Republicans Need to Feel Way More Heat for Their Opposition to New Gun Laws

Everything you could say about our American gun obsession has been said, repeatedly, and nothing has changed. Now that our time living in the pandemic is lurching towards the finish line, we can once again expect the seemingly daily parade of horrors as mass shootings retake their place in the reopened nation. One nightmare will replace the next as quickly as the Boulder shootings replaced the Atlanta shootings in the news cycle and in the American consciousness, only to be replaced by another multiple homicide, multiple injury shooting by, almost guaranteed, some fucking man for some fucking reason. And we'll do the dance with the same steps that we've done for decades, with the back and forth over politicizing the death, with the round and round of what could have been done to stop the shooter, with the up and down over motives real and made-up, all the thoughts and prayers, all the proposed laws that go nowhere once they leave the House of Representatives, with the National Rifle Association somehow still relevant, with right-wing media telling us how guns equal freedom when we all, all of us know the opposite is true.

On Twitter and elsewhere, you'll see the usual liberal reactions. You'll get degradation, like advising gun owners to lube up their rifle barrels and fuck themselves to screaming orgasm with them. Or how a gun is just a dick substitute, a hard tube that makes up for a gun owner's inadequacies in physicality or skill. Hilarious.

Or it could be just general mocking of gun fucks. Like how they get all worked up if someone dares to misuse the term "assault rifle," as if that's what fucking matters.  Or what "AR" in "AR-15" really stands for (Asshole Reamer? Armed Rube? Authoritarian Robot?). And fuck you, pedantic gun nuts. You know what guns everyone is talking about when they say "assault weapons"

Or it could be an attempt to actually educate the savage gun freaks, pointing out how little gun violence there is in countries where there happen to be strict laws on gun owner. Or it could be to reason with them, Nicholas Kristof-style. But, really, the worst are a small number of gun owners who are deep-throating the NRA's talking points like it's a fellatio fest at Fleet Week (pre-pandemic). And, of course, elected Republicans.

So instead of all that noise, all that rhetoric, all those sodomy jokes, however fun they might be to make, lemme offer this:

In Florida, a February 2020 poll found that 86% of voters in that state supported universal background checks for all gun purchases. That includes 96% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans. 72% of voters said they "strongly support" the idea, with majorities in both parties agreeing with that sentiment. Yet, even in the wake of the mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, skeevy Republican Senator Marco Rubio has never supported universal background checks, completely ignoring the wishes of the vast majority of his constituents.

In Indiana, an April 2019 poll found that 90% of voters in that state supported universal background checks for all gun purchases. That includes over 80% of Republicans and over 90% of Democrats. Interestingly, it also includes 88% of gun owners and 73% of NRA members. But Republican Todd Young, one of that shitty state's shitty senators, has an A+ rating from the NRA for, among other reasons, opposing universal background checks. Young has occasionally made noise about supporting some kind of "strengthening" of background checks, but he's never followed through because of course he won't.

In Utah, a September 2019 poll found that 88% of people in that state supported universal background checks for all gun purchases. That includes around 80% of Republicans and nearly 100% of Democrats. And it includes 88% of people who identify as active Mormons. Batshit insane Republican Senator Mike Lee proudly opposes gun laws and thinks that people need guns to prevent the government from taking their guns or some such vaguely treasonous nonsense.

The point here is not that universal background checks would end mass shootings. It would hinder some sales, but it needs to be paired with an assault weapons ban and other measures. But that's not the point of all that information. 

What should be clear by now is that universal background checks are not controversial or extreme, no matter how much the corrupt slugfuckers at the NRA screech that they are. In fact, the extremist position is opposing them. You are going against what almost every American believes and wants. Sure, you can call yourself a lone warrior for Second Amendment rights or whatever the fuck you wanna say to make yourself feel better, but, mostly, you're just a dick who's busy rubbing your nipples with gun lobby cash.

And the three dicks up there are all up for reelection in 2022. I'm under no illusion that Utah, Florida, and Indiana are gonna elect Democrats (although Florida is a little more likely and Indiana did have Evan Bayh for a couple of terms not that long ago), but Rubio, Young, and Lee need to feel some fucking pressure on this issue. Here they are, dismissing the overwhelmingly position of 9 out of 10 of their constituents. There's gotta be some pain for doing that, an ad or two calling them extremists who don't give a fuck about the voters of their state.

Because, see, if they end up having to pledge to support background check expansion, and that actually passes through the filibuster-fucked Senate, that opens the door just a little. Then we can move on to the other anti-gun laws that are also incredibly popular. Or we just fucking elect more Democrats and tell the GOP to go fuck themselves with their AR-15s. You know what the AR means now.

You Cannot Talk About Biden's Border Actions Without Talking About Trump's Gutting of the Federal Government

Amid the right-wing's newly-found hysteria over the treatment of migrant children who are traveling unaccompanied to the southern border of the United States, amid the media's buying into Republican talking points as if they are gospel because, without Trump, they have to go back to the old rules of creating scandals and crises where none exist because Biden's blissfully boring, amid the ecstatic rage of hypocritical fucks from the Trump administration who are savagely beating off to the images of migrants housed in crowded conditions, one big motherfucking piece of the picture is being completely ignored. And that's the fact that Donald Trump wrecked the federal government, leaving behind a barely functioning shell in many departments. He trashed the joint because that's what the fuck he does, like a fuckin' flood went through the neighborhood, and it's been up to the Biden team to essentially rebuild the houses from the studs and foundation that remain.

We knew this even before he was out of office. As Garrett Graff reported in Politico in mid-January, Trump's irrational, mercurial, and nonsensical revolving door of security officials, most with "acting" status, left the Capitol and, indeed, the entire goddamn nation vulnerable: "The practice has left his agencies severely undermanned and, often, staffed by people who are seriously underqualified for the positions they occupy." At the frantic, bullshit end, "the Department of Homeland Security's intelligence leadership ranks are so empty that it’s currently being led by the principal deputy general counsel." And that extended to, well, motherfuck, the border, where the "three main border and security agencies are all but gutted."

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued a statement last week laying this all out: "The prior administration completely dismantled the asylum system.  The system was gutted, facilities were closed, and they cruelly expelled young children into the hands of traffickers.  We have had to rebuild the entire system, including the policies and procedures required to administer the asylum laws that Congress passed long ago." A CNN fact check found Mayorkas was accurate in his assessment of the absolute sabotage of the American immigration system on the Southwest border. But, of course, the verminous conservative criminals from the Trump administration are beshitting the airwaves, with Stephen "Most Likely to Actually Be Drinking Baby Blood" Miller, the architect of Trump's megafuckery at the border, screeching that Mayorkas is lying. Honestly, I could come up with lots of awful karmic and physical punishments for Miller, but I'm pretty sure all of them would just give that coprophagic bitch an erection. 

But it's not just Mayorkas. Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the director of the White House's office of intergovernmental affairs, said, "There were aspects of our legal immigration system that had been gutted and a department that lacked the personnel to administer our laws," with another official adding, "When we came into office, like, it was a disaster. I mean, really. The staffing wasn't in place, the structures weren't in place." Oh, and let's not forget what complete cockfleas Trump's team were to Biden's during the transition, so they couldn't even get the full picture of what they were walking into. Shit was decimated. You don't turn that around overnight.

Even with all this chaos, what's going at the border sucks, but it's been sucking for decades, and it's sucked far, far worse than it sucks now. And the actual situation is far, far more complicated than the manipulated media will talk about. The current surge of unaccompanied kids began in November, for instance. And, again, again, again, you can't leave out the damage done to the very agencies that are supposed to handle migrant issues, and you can't discount the corruption of the Customs and Border Patrol and ICE themselves. Yes, Biden has left in place some Trump policies so far as he's dealt with shit like the pandemic (which also has an effect on shit like the number of beds...like I said, it's fucking complicated) and the economic recovery. It's only been two months. Could we check in around July 20 to see how it's going? To see if shit's improved? To see if Congress might actually do something to unfuck our immigration system?

No matter what, you can bet that the jackals and howler monkeys of the right will be yowling like they slammed their nuts in a car door. Or perhaps they'll just continue to show you who they are, like Republican Senator John Cornyn did today. He tweeted out comments from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama condemning "illegal immigrations." Then he followed that with this tweet: "President Biden has instead emphasized the humane treatment of immigrants, regardless of their legal status."

Kind of takes your breath away, no? This mongrel nation only exists as it is because of immigrants, almost all of whom were treated like shit by other immigrants when they first arrived. You'd think acting with humanity wouldn't be derision-worthy, but, well, that's so American, I suppose.

(Note: The First Nations people decided to help the pasty white asses that arrived to this continent rather than murder them. Whites have always been shitty about repaying their debts.)

The Real Culture War Is Over Vaccines

Yesterday, I was talking to a few people about COVID vaccines. Two of us were fully vaccinated, and another was scheduled to get his. One of our Zoom group, Sandy, a young woman, declared that she was not going to get the vaccine, even if required by her job. She insisted that "everything I've heard" tells her that we don't know if it's safe, that "we don't really know what's going to happen to people 5 years from now," and "I never get a flu shot," and "It's only been a year."

After a few fruitless minutes that included "You're being crazy," "Who tells you that garbage?" and "Jesus fuck, get the fucking shot" (that was me), we decided to change the subject. That's when Sandy added, "And you know they're lying about the number of people who died." We asked what she meant. "They just say it's COVID when it's something else," she said. We pushed again. She got huffy and exclaimed, "I know friends who say they've had family die in the hospital from something else and they put it down as COVID."

"You personally have had people tell you this happened to them?" I asked. She said she had. Rather than saying, "Oh, bullshit," I said that I'd like to know if the dead people perhaps had conditions that were exacerbated by COVID. 

Sandy is not dumb. She claims that she stays out of politics, but that's the kind of lie that lots of people repeat when what they really mean is "I believe some fucked up shit and don't want anyone to know or to challenge me on it." Unspoken through all of this was where Sandy was getting her information. I avoided saying, "Fucking shut off the fucking Fox 'news' already," although I have said that to her on other occasions. She said she doesn't watch it but "it's on when I go visit my mom." Which, again, is just another way of saying, "Yeah, I suck that shit down along with every nutzoid meme my crazed Facebook friends post and every link to a sinister-sounding YouTube video telling me how liberals use coronavirus to mind control you."

This is the real cancel culture right here. It's not Dr. Seuss shitcanning books with racist images. It's not the genitals of Potato Heads. It's not even saying, "Well, I guess fuck Harry Potter" because JK Rowling is transphobic. No, the culture war that's being fought that matters far more than any of that is on the minds of people when it comes to coronavirus and the vaccines. Then the disinformation being spread by the most-watched and -clicked conservative news sources is about life and death, not if you've got the sads because If I Ran the Zoo is hitting history's dustbin. 

What Fox "news" and the rest have done is to turn the COVID vaccine into just another sock they can all jack off into and toss into the laundry basket brimming with stiff footwear. See, getting vaccinated isn't about making you a good citizen, a healthy person, or a considerate human being. No, it makes you a tool being manipulated by Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, Big Pharma, and probably AOC and socialism and, sure, Hillary Clinton. 

For example, on Fox, obviously, Tucker Carlson, who always looks like he's wondering if he just farted or sharted or full-on shit himself, is backing the anti-vaxxers by "asking questions" about the vaccine: "How effective is this coronavirus vaccine? How necessary is it to take the vaccine? Don't dismiss those questions from anti-vaxxers, don't kick people off social media for asking them." Yes, don't dismiss people who think that there are microchips in the shots or still cling to the completely discredited idea that all vaccines cause autism. Doing what conservatives always fucking do in blowing up one small thing, Carlson took the tiny - no, infinitesimal number of cases of blood clots in Europe and used that to discredit the vaccine as a whole. He talked about a case where someone died of a brain hemorrhage after getting vaccinated and asked, "Should this scare you? We don't know, but the rest of us deserve an answer. Instead, our leaders are acting as if the science were totally settled and you're not allowed to ask questions." In Europe, 37 cases were reported out of 17 million people injected. That's statistically zero. At best, it's what we might call "a rare side effect." The diabetes drug Jardiance caused 12 cases of rotting of the taint in 1.7 million users, but no one's rushing to tell people not to take it. (Yes. Taint rot.) 

How is this cancel culture? Because they are treating the anti-vaxxers like all the other things they claim have been "canceled" by the left. If you think Confederate monuments should stay up, why should you be condemned for that? If you think boycotting Goya products is wrong, why should anyone be allowed to tell you you're wrong? And if you think the vaccine is dangerous despite virtually every single bit of available science saying it is not, well, aren't you allowed to say science is wrong despite having absolutely no background in medical research? Shouldn't we all just accept your God-given, American right to dissent from reality? What happened to freedom? Hey, I'm just asking the fucking questions here. 

This is a dangerous fucking game the right is playing, often with full knowledge that they're just conning the rubes and milking them for all the pillows they can buy. Then again, other Fox shows, like Hannity, which is on right after Carlson's, hosts are whining that Biden isn't giving Donald Trump enough "credit" for developing the vaccine. So which is it? Either the vaccine's a dangerous thing that Biden is using to murder you or it's a blessing dropped right from Trump's chafed loins. 

Of course, such contradictions don't matter to their viewers. They'll get outraged for one thing, then outraged for the opposite, even if it kills them, and that's just fuckin' fine as long as it makes liberals cry. 

It's a great cosmic fucking joke that we used to unify and celebrate when America made a great scientific advance and now it's just an excuse for another volley of arrows from the right in an idiotic war of their making. So now we break down as a country between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, a situation ripe to create variants and misery, which, if it happens, will only prove to the anti-vaxxers that the vaccine is worthless, just like they told us.

Random Observations on a Presidential Presidential Address

1. President Joe Biden's speech to the nation last night could have been a giant victory lap. Having just signed the most significant anti-poverty legislation in at least two generations and leading a country that has gone from the worst rate of COVID deaths to the most vaccinations in the world since he's been in office, no one would have blamed Biden if he had come out to the lectern and said, "Suck my dangly old balls, you Trumpfuckers. Ol' Joe is taking your piles of shit and turning it into fertilizer. You thought I was brain-fucked. Well, sorry, bitches. You're ridin' with Biden and we just floored it. Oh, and indictments have been issued for the following people" followed by a list that included Trump, his terrible children, and most of his circle of poisonous cockmites. Beyond the rhetorical masturbatory fantasies of an angry, exhausted lefty, Biden could have done that. He could have listed all the parts of the American Rescue Plan that will help actual Americans who need rescuing and not only billionaire cash hoarders. 

2. But that's not the speech he gave. Instead, what came through most clearly was that Biden wants us to feel the burden of this fucktastrophe of a year. He wants us to feel it and carry it and understand it, as he carries the burdens of all the deaths he has experienced and his own brushes with mortality. He said that it's okay to mourn, no, that it's necessary to mourn the dead, and it's also necessary to mourn the loss of time that we all experienced. He said, "It’s the details of life that matter most, and we’ve missed those details.The big details and small moments. Weddings, birthdays, graduations — all the things that needed to happen but didn’t. The first date. The family reunions. The Sunday night rituals. It’s all has exacted a terrible cost on the psyche of so many of us." Goddamn, I know it's only been four years since Barack Obama was president, but those lines made me realize how much we have been missing since he left office, that sense that someone understood us as whole human beings and not red-hatted cogs in an orange, screaming ego machine. Biden spoke gently and firmly, laying it out there, as he has done before, and making clear that, yes, we will move forward, but we must honor what the cost has been.

3. Perhaps even more importantly, Biden made a case for the centrality of government in the lives of a nation's people, as a part of the people. Since 1981, the idiot mindset of too many members of both parties has been that government should be something minimal in your life (unless, of course, you want an abortion), that direct help is bad, that social programs are worthless, despite nation after nation proving the exact opposite. This kind of thinking has fucked up so many people's lives, from the deregulation that has allowed our air and water to be poisoned to the denial of assistance to the poor. What fucking monsters we've been. What American pigs. Biden reversed that equation in his speech, saying, "Look, we know what we need to do to beat this virus: Tell the truth. Follow the scientists and the science. Work together. Put trust and faith in our government to fulfill its most important function, which is protecting the American people — no function more important. We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us. 'We the People.'" Notice that he was talking about everyone, and, with his refreshingly straightforward condemnation of violence against Asian Americans, he was saying that the racist shit that was tolerated before is off the table. 

4. And, inevitably, conservatives lost their little goddamned minds, going full-blown ragegasm at a speech that sought to unify the nation. There was the laughably moronic image of tiny Tucker Carlson reacting to the speech in the corner of the Fox "news" broadcast; it was mostly Carlson doing his Tucker stare, which means looking like a little boy seeing a vagina for the first time. There was Brian Kilmealready bizarrely telling everyone to move on from the half-million dead, which is what you say when you're one of the people who helped murder them. Screechmaven Mark Levin blustered that the speech was "propagandistic," revealing that right-wingers think that compassion and care is propaganda, which is pretty accurate. But the most hilarious thing that upset the right-wing fucknuts is that Biden didn't give "credit" to Donald Trump for his administration's role in developing the vaccine, which is pretty bold for a bunch of people who never gave Obama credit for building the economy that Trump brayed like an ass about for years. Sure, though, let's give credit where credit is due. Biden could have said, "Donald Trump ignored the coronavirus for too long, politicized simple things to prevent it, lied about its seriousness, held events that actively spread it, and refused to come up with a national plan, leading to widespread economic misery and over a half-million Americans dead, but he didn't totally botch it when it came to the vaccine." Yeah, fuck all of these increasingly deranged, insignificant, pathetic dicks.

5. What we also got in the speech is that Biden isn't looking for our approval (although, you know, every politician is). He is looking for our help. He is leveling with us about what has happened and what needs to happen and what consequences are if we fuck it all up. He told us he needs us and that he trusts us, perhaps a little too much, to do the right thing when it comes to finally bringing this miserable crisis to its jubilant end. Yes, July 4 as our Independence Day from COVID is hokey, but it's not a goal for cynics like me. And, unlike Trump's promises a year ago that things would be over by Easter 2020, it's genuinely realistic. It was a presidential presidential speech, and, even more, it was a healing speech, not just from the virus, but from what the last administration did to us. We can get past this, Biden was saying, all of it, and be better in body and mind and soul and country. Let's hope he's right. Let's help him be right. 

(Note: Yeah, this is a bit of a slobbery blow job for Biden. But that's okay. There will be plenty of time to take him to the woodshed over all kinds of shit.)

(Note: The Affordable Care Act is arguably the last great anti-poverty legislation, but the American Rescue Plan does even more.)

One Year On in CoronAmerica (Part 1: Keeping It Together)

It was a year ago that I finally told my students that we were going to move our class online. Over the two weeks before March 10, student after student kept telling me about how they were worried, how they lived with parents or grandparents with comorbidities, how they themselves were scared for their own health. They wanted to know from me what to do. I had finally faced the reality of the situation. I was an idiot in February 2020, telling people that it wasn't any worse than a bad flu because I desperately wanted it to be that. Because I knew that if it wasn't, we were fucked, that a chunk of our short lives was about to be sliced out as a sacrifice to the coronavirus. And it wasn't just me - yeah, I had all kinds of things planned - it was the students. It was the kids of friends and in my family. I was and remain crushed by all that they have missed out on, by the stalled careers, the canceled life-affirming events like graduations, and more. But denial wasn't going to do anyone any good.

So I told my students that I was making the decision to go to remote learning. I'm also a chair of an academic department (yeah, I know, I'm as surprised as you are), and I had told my colleagues the same thing the night before, writing to them, "I see no reason not to respect the judgment of faculty who believe that their health may be at risk" when it comes to the decision to move online. By the end of the day March 11, the entire City University of New York, all two-dozen campuses, shut down, and the world became a new, alien place. 

On March 18, I wrote to my department, "I want to be realistic about things without being grim. But we're looking at this getting much worse before it gets better. There is a very good chance that at least some of us will get ill, if we aren't already, and there is a very good chance that at least some of our students will, too. You can add into that our loved ones and our students' loved ones. And we know that there is a chance that some will get very ill and even die." I asked them to practice a "pedagogy of compassion," where our empathy for the confusion and fear all of us were experiencing would guide our virtual classroom decisions. "If we're all in this together," I said, "then the more compassionate and forgiving we can be, the easier it will be for all of us when it's finally under control and we go back to whatever normal becomes. Hopefully." We thought it would be a few months until normal. Then a few more. And now a year. With more to come.

I've been fortunate in so many ways in this year. I have a job that I was never at risk of losing and could, with some adjustment, do from home. All my loved ones are fine. I personally know only one person who died of COVID; he was an elderly retired professor who was a lovely human being. I know many who got the virus, but all were fine with a few exceptions, including some who have symptoms that have lasted months. I went through a mild bout with the bastard but recovered quickly. I was never food insecure or threatened with eviction or bereft of medical care when I needed it. I don't believe in being blessed by an invisible sky wizard, but maybe there's a secular version.

Being a professor, I got an understanding of the suffering that so many families were enduring through students coming to me to tell me about their sick and dying relatives. For a period of time, at least once a week, a student had to miss class to go to the hospital to look after someone. More than a few did have to handle death near to them. Students got COVID, and it laid some of them out, making them unable to even come to a Zoom class. It was a snapshot of the pandemic in its worst months in New York City. They told me about lost jobs at restaurants and shops, or essential jobs, as EMTs or grocery store workers, where, frightened and worried, they did their best to keep society together for people who were just as frightened and worried. Many of my students are new teachers or teachers-in-training, and they found themselves thrown into a pedagogical world where their own young students' fears and frustrations were complicated by the Zoom distance. They found themselves acting as emotional support for young people. It made more than a few question their career choices. I tried to offer advice and comfort where I could, and maybe it helped for a moment or two, a salve for a pain that allows you to forget it for a little while until a twinge brings you back to reality.

This was the heart of my year in America during the coronavirus. CoronAmerica, if you will. Outside of personal relationships, this was what prevented me from falling into despair. The first couple of months, during lockdown, students clung to our Zoom classes as moments of attempted normalcy and of desperately-needed community. And so did I.

I don't know how I would have dealt with this past year without that because of the other overwhelming feeling, that of a burning rage that has never diminished in the last 12 months. More on that tomorrow.

Grappling with Andrew Cuomo's Scandals

There is absolutely no reason to feel guilty or bad because you found comfort in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily press briefings during the lockdown early in the coronavirus pandemic. While President Bumblefuck Magoo was prancing around and lying about the severity of the situation while shitting on anyone who would dare ask the federal government to do more, Cuomo was a soothing voice of calm, seemingly honest and straightforward, ready to challenge Donald Trump, and, holy fuck, we just needed that. 

You can still appreciate that. I don't feel ashamed that I enjoyed Bill Cosby's comedy for decades. But now, I feel awful for his victims, first and foremost, and, way down the list of Cosby fallout, I can't see him or listen to him without being viscerally repulsed. That's the only rational reaction. The point here is that you can have thought one way about Cuomo in March 2020 and now think the complete opposite in March 2021 (and as an employee of the state of New York, I've thought in many ways about him).

But we have to grapple now with what we know about Cuomo. We know that he has been accused of sexual harassment by at least three women, including two who previously worked for him and his administration. We know that Cuomo and his administration sought to hide the true number of deaths from COVID at nursing homes, partly because it reveals how disastrous was his decision to allow patients recovering from COVID to go back to their nursing homes while still testing positive for it. 

And, frankly, as Steven Thrasher details in a Scientific American article, Cuomo made many moves early on in the pandemic that fucked over New York. In mid-March 2020, for instance, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wanted to do a shelter-in-place order, as had been done in Wuhan, China, and Lombardi, Italy, but Cuomo refused to authorize it, saying, "It cannot happen legally. No city in the state can quarantine itself without state approval and I have no interest whatsoever and no plan whatsoever to quarantine any city." That order might have saved 17,000 lives.

Oh, it's fun to laugh at Cuomo and the Cuomosexuals, the ones who put him on a pedestal so high that he had the gall to write (or have ghostwritten) a book titled American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic while we are still very much in the midst of the goddamn crisis and the fuckin' lessons are still being learned. It's pretty awkward and not so fun that the book has this line: "New York was number forty-six of fifty in the nation when it came to percentage of deaths in nursing homes." Well, no fucking shit when you're reporting numbers that are half what they should be.

And now multiple Democrats have called on the Democratic governor to resign in the wake of the allegations of inappropriate behavior with women who worked for him. This has led other Democrats to angrily cry, "Franken!" under the belief that Senator Al Franken resigning over sexual misconduct with several women was hasty and wrong and excessive. While I would have liked to have seen a full inquiry into the allegations, I said at the time that Franken had to go because it gave strength to the growing #MeToo movement and allowed us to criticize Donald Trump with clean hands. (And, to be fair, Franken's replacement, Tina Smith, has been a pretty great senator for Minnesota.)

However, as Dahlia Lithwick points out, we've gotten to where thorough investigations into allegations made in the media should be welcomed. She writes, "It’s not a terrible thing to allow an independent investigator to gather all the facts and arrive at a formal conclusion before calling for his immediate ouster...If we’d spent the time we’ve spent calling for people to step down immediately in formulating and refining an actual process that could formally investigate claims and issue guidance on what should be done about them, we might have ended up in a place where more sexual predators could be held accountable rather than fewer." And that, to me, seems like pretty solid footing to be on. 

And that's not because I have any love for Andrew Cuomo. Seriously, in most ways, fuck that guy. But it's because, as I've written before, we're in the midst of reckoning on shitty behavior by men, including those who may not understand how their behavior is shitty (really, if you don't get how being a creep is making a woman feel uncomfortable or threatened or even just getting in the way of her doing her goddamn job, that's on you). It's a reckoning that is long overdue. These allegations may just take down Andrew Cuomo and force him to resign. More likely, he'll have to answer to voters, which isn't necessarily an awful outcome. 

But I think the way to give power to this reckoning is for there to be some kind of official affirmation of the charges. It's not about disbelieving Charlotte Bennett, Lindsay Boylan, and Anna Ruch. As with the allegations against Joe Biden or against Brett Kavanaugh, it's about taking allegations seriously and not dismissing or accepting them because of your feelings towards the person being accused. It's about trying to make sure the due process and due diligence are done. 

I'll tell you one thing that has me additionally pissed about the Bennett case is that she followed the procedure that the state, you know, the one led by Cuomo, has for reporting harassment in the workplace. As someone in a supervisory position and, like I said, employed by New York State, I can tell you that this shit is hammered into us, with potential consequences if we don't act correctly on hostile workplace reports. By law, there was supposed to be an investigation, and that wasn't done. In fact, according to Bennett, Cuomo's chief of staff and general counsel said that there would be no investigation because "You came to us before anything serious happened. It was just grooming and it was not yet considered sexual harassment." How fucked is that. Also, every employee of the state at a certain level has to take an online sexual harassment training, as I have, and Cuomo didn't fucking do it.

Andrew Cuomo was never who his biggest fans thought he was. Thrasher's article makes it crystal fuckin' clear that his actions in slashing hospital beds and Medicaid spending exacerbated the effects of COVID on New York. Cuomo is a fucking asshole, an old school hardball player who will fuck with members of his own party (although, in New York, sometimes Democrats are the Democrats' biggest enemies). He's had multiple scandals already, although you wouldn't know that since they happened before he became "America's governor" (damn, I think I gagged writing that). 

So if this is the end for him, if it's because of the harassment allegations against him, then so be it. Cuomo is not irreplaceable. Almost no one is. He might have given us something that we needed in a terrible moment, but, hey, breakups happen.

One note, though: If you're someone who gave Donald Trump a pass on all his rape and sexual misconduct allegations, you can just sit the fuck down on Cuomo.

Update on August 3: Yeah, fuck him. Cuomo needs to get the fuck out of office. 

"Fuck Those Dr. Seuss Books" and Other Proper Responses to the Fake "Cancel Culture" Bullshit

As an honest-to-goodness professor of the literary arts, I have seen your "cancel culture" bullshit so many times before that it's honestly fucking laughable. I can remember sitting next to a renowned Shakespeare scholar as I argued that a course in ol' Bill shouldn't be required of English majors. His face got red as he sputtered, "What do you mean? You think someone deserves a degree in literature without reading Shakespeare?" I said I did and that we needed to get away from such prescriptive ways of thinking about literature and the canon and more. 

This was in the midst of the late 1980s and early 1990s upheaval in my field over what students ought to read. See, all of a sudden, we were supplanting white male writers with women and people of color, cutting down on the number of Europeans while adding Asians, Africans, and South Americans, and allowing gay and lesbian authors their proper credit. The gatekeepers of the literary world were aghast. It was "political correctness" run amok. Fucking books were written about it. "Tenured Radicals," as one hysterical tome put it, were destroying the foundations of Western Civilization by daring to say that the works of dead white men might not be the only lens with which to view the world. This shit was everywhere, on TV news networks, in Congress, in the presidential race, how "political correctness" was wrecking the joint like a black lesbian feminist Godzilla devouring the canon and setting fire to the Ivory Tower.

Now, it all seems so fucking dumb. I don't think students could imagine an education in literature that privileges white male authors entirely over, say, Toni Morrison or Sylvia Plath or James Baldwin. And most students will end up reading Shakespeare because, you know, he's just hard to escape no matter how hard we might try. But the point here is that after hyperventilating that there was only one way to properly learn the humanities, most of academia adjusted and, indeed, embraced this blowing a hole in the wall of racist and sexist bullshit surrounding the precious subject matter. Now, you're an outlier if you think we should go back to a Great Books as Defined by Crusty Pale Fuckers. 

So this whole "cancel culture" thing is so fucking dumb and it's just another way that conservatives are exploiting the ignorance of their voters. So what if there's a warning in front of a couple of episodes of The Muppet Show to indicate that it's fucked up that Johnny Cash sang in front of a Confederate flag or that Spike Milligan did yellow face and fake Chinese voice. So what if the packaging for Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head went unisex? You can still put high-heeled shoes and a mustache on your plastic potato, just like you could before. And, really, truly, fuck those Dr. Seuss books. How is it not a problem that the books contain racist images? Let's stop acting like there aren't a million other books that are just as good that don't have crazy Arabs or weird indigenous Alaskans. Besides, you're not losing your Horton or Lorax or Grinch. Your childhood is protected, so you can stop being an asshole because (checks notes) the Seuss estate pulled the books out of publication.

The point here, of course, is not that some conservative dicks are upset that liberals believe things. That's been the story since forever. No, what we're seeing here is the distraction, the thing that makes you forget you the GOP really is. Remember that Republicans don't give a fuck about appealing to people through Ideas That Might Make Their Lives Better. No, they prefer the Shit That Makes Idiots Mad and Fuck Your Voting Rights approaches. The vaccine program is a big success? The COVID bailout prevents the nation from being economically fucked by the pandemic? Oh, fuck, what's a scummy GOP fucknut going to do? Time to cue up the culture wars, motherfuckers. "Yes, it's true that Republicans supported policies that flat out murdered hundreds of thousands of people, but, hey, look, Kermit's nuts are being cut off by Cancel Culture and AOC," they'll say and that'll be dutifully re-vomited by right-wing media led by Tucker Carlson's one-mustache-short-of-a-Fuhrer face.

This becomes the same-sex marriage or anti-abortion initiatives on ballots that distract people from voting for Democrats. Yeah, we've been through this before. In fact, every fucking time now with Republicans, who would rather toss shit than discuss an issue honestly. Or, these days, rather than talk about the same reality.

In so many cases, "cancel culture" just means "Oh, shit, they caught us" to the people who got caught. And they're pissed that now that they're caught, they can't just be white people who, say, casually use the n-word. Like, well, the Republican Party.

(Note: By the way, back in the late 1960s, Warner Brothers made sure that no one would see the ultra-racist cartoons they used to produce. So they got rid of the grotesque Black people, the hideous Asians, but, oddly, not Speedy Gonzales until recently. And now, no one even cares about them except out of perverse curiosity. We don't think twice about it. If that happened now, the Proud Boys would be attacking Bugs Bunny.)

(Note: There are more complex examples of different works being updated or recontextualized than the ones noted up there. We should be having a hell of a discussion about how we talk about Washington, Lincoln, and especially Jefferson.  We might argue about whether the racist depictions of Native Americans in the Little House on the Prairie books make them unsuitable for younger readers. Sometimes we may end up disagreeing and never figuring it out, like with Huckleberry Finn. And fuck the idea that you let it go because "it was fine" back in the day. That's not a free pass. You should read some of the shit included in old anthologies of American literature. Shit changes. Change with it.)

Don't Let Republicans Off the Hook on COVID Relief and the Minimum Wage

In Pennsylvania, 62% of voters in 2019 supported raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. That was consistent with polls from previous years. A poll this month showed that 59% of Pennsylvanians support the COVID relief bill currently being voted on, including the hike in minimum wage. The current minimum wage in Pennsylvania is the same as the federal one: $7.25 an hour.

In Wisconsin, the bill polls at 60% support. A 2019 poll showed 57% support for a higher minimum wage. The minimum wage right now in Wisconsin is $7.25 an hour.

In West Virginia, raising the minimum wage to $15 has the support of 62% of voters. The state's Republican governor, Jim Justice, supports the COVID relief bill, including the minimum wage hike, which is currently a comparatively generous $8.75 an hour.

Nationally, the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill polls at 76% approval, including 60% of Republicans. It is one of the most popular major pieces of legislation in years. It is bipartisan. Hell, it's universal, considering that 71% of independents are for it at least "somewhat." And at least 59% of Americans support the $15 minimum wage. 

I chose Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and West Virginia specifically because they are states whose two senators are divided between Democrat and Republican. And while it's easy to dump on Democrats in the Senate for their failure to unify behind the minimum wage hike or getting rid of the filibuster (and, yes, I realize it's primarily Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona), and while it's easy to be cynical about Republicans' fealty to their agenda of owning the libs and getting back power so they can get in more judges while undermining democracy and kissing Trump's voluminous ass, that lets Republicans off the hook for doing things that large majorities of Americans, including in their own states, want them to do. 

Seriously: the approval of the COVID relief bill, the American Rescue Plan, is above 50% in Republican states like Florida, Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana. And that's in a poll that not only laid out what was in it (including the minimum wage), but also gave examples of arguments for and against it before asking about support. 

We simply give up on Republicans without making them take the blame. The problem isn't just two Democrats. The problem is 50 Republicans. Yeah, sure, put all the pressure you can on Manchin and Sinema. (By the way, Manchin isn't changing parties if he's squeezed. If he does, he'll be crushed in the Republican primary in West Virginia in 2024.) But Republicans need to be reminded that they can pay a price for ignoring their states' voters. Why should Manchin get all the grief when West Virginia's other senator, Republican Shelley Capito, simply sails along, flipping off the people in her state who desperately need funding. Even now, Democratic groups and the DNC need to be running ads nonstop that put the screws on Republicans, that get the phone calls pouring in. Will most of the targeted Republicans not give a damn about it as long as their corporate funders back them? Probably, but you can make them sweat and set things up for 2022, at the very least. 

When Senate Minority Leader and Man Who Always Looks Like He's Seen a Large Penis for the First Time Mitch McConnell was asked about the broad support for COVID relief, he called it "wasteful," and Republicans criticized Democrats for things in the bill like funding for the Kennedy Center and a bridge in upstate New York, as if $100 million is anything other than a molecule in a drop in a $1.9 trillion bucket. 

But this popularity of this bill and the minimum wage fight during the time of COVID gives Democrats a chance to do something that I've talked about a great deal: it allows them to shift the political narrative away from "feckless Dems are too liberal" to "cruel Republicans are taking food out of your mouths" and "Republicans want to keep you at starvation wages." Democrats like Manchin and Sinema and previous self-proclaimed "moderates" are still buying the former narrative, but the nation has obviously moved away from that. The nation took the legislative and executive branches away from Republicans two years after giving them complete control of them.

Democrats are still responding to the narrative that Republicans created for them during the Reagan presidency. Too many Dems tried to prove they weren't that "liberal" (including Joe Biden). Now, let's figure out how to make Republicans have to show they are not who we say they are. This is a legit chance to do that, the first one since 2009, and we screwed that one up. Don't waste this opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead Terrrorist: Rush Limbaugh Wrecked America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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