would have imagined (but not enough to win, obviously) and a few conspiracy nuts got elected to Congress. The country seems stuck in a fever state, and we see column after column about how we're going to be here for a long damn time, just flailing about, regressing in so many ways as we fight to defeat the harmful politics that exist in Trump's wide, porcine shadow.

But lemme say something that is uncharacteristically hopeful to end this goddamned year (and before we get to haiku - oh, yes, we always end the year at this joint with haiku). I don't think it's going to be as bad as we think. There is a chance that this madness is going to fade sooner than we think for a simple reason: shit getting back to normal post-COVID.

Go with me here: In the wake of the pandemic, every fucking thing that we did as groups of humans, from large family gatherings to football games to concerts to bars and restaurants, all of that was shitcanned. Sure, sure, in most places, you could, after the lockdown ended, go to a 25-50% filled bar with all kinds of precautions, with the constant stress of those COVID protocols hanging over you, whether you were following them or resisting them (wear your fucking mask!). Even the most MAGA-minded assholes were forced into a radical reduction in activities, no matter how often they got together for backyard barbecues or weddings or other superspreader events. 

People are so fucking bored and frustrated right now. When your weekend was built around tailgating or boot-scooting or whatever, you're gonna wanna lash out. Of course, people are gonna veer into the bullshit that soothes the lizard brain to explain why life sucks so hard right now. Of course, if you were inclined to rock out with your MAGA out, you're gonna identify even more with that fuckery because it tells you that you don't bear any responsibility for any of this. If you dabbled around the fringes of conspiracy theories, well, fuck, there's only so much porn you can watch before you go ahead and click on that suggested YouTube video about pedophiles and baby-eating Democrats. You've got nothing to occupy your brain because you sure as shit didn't read before the pandemic. It's not like you're gonna all of a sudden pick up Crime and Punishment and go to town. 

Fuck, no. You're gonna go to the gatherings you can, whether that's Trump rallies or Proud Boy Zoom meet-ups. You're gonna head towards people because that's what we do. Goddamn, I miss people - real, physical, present people, not ghosts on a video chat. I miss theatres and music clubs. I miss my fucking family in Louisiana. I miss getting the fuck out of this country to meet new people. So I get it. I get that urge. I've filled it with whiskey and pharmaceuticals, along with too much CNN and Netflix/Hulu/Prime, as well as the comforting closeness of a couple of beloved humans and a dog. But I can see how you'd want to massage that ogre part of your mind and fuck shit up even more than you'd fuck it up if things were normal. Hell, you've finally got time to fuck it up, especially if you've been furloughed or fired or even if you're just working from home.

I truly believe that big segment of the crazy-as-a-shithouse-rat population is gonna go back to getting drunk at college football games or dancing drunk at bars or drunkenly hanging out with your grandparents or some other activity, probably done drunk, when we reach a point with the vaccine where we can have a relatively normal life again. The pandemic happening in an election year was just the perfect storm of disorienting new existence and oppressive behavior, helped along by the yowling, paranoid maniacs of the right, most especially by the Maniac-in-Chief. Once people have shit to do, they're gonna do it. And while there will still be a big fuckin' MAGA and QAnon presence in this idiot nation, I truly believe that, given the choice between waiting to see what the latest Q dropping is and going to a Jason Aldean concert or a Cowboys game, people will be rushing to de-politicize their brains. They'll still be idiots. But at least they won't be trying to blow the joint up.

That's the best I've got. I hope that Biden's Justice Department will ream out Trump and his crew with all the savagery that they can muster (and I think they're being coy about that until after the Georgia runoffs, if not until after inauguration). And I think that Trump will quickly go back to being the circus freak he always was. 

The fever will break because the only other option is that we move on to violence on a large scale. And we're fortunately too selfish and lazy to head in that direction. I hope.

(By the way, this doesn't excuse anyone for believing their democracy-harming lies. It's just explaining how they got to the point of making such nonsense the center of their lives. Always and forever, fuck these assholes.)

The Rude Pundit's Annual Nativity-palooza, Including the Most 2020 Nativity

Like movies about suicidal snowmen and tortured ghosts and pole-frozen tongues, some things are a tradition around the rude house. Beloved reruns are good for the soul. My favorites to trot out this week are the Invader Zim Christmas episode and Olive the Other Reindeer. Even here, in Left Blogsylvania, we can indulge in revisiting old posts.

Before Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and many other places you can get your fix of weird shit, I posted this Christmas blast back in 2004, updated yearly with new bits of freakishness (some links might not work anymore, but they were or are all real and are not meant to be ironic):

Xmas - And, lo, a small teddy bear will lead them:
In the days before Christmas, the Rude Pundit roamed his neighborhood, looking at the displays in the charming stores and corner markets. There he saw the agony of so many dichotomous feelings about this holiday. One window had a kneeling, praying Santa next to a baby Jesus in the manger. Santa's hat was off. He was balding. Another display had the jolly old fat man landing his sleigh and reindeer on the roof of the manger. Surprisingly, neither Mary nor Joseph seemed rattled by the noise, although a camel was looking upward, as if asking, "What the fuck?" The Rude Pundit loved that camel.

Ah, sweet camel, what the fuck, indeed. Christ and commerce, Alleluia. The Savior has been born and he thanks you for your presents. Santa showing that he'll even honor the king of the Jews in the land of Islam. There's no telling what it means (and don't get all up in the Rude Pundit's face about St. Nicholas). Except this: we want to embrace both things, good deconstructionists that we are: Santa, who soothes our greed, and Jesus, who promises us peace. Either way, we want them both to tell us we're good people, nice people. And, of course, guilt-ridden Christians want to make sure that Santa toes the party line, you know.

For the holiday, here's a few of the Rude Pundit's favorite nativity sets, none of which are intended to be mocking of the event:

That right there is the Veggie Tales Nativity. In case you don't know, Veggie Tales are cute vegetables who love Christ and salad tossing. The newborn savior up there is a carrot. Get it? A baby carrot? What a delight.


Holy shit, that bear nativity is one of the creepiest fucking things the Rude Pundit's ever seen. Staring straight ahead with their dead eyes, it looks like a satanic cult sacrifice to some horrible bear-demon. Although, the three wise bears have provided snacks for the blood rite: salmon, honey, and berries. All go well with cub entrails.

Every year, I think, "I wonder if there's an even weirder nativity set that I can find" and every year I come across something where I think, "Yeah, that's friggin' crazy shit, man." Here, it's the snow people nativity, with a snow angel, a snow Joseph, a snow Mary, and horrible half-snow, half-flesh sheep chimera. Did Snow Mary give birth to Snow Baby Jesus? Or did they all just make Snow Baby Jesus out of snow?

You know how gnomes used to be just those creepy little bitches you put out on your lawn and forgot about? Well, now they can apparently give birth to the Gnome God's child, who will, no doubt, be crucified on a cute little cross one day for the sins of all gnomes. Oh, so many sins.

What I love about the cardinal nativity is that they're morbidly obese birds, every one of them. In fact, Baby Jesus cardinal looks like he's a tubby little bastard who's stuck in his nest/cradle. Also, all of them look kind of pissed off about the whole event.

That goddamn nightmare fuel isn't a lab experiment gone horrible awry. It's a bunch of white mice with eyes so wide they look like someone laced some cheese with meth and let the little bastards go crazy. It's gonna be horrible when baby Jesus mouse gets crucified in trap.

This is not to mention the Chickentivity, the Moosetivity, the Barntivity, the Native American Nativity, and the various Beartivities, all available unironically for your Christmas consumption.

And, finally, the baby nativity:

You might think, "Oh, that's adorable. What's so wrong with it?" To which I can only inform you that the implication of it is that a baby Mary shoved a baby Jesus out of her baby vagina.

And to all a good night.

Oh, wait. What's that you say? You think that last one was kind of a weak one to end on? Well, then, fuck you. Here's the Day of the Dead nativity:

Yeah, they're all screaming in horror and pain. Essentially, that's Christmas in the time of Trump.

Oh, wait. What's that? Those aren't that bad after all we've suffered? Then how about these terrifying motherfuckers:

Or maybe that's just how we'll all look after climate change has its way with us.

No? Too terrifying? Then how about this one, which screams, "2020 Has Murdered Hope." 

The fuck is that? Is it dried turds vaguely shaped like Nazgul from Lord of the Rings? No, even worse, it's made out of iron, so it is literally metal as fuck. It looks like shit, it costs you a ton, and it can kill you if you're not careful. That's 2020 in a fuckin' nutshell right there. 

Merry Christmas, baby. Let's just get out of this year alive. May George Bailey finally get to push Mr. Potter into the frozen river.

(Note: Previous editions of the nativity post have included the Zombitivity, Dogtivity, the Boyd's Bears Nativity, and the Rubber Duck...oh, fuck, you get the idea.)

One of the Big Lies in MAGA World: No, Democrats Did Not Try to Get the 2016 Election Overturned

It's one of many articles of bad faith in MAGA world, the fact-free zone of delusion and conspiracy that Donald Trump and his enablers, lackeys, lickspittles, and loser voters exist in. They believe that it's fine that Trump challenge the results of the secure and fair-ish (leaving aside all the ways that the GOP disenfranchised voters) 2020 election because, they insist, Democrats tried to overturn the 2016 election. 

Sure, part of that comes from their basic misunderstanding of the constitutional impeachment vote (impeachment and removal wouldn't have given Hillary Clinton the presidency), but Trump has said repeatedly, most recently on December 2, that Democrats and "their four year effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election" and that Democrats "perpetrated one phony and fraudulent hoax after another. You’ve been watching it now for four years." For him, it all began right before the 2016 election, when allegations about Russian interference in favor of Trump were first raised. Rather than react as a normal fucking president and say, "Oh, shit, that's bad. We should investigate the fuck out of that," Trump immediately took it as an attack on his legitimacy when no one in any position of power was trying to change the outcome of the presidential race. 

In fact, here's then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on November 17, 2016: "After winning the Presidency, the Electoral College, but losing the popular vote, I think that President elect Trump, that he has a responsibility to try to bring people together, not continue to fan the flame of division and bigotry. Later today, I'll meet with Vice President-elect Pence, and it is my hope that we can discuss areas where we can work together constructively.  As we've always said, we always try – we have a responsibility to find common ground but to stand our ground when we can't." You see that? Pelosi didn't even wait for the certification. She didn't wait for the safe harbor date. She declared Trump the winner and talked about how to work with the incoming administration. Like a fucking normal human would. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was working so hard to overturn the election that he and other Democrats were looking for ways to negotiate with Trump: "Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, elected Wednesday as the new Democratic minority leader, has spoken with Mr. Trump several times, and Democrats in coming weeks plan to announce populist economic and ethics initiatives they think Mr. Trump might like." That's from November 16, 2016, with not a word about trying to get states to send alternate electors.

What about the leaders on the left? In a speech to the AFL-CIO right after the election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren talked about the things she and Trump agreed on: "He talked about the need to address the rising cost of college and about helping working parents struggling with the high cost of child care. He spoke of the urgency of rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and putting people back to work." Of course, Trump had been fucking lying throughout the campaign about that shit, as anyone who knew a goddamn thing about him could tell. But Warren wanted to get shit done, so you work with the hand you're dealt. Or that's what it used to be. Democrats are playing poker. Republicans are playing 52-card pickup.

Yes, there were liberal voices who wanted something to happen to stop an obviously incompetent, dangerous, greedy, maniacal narcissist from becoming president. Fuck, I was one of them, and I was fucking right. But that wasn't the view of the Democratic Party and its elected officials. 

What happened is that Trump decided that everyone was out to get him because, in his warped pudding of a brain, everyone is always out to get him. And because his campaign had actively sought intel from Russians, he knew that any real investigation into that country's interference would naturally show what a goddamn criminal he was (and always has been). But that shit's on him. He created the myth of Democrats trying to overturn the election when, really, the best effort was made to remove just him from office, leaving Mike Pence as president. 

All Republicans who go along with this lie about Democrats are really just saying that they were too fucking cowardly to get rid of the madman when they had the chance.  And they're justifying their own fucking lies about the 2020 election because they're still cowards.

Now Donald Trump Is Suing a State He Lost Bigly

You will not be surprised that soon-to-be not-President Donald Trump hasn't given up his pursuit of a victory in the 2020 election through state and federal courts. I'd call his effort "quixotic," but, really, there was a better chance that Don Quixote's windmills were giants than that Trump can do anything other than continue to lose case upon case. It's as if he gets some sexual thrill off the decisions against him, like when a judge bitch slaps his lawyers, Trump gets a raging chubby in his choad and can finally get Jared to jack him off. Even better is when that judge is one he appointed. Holy shit, that's the kind of quality debasement you can normally only get from piss hookers. 

Just kidding. We know this is all, all, all about squeezing the rubes for as much of their cash as Trump can rip from their dirty fingers. He's coveting their greasy dollar bills, rolling around in them like Scrooge McDuck gone hobo.

The latest case was filed on Monday against New Mexico. "What the fuck?" you may rightly ask. "Didn't that inflamed orange cockhole lose New Mexico by over 10 points? Over 100,000 votes?" And you'd still be right when you continued, "Seriously, what the fuck is this? New Mexico's got a Democratic-led legislature, a Democratic governor, and a Democratic secretary of state? The fuck is up with this?"

And, indeed, it's pretty hard to figure this one out. It's about the drop boxes where people could, you know, drop off their ballots, and the idea is to throw the case to the legislature, shitcanning the ballots of the over 900,000 New Mexicans who did vote. But, as I said, the legislature is solidly Democratic. And the Republican Party of New Mexico tried suing over drop boxes before the election but withdrew from the case, prompting the Secretary of State's office to say, "The State GOP acknowledged that drop boxes are legal under New Mexico law and that it was absolutely appropriate for the Secretary of State to provide this safe and efficient option for voters." Also, they were suing over the wrong drop boxes. No, really: "The ballot boxes in question were reportedly drop boxes for other types of county business."

The lawsuit is a mess, as all of these lawsuits have been. For one thing, Trump's legal team flat-out admits that they wouldn't have given a shit about this if Trump had won: "Before the election, the Plaintiff [Trump] had no ripe claim against the Defendants...The Plaintiff could not have brought this action before the election results." Which, okay, fine, but that's not about defending a principle. It's about trying to force-fuck a victory for Trump. The principle wouldn't have mattered if Trump had won, they're saying.

Here's the thing, though: The lawsuit doesn't cite a single case where something was amiss with even a single ballot. It just assumes there must be fuckery where they believe fuckery could exist. It's like saying that you left your front door unlocked one night, so you must have been robbed, even if all your shit is still there. And, as far as the remedy of ignoring all the votes over the potential for some unproven voter fraud, that's ludicrous. Even if there were a couple of cases of someone dropping off a ballot for someone else (one of the lawsuit's big worries), it would be nigh on fucked up to say that means the entire election is invalid. That part is like saying that because the cops caught someone speeding, the whole damn highway should be shut down. Of course, the law doesn't work that way. 

The most frustrating thing about all these lawsuits is that they are based on the presumption that the election should have gone as it normally would have even though we're in the middle of a goddamned pandemic. In other words, the only way to see these filings as legitimate is to buy the Trump administration and the nutzoid right-wing argument the COVID was no big deal and everyone needed to just line up to vote, virus be damned. The lawsuit says, "It is an understatement to say that 2020 was not a good year. In addition to a divided and partisan national mood, the country faced the COVID-19 pandemic. Certain officials in New Mexico presented the pandemic as the justification for ignoring state laws regarding absentee and mail-in voting." 

You got that dickishness there? Like New Mexico just insidiously decided to use the 'rona to fuck up Donald Trump's chances in the state, which he lost in 2016 and which voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Clinton in 2016. And Trump was behind by at least 8 points in every poll leading to the 2020 election. Essentially, the claim is that because New Mexico's state government sent people applications to vote absentee (by mail or drop-off) because it was concerned about people fucking dying, it violated the law, which it didn't. 

It's stupid. The whole effort is stupid. It's so fucking stupid that Trump's lawyers cite the case of, no shit, What-a-Burger v. Whataburger to make some stupid point in the midst of all this fucking stupidity.

So what's the purpose here? Is it to use New Mexico as an example of Trump suing to defend some principle that then can be applied to other states if he ekes out some kind of victory? Is it because courts in states and districts where he has filed dozens of other lawsuits have told him to knock that shit off so he's gotta find a new court? Is it an attempt to get that charge in his balls of degrading loss one more time? Or is it just another way to continue the grift? The answer, of course, is yes. 

Note to Hopeful MAGA Cretins: You'll Be Much Happier If You Give Up Now. I Know.

Hey, MAGA jerks, 

I don't like you, and, from your tweets and messages, I've got a pretty good idea that you don't like me. Still, I feel compelled to give you some advice, if only in the hope that it will calm down the overdramatic rhetoric that makes it seem like you're gonna start some kind of violence. I'll put it this way: You're blood's all het up over nothing.

You need to get your head around a simple fact: Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Calm down. Just shut up and listen. Despite all the shit-tossing monkeys on One America Nonsense and the screeching goats on Newsmax and Tucker Carlson on Fox "news," there's not a goddamn bit of evidence of the kind of massive, coordinated fraud necessary to "steal" the election that any rational court will consider.  And as for the argument that mail-in ballots should never have been allowed, well, you're gonna have to take that up with states that went for Trump, like Florida and Texas. (I know: they're not corrupt so their mail-in ballots are fine because they went for Trump, the mongrel tautology of the desperately ignorant.)

But even if you believe with all your shrunken heart and fucked-up soul that Trump really won by hundreds of thousands of votes, it doesn't matter. The die is cast. Joe Biden will be president, and there is nothing in the realm of possible that can be done to change that fact. (Yes, there is that, but that's not gonna happen either, so stop before you get in trouble.)

I know what you're going through because I went through it with Trump in 2016 and beyond. I wanted so desperately for something to stop it. "Where the fuck are you, Democrats?" I wondered, believing that some magical uprising against a patently unqualified and blatantly corrupt and possibly compromised president-elect was one way to stop him from taking office. I wanted the Electoral College vote to be delayed, hell, just to make a point even if it didn't change anything. I fucking gave money to that fraud Jill Stein for her recount. But none of it stopped Trump from being inaugurated in front of a much smaller crowd than Barack Obama. (Sorry, that was a low-blow, but, well, as I said, I don't like you.)

It didn't stop with Trump actually becoming president. I'm telling you this because you're already thinking about the ways Republicans can drive Biden out of the presidency. That is a road filled with dashed hopes and stomach-searing bile. Listen:

As I've said before, after inauguration, I heard from political insiders and people with supposed contacts in the intelligence agencies that Trump was doomed, that it was a matter of time before he was undone by his flagrant criminality. I mean, c'mon, look at it from a liberal Democrat's perspective: between Trump University and his "charity," not to mention the clear evidence (yes, evidence) that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, there was no way he wasn't going to be chased from office. It'll be October 2017, I was told by one person, and November 2017 by another. He won't last until the midterms, said someone else. They all heard that the intelligence community was gonna eat him alive. Each time, even though I knew it was bullshit, I believed and hoped because I fucking needed to.

On it went, with all the bets on the Mueller Report. Yeah, that was gonna do it. That's the slam dunk. Or then the mobster-like behavior with the president of Ukraine that led to the impeachment hearings. Each one was pure political porn. I could mentally jack it to the idea that this was the one, this was the undeniable proof of everything and Trump would be run out of DC. Hell, after Democrats won the House in the midterms, it seemed almost inevitable. It wasn't. John Oliver used to make fun of this hopeless pursuit, with his button that he'd press and a big "We Got Him" sign descending. The running gag, of course, was that we were never going to get him.

If you take nothing else from this, listen to me here: All of this presupposed that there might be a critical number of Republicans who believed the bullshit about law and order that they'd been spouting for my whole life. I knew there weren't, but, well, eternal optimism is the curse of the often disappointed. So I'd hope that John McCain or, at the time, Lindsey Graham or Lisa Murkowski or even Susan fucking Collins would join with Democrats to uphold American laws and decency. But they didn't do a goddamn thing other than cast an occasional protest vote on something. My point here, dear dumb MAGA fucks, is that one of the big reasons none of your hopes will get traction is because, whether you like it or not, you haven't eliminated Democrats, and without their buy-in, whatever you believe can happen to keep Biden from being president is as much a fantasy as all the QAnon insanity.

By the way, all the QAnon garbage is insanity.

And I know you're watching videos purporting to show absolute proof, like some asshole showing you some boxes and claiming they're stolen ballots or what the fuck ever. I know you're on message boards and Twitter threads and Facebook (for some fucking odd reason), with everyone sharing every little shard of something that can be manipulated into seeming sinister. And you're loving the memes about Biden being senile and feeble. And you think the pathetic Kraken shit is awesome. And you get all thrilled when you hear that a bunch of Republicans signed onto the latest worthless lawsuit. And you and the misses fuck insanely to Tucker Carlson bleating madly about China and Hunter Biden. "Yeah, stick your finger in my butthole, Jesse, when he squints."

I think you are full of shit and you hate this country, you racist, fascist pig fuckers. You think I'm full of shit and that I hate this country and I'm a communist who sucks Hugo Chavez's dead dick (which, I gotta tell you, this Chavez obsession of yours is just weird. Most of us over here on the left don't give a shit about Chavez). We can deal with our differences later, maybe. Or not. 

But listen one to this one last thing: After impeachment and the Senate acquittal (c'mon, everyone in the country knew removal from office was doomed to fail), I finally gave in and decided that the only way Trump was leaving the presidency was by being voted out. That made things so much easier. It was clarifying. Because, see, even if I only half-believed that the early exit was gonna happen, it still clouded my thinking and pissed me off. 

Free yourselves from this one fucking delusion, dear deranged MAGA dickmites. And gear up for the next election. We are. 

Kisses,

The Rude Pundit

P.S. Wear your fucking masks.

(Note: They're never gonna give up this delusion. And they don't believe in elections anymore.)