Mean Gene

When circumstances favor sociopaths you have a real problem. Consider Republican attitudes about taxation. You always cut taxes. You cut taxes when the economy is down. You cut taxes when the economy is up. You always cut taxes.

If this isn’t the definition of ideology, as opposed to adaptation and thinking, it is something close. Add to that, these are not just bad ideas they are self-servingly bad ideas and you have sociopathy. Add to that the cruelty. Gratuitous cruelty.

Their fixed ideas are cruel. Similarly to taxation Republicans are always at war. They must always have enemies. The more the merrier, it seems. The fall of communism was therefore a problem. You see it in their insanity about Islam.

Islam is no threat to us. Nobody is a threat to us. Except ourselves. Democrats aren’t mean. That’s why there is no Fox News or Rush Limbaugh on the left. Democrats don’t need enemies. That’s a disadvantage in fighting Republicans.

Democrats don't have the mean gene. All of the assholes are congregating in the Republican Party. And assholes can be hard to beat. They are delusional assholes, fighting a vulnerable system from the inside. It gives them a huge advantage.

Am I Alight?

Once again, before I die, I'd like to own a vehicle where, when I smell smoke, I don't first wonder if it's me that's on fire.

Did you ever stop to think...

That the entire world might be destroyed because some rich American asshole, maybe named Koch, didn’t want ANYBODY telling him what to do?

He Cares Enough To Cover His Ass

John Roberts must know, or suspect, that his name will be forever attached to the court remembered for reducing the federal judiciary to a haven for political hacks and partisan extremists. His court might be remembered for enabling the destruction of America.

Some earlier Republican Court appointees came around, to the dismay of their party, and voted as true custodians of the law. The Federalist Society, yet another Republican group set on undermining majority rule, put an end that. I hold little hope for Roberts.

There are few likely signs of integrity. Roberts has acted to cover his, and his party’s, ass.

Once Upon a Time in the White House

Reading about Stephen Miller’s schemes as they hatch and are implemented or exposed I hear a harmonica. Why, you might wonder. A movie, Once Upon a Time in the West.

Watch it. And, ask yourself how you might react, as a once needlessly persecuted child, to what Miller has done. Revenge fantasies have their place because justice has its place.

Beware the harmonica, Stephen, you repulsive, sadistic piece of shit:

https://youtu.be/qwb3P0fuM1c

Where’s My Supply Side?

Where’s my rising tide? In 2020 we’ll be celebrating 40 years of Republican lies. It’s been a hell of a run and marks a generational shift. Marketing principles came to apply.

No longer did the product matter. Essentially, the product ceased to exist. The hype was all that mattered. Nobody likes to admit they’ve been suckered. Our time has come.

Grievance Manifesto

Donald Trump's manifesto of grievances against Nancy Pelosi and impeachment offers no new insights into his angry, infantile soul but only more evidence for its crying disintegration under pressure and the willingness of those around him to abandon all standards in his defense. In other words, we know he was incapable of writing or thinking it, only that he must always get his way and that he feels genuinely persecuted because he thinks he’s the only person in existence. Really.

For Donald Trump’s reality is that of an infant. He is either being fed and coddled on demand or he is not. One of those situations is acceptable and the other results in a display of wailing. The manifesto was wailing processed by degraded minds of greater sophistication hence the conclusion that his army of ass-wipes and diaper changers was hard at work. But, remember how the output of George Bush’s anus could not be contained and how he ultimately shit the whole world.

What Good Is A Soul If You Can’t Sell It?

There are those who believe God gave us a soul as a stake in life to be sold in a pinch or as opportunity has it...

https://youtu.be/3jaQYNTs01w

But, man, why do people sell them so cheaply?

Hallmark to Trump

I can tell you how you get from a Hallmark show to Trump. I have done the research so you won’t have to, watching as much of When Calls the Heart on Netflix as I could stand. Such a mess of stereotypes and cliches, revealing an unbelievably simple world-view, you have never seen.

And what is Trumpism but a mess of stereotypes and cliches — prejudices — embedded in jingoism in an administration looking more like a hellish Carnival Cruise than a ship of state, with hidden peon masses belowdecks supporting the fantasy lives of the wealthy? It’s all unreality. It’s all lies. 

When you tell true believers they can’t have their fantasy life they get pissed. Put them all on a cruise ship to somewhere, I say, after evacuating the underlings. Send them anywhere, but get them the fuck away from me. Let them fight it out among themselves who has to serve the drinks.

William Barr Eats His Soul

Bill Barr has formally eaten his own soul the way someone might ingest an incriminating scrap of paper. Now you see it, now you don’t. Not only has he rendered evidence useless he’s declared his own subservience to the dark lords of intimidation and unreason in the most potent way possible, by using the tactics of the perversion and distortion of reality.

That is, he has reduced the rules of the game to ashes. A smaller inversion has taken place—only because he is but one cog in an evil machine, not because his own inversion isn’t complete. He is the man charged and taxed ABOVE ALL OTHERS to uphold and administer justice. He has not only refused he has asserted, in his way, that justice DOESN'T EXIST.

These applications of intimidation and dominating force are assertions of thuggery and Machiavellian intent.

Barr has made HIS will, in subservience to Donald Trump and other evil forces, the law of our land. The masquerade is ending as the pretense of order and intelligibility falls away. Those forces of darkness are revealing their hand in open defiance not only of specific rights within a structure and system but of the existence of any enforceable rights at all.

Tidings of Anguish and Despair

This Christmas the Republican Party brings you Donald Trump, an onslaught of insults and cruelty, and other assorted goodies from the deepest recesses of the human subconscious. Enjoy.

Closely Held Concern

America is supposed to be a publicly held property but billionaires are taking it private.

Baby Boomer Belongings

A buyer’s market is beginning for baby boomer belongings. Let that apply to consumerism and the fascist politics of Trump. I hope younger generations will devalue that stuff to what it is, worthless detritus and toxic waste.

The American Presidency Hamster Cage

Trump. Bush.

About McCain and Romney we will never know, but the American presidency and government in Republican hands are hamster cages for pets of the uber-rich. Victorious politicians are constrained from responsible action or otherwise coddled into compliance. The real ”deep state” is entirely in Republican hands, a vertically integrated operation designed to thwart, pervert, undermine and overthrow our democracy. American grit, determination and ingenuity are applied to subversion.

Trump even looks like a hamster and, more obviously than Bush but it’s clearer in Bush’s actions now in retrospect, all he can do is run around in an totally circumscribed way. He, too, would be punished if he strayed but he has been a good boy, probably surprising his masters and managers. He has relied on that infrastructure of doom, the Federalist Society and Heritage and Cato and all the rest down to obscure media enterprises executing disinformation and indoctrination protocols.  

The “Justice” Department—this is a big deal—is in the hands of a hamster though he looks like a sick one. Perhaps he was poisoned before he was appointed. They can’t and won’t act outside their incredibly defined roles as wholly-owned subsidiaries of the billionaires and tycoons. The Supreme Court and Justice Department have fallen. Congress is compromised. These are dark days.

The Epstein-Barr Connection

I’m assuming here that Bill Barr didn’t grow up rooting for Mr. Potter and the Flying Monkeys. Furthermore, that he isn’t a secret admirer of the Third Reich and its tactics. We must then go searching for explanations for his shameless and illegal authoritarianism.

He’s either morally incompetent—he doesn’t actually realize what he’s doing—or he thinks or hopes his side will be so victorious there will never be any accountability. In either case he’s a damaged soul and a look at his history reveals a connection with Jeffrey Epstein.

Barr’s father was headmaster at a school at which Epstein taught and, I believe, responsible for his hiring and thus later stratospheric ascent into wealth and degradation. Think of the effect such an association might have had on Bill, who now defends a scumbag. 

Barr defends a scumbag of Epsteinian proportions as though it is to-the-death or as though Trump is his father. Now, if Trump is a father figure to Barr by choice he must be fucked up beyond imagining. I hypothesize that Bill’s dad was implicated in Epstein’s depravity.

Anyway, it’s worth looking into, possibly explaining Barr’s descent into madness or moral turpitude.

Republican authoritarianism and consistent attempts at intimidation, as well represented by Barr, are clearly contagious and going viral. These might be similarly understood as a mass and generational example of Bill’s own horrifically desperate daddy problems. 

Revised Outlook

I used to think Americans were industrious. Trump and his supporters cause us to rethink that. A hardworking, responsible electorate wouldn’t place irresponsible people in roles of power, let alone a horror like Trump. We have nothing but a drive to plunder.

Trump is the plunderer president, an embodiment of the real American ethos. We are and always have been, as is now revealed, rapacious.

Redirecting...

Whatever Trump-voting Americans wanted in the last election I don’t think they got it. Now they’re too stubborn or proud to admit it. Nobody wants to admit they’ve been suckered and scammed and deceived. And, I don't think they’ll ever admit it. They are too implicated.

It’s up to the rest of us.

Fire Sale Chats

Trump should take his case directly to the American people. The anti-democratic case. If our democracy is bankrupt he should make his argument. Then we will decide. But, enough with the lies and deceit.

How Republicans Caused the Holocaust

You might look in awe at Republican stupidity, arrogance and treachery and think it’s unprecedented but it has happened before, in the 1920s, under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. They created the Great Depression, the misery of which caused a fascist upswing culminating in the Holocaust. The same small-government, anti-immigration, laissez-faire doctrines prevailed then as prevail today. Once the Depression started Herbert Hoover practiced an equivalent of austerity, locking in the suffering.

Republicans love and celebrate suffering. Thank God we had Obama to lessen, to the extent they would allow it, the effects Republicans created in 2008. Still, the economic casualties have been many and the rich have only gotten richer as they always will under Republican policies. We are in a full fascist upswing and nobody knows where it will lead. I think these are games of inches and one good leader could save us. Democrats, however, are coughing up an uninspiring bunch. We need a Roosevelt.

The Intimidation Phase

I don’t want to downplay, diminish or fail to honor the significance of all the bullying and betrayal Democrats have endured up until now—I know it has been horrible—but something is seriously different since Trump’s thugs have taken over.

On balance we have moved from a period of pretense, illusion and deceit to one of intimidation, increasingly open hostility, suppression and domination, I assume because the lies are so undeniable. The mask is off and Republicans are exposed.

Exposed as what? I don’t even want to use the language of treachery, all the epithets appropriate in a society irreversibly falling apart but it is that and then some. The sadness so many of us feel is because we know we have already failed.

We are already doomed and screwed. We fight on as though it can be fixed. It can’t. We have to be reborn now as something entirely new and different. Foreword is the only way. And the only way to be reborn is to crush the Republican thugs.

What it means to be a “Burkean” conservative in the age of Trump...

Watch “conservatives” scramble around trying to save face and convince the world they stand for anything other than living like pigs in the age of Trump. There was the “fiscal,” small government ploy, which a few of them still cite to try to separate themselves from the “social” conservatives, as though it makes any sense at all when they spend money like water on the military and the surveillance state and still cut taxes (mostly on the rich) thereby producing inconceivable deficits and bankrupting the government.

There’s the “Democrats are worse” faction who fail to mention Democrats haven’t had their way for forty years or since Republicans decided bullying their adversaries, subterfuge and hostage-taking, as in shuttering the government in the budget wars and other forms of intimidation, were appropriate tactics. What a gig! They insist on controlling everything but deny any responsibility for the outcomes. The occasional left-wing victory, like Obamacare, which was still crippled by them and a compromise, makes them livid and completely insane.

It becomes an obsession—a touchstone and focus for every irrational argument and unsupported assertion. Their culturally superior, literate, philosophical wing, like Andrew Sullivan and P. J. O’Rourke, call themselves “Burkean” alluding to vague, anti-progressive norms that fetishize an idealized state that never existed while plucking supposed nuggets of goodness from the huge sewage treatment apparatus surrounding Trump. They only want intelligent, thoughtful social evolution, I suppose. Where is that in Trump?

Where is it in his tsunami of incompetence and insults and in his extravaganza of decadence, debasement and decay? I give up. There is no dignity or decency among them, only a torrent of lies, so they forfeit the presumption of integrity. They look out for themselves while our institutions burn.

Sic Transit Trump

Something has to give. Trump is going to have to go. He is too ridiculously, stupendously incompetent to carry on in his job. Though, he’s really good at destroying things. Is that a talent? Still, in any case, it argues for getting rid of the son-of-a-bitch.

Wrassle Back

Republicans are trying to wrassle their way out of Trump’s tribulations. They placed Jim Jordan of Ohio, a soul-selling acolyte of Trump if there ever was one, on the intelligence committee and he showed up without a suit on, all ready to wrassle.

Trump loves wrassling but the fake kind, just like his entire life. His father left him so much money Donald could play and pretend at being a real developer and businessman and at having a life but Jim Jordan is a real wrassler trying to save a pretend president.

Donald pretends at president like everything else because he doesn’t know how not to. So, he’s screwing it up really badly. Oh, Lord, I just realized Trump doesn’t know he’s a fake and a fraud, kinda like The Truman Show. The names are almost the same.

Truman. Trump. What a discovery! Trump was, obviously, a huge mistake and somebody better pull the plug on our president. His whole life he’s been humored and protected but he could do fantastic damage. He flops around now like a fish out of water.

Undue Respect

Congressional Republicans deserve no personal respect and whatever they might claim from their elected positions they forfeited when they betrayed their oaths and responsibilities. Fuck them and the elephant they rode in on. It wasn’t the real one but a Trojan horse.

Ready for Primal Time

The barbarians aren’t just within the gates. They are running everything.

I’m so tired of it all.

It’s so wearing watching Republicans destroy the world.

Bachelor Trump

Under Republicans the American government has become a reality show. Sell your soul to win. Compare it to The Bachelor. Actual life is secondary to the show. Weddings occur at the end, not that it’s required but everyone understands the dramatic necessity. I don’t know their demographic but I bet the show is very popular among those who believe in the “sanctity of marriage.” Contestants can sleep together and hardly know one another but in some weird way the forms are observed.

Similarly with our government which, by the way, has the power to destroy the world in an instant. (To show their restraint they are doing it slowly.) Winning is the only thing that matters among Republicans. That and putting on a show, a whole lot of low drama. Masses must be entertained. Reality, the life and death-matter of running the country, is an afterthought. It’s not quite Jerry Springer yet but we’re trending there with concerns of dick size in debates. What will it be next?

O Captain! My Captain!

He divided a country because he was bored, amusing himself by opening old wounds. Or, rather, out of blind, pathological ambition.

The ship of state is Fox News. Hate is at the helm, steering by fear. There’s a hole and void where democracy and decency used to be.

A frantic Captain barks incoherent orders. He is the master and commander of a pirated ship now and the crew is kept in check by fear.

We Got Fooled Again

Pick your poison. Choose your lies. An entire generation thought it could see through the haze. They thought they could live in the truth but they are awash in lies as never before. No one can live in the bright light of pure truth.

People must choose the lies of freedom and the stories of decency. Choose your myths carefully or you’ll fall back right into the arms of despair. Don’t delude yourself. Or, delude yourself well. No one escapes. Think you can?

EDHD—Driven to Destruction

Ethical Deficit Hyperpartisan Destructivity (Disorder) is a newly epidemic malaise classified based on field observations and studies of Republican politicians, their appointees and surrogates. It is broadly considered a compensatory reaction formation and spoken of among psychologists as a disorder of insecurity and suspected inferiority, causing aggression, acting-out, domination displays and personality malformation.

It is also a type of vandalism and related to arrestedness in adolescence and Oedipal fixations playing out as denial, projection and repression. The federal government is the mother image to which Republicans are compulsively drawn for gratification while vehemently denying those desires. Many victims are pudgy, pathetic, inferior physical specimens, like Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, Phil Gramm and Scott Walker, but it is a psychological and not a physical ailment per se.

Paul Ryan and Jim Jordan, others among the afflicted, are even somewhat buff. Democratic men are the responsible father figures and providers Republicans are unwittingly driven to try to displace and destroy out of jealousy. Democratic presidents, especially self-made men like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, will render them completely insane and elicit extreme agitation and extraordinary aggression.

Now, I don’t mean to be hard on them. This is a medical condition requiring treatment but if Bob Barr, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are the pride of Republican manhood someone should order up SOME FUCKING HELP. The impaired should be involuntarily admitted to an asylum and facility if they won’t admit themselves. Deep down they want to be stopped, the theory is, and thus reassured of the society’s resiliency.

Any understanding of the origins of this locus and epidemic of failed manhood is preliminary, speculative and hypothetical but it seems certain that it is generational and related to the inability of the “baby boomers” and the man-groups following on those that built the culture and fought in WWII to “measure up” and grow up. They are stuck intractably in a most vicious and destructive kind of adolescence.

Money. Prestige. Power.

Why do Republican representatives and appointees want to hold onto their positions so strongly they will eat dirt and grovel before Trump, these public servants? Their jobs are meant to involve the sacrifice of uprooting themselves and abandoning the lives they have cultivated with complete freedom in a prosperous and fruitful land for the constraints of serving their fellow citizens.

How laughable! We can see now that they came to plunder. The public good? What a quant idea for people who champion greed and say it will all somehow work out to the benefit of everyone. Their “invisible hand” is invisible because it doesn’t exist. Or, it is the hand of oppression and servitude for their victims. They should all be thrilled to get back to their private lives and go home.

Washington is their home. Like Trump they never gave up their selfish ambitions. They are creatures desperate to maintain the system they have made, in defiance of law and tradition, to benefit themselves. Newt Gingrich rocketed out of obscurity in some Georgia shithole, using his master’s term, to wealth and fame. He waddles around Rome now, erupting occasionally in support of Trump.

He feasts away at our expense looking like the emperors he emulates—an obese, gesticulating clown sputtering through his spittle. Government checks have made his life. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan followed the same track and married rich women for insurance. They love the easy lives WE provide and will fight to keep them by their practiced tactics: lies and intimidation.

They have created a government modeled on multi-level-marketing, transitioning to a culture of inheritance and permanent Republican hegemony. The money flows in and they don’t have to do anything but sit atop a corrupt organization and beat down challenges. They beat down competition. They came not to serve but for money, privilege and power. The will do anything to keep it.

Driving While Democrat

Democrats are about to get pulled over by Bill Barr's Boss Hogg. He is playing a small-town sheriff in the segregated South.

Unequitable, racist, bigoted, biased, flagrantly prejudicial enforcement is his plan. Democrats are the new black underclass.

First He Wasn’t. Then He Was. Now He Isn’t.

Initially Donald Trump wasn't the issue. Nobody knew how incompetent, stupid and inconceivably corrupt he was. Then he became the issue, with a childlike reliance on all the infrastructure Republicans have built up over the years to guarantee America would be a paradise for rich people and reduce everyone else to misery and inconsequence.

Donald wanted to be liked. New Yorkers knew he was an oaf. He was never accepted there and, at some level, he knew it but, as president, he could make even the highest reaches of the aristocracy pay attention and, to some extent, dance to his tune. He used every kind of incentive and threat, like any good grifter, huckster, briber and blackmailer.

Now he isn’t the issue again. He is so blindly, recklessly, garishly corrupt he makes impeachment easy, not that the Senate will comply or anything will be admitted. That is what is interesting now—the resulting issue. Trump exposed the Republican Party as a treasonous and seething mess of self-serving frauds and scoundrels, a fifth column.

Republicans are the swamp and they have compromised the government. They were always disloyal. They have owned and managed Trump because he was a characterless void:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/swamp-trump/551807/

Donald’s Special Day

No, it’s not his birthday.

Donald loves to hurt and belittle people and Americans, in their wisdom, made Donald Trump president so every day is his special day now. He gets to belittle people and, as for hurting, it goes on even on his many days off playing golf because of his enormous power and the opportunity to delegate the pleasure and privilege of hurting to his surrogates, enablers, underlings and enforcers.

There is, of course, a children’s book of this title and the first to be rated “R” which is a real breakthrough in despoiling and perversion. You might think it’s bad business to have a children’s book they can’t even buy but this is Donald’s genius and particular gift, to build failure into everything he touches. His failures continue creating chaos and doing damage even once he has moved on.

Failures are strewn about in his wake like carnage on a battlefield and people are corrupted and demeaned by Donald to such a degree they go right on demeaning like little Trump mini-trolls even when set free from the immediate influence and active oversight of their evil master. In business they refer to “multipliers” and Donald, as a businessman, prides himself on his power to multiply turmoil.

It is his special skill and gift to the world. He is so damaged and degraded his soul has ceased to exist. It only wants to share and promote this destruction. Donald’s only function is to annihilate other souls. He is the kind of demon or vampire you read about in novels, a black hole of despair, gluttony and greed. Donald’s is a need incapable of being filled so every day is his special day of doom.

Corruption is his compulsion or quest and Americans, desiring to die, made him their leader—a harbinger and agent of the end of the world. Jesus, they believe, will then swoop in and gather up his special, chosen souls and take them to heaven. And you thought the Taliban and ISIS were insane. They are amateurs and powerless little perverts, by comparison. America must always be the best.

Even, or especially, at this satanic, soul-sucking enterprise.

The Grand Mufti of Mar-a-Lago

Donald Trump refuses to be a president and do his job. His “policies” are based on whim, superstition, magical thinking and political expediency of a sort which means he must placate two groups, oligarchs and bigoted extremists. The latter are largely religious and certified throwbacks.

This makes him not a president but a satrap or a grand mufti. He increases his power by narrowing and parochializing his vision. Sadly, that is not his job. He was always a narrow, ignorant guy anyway, lacking the bandwidth to be anything else. Let’s put him back in appropriate circumstances.

From Florida Trump can stream fatwas and insults at his leisure and ease. That pesky press won’t bother him. In Florida Trump can feel like a king, well-insulated from reality. Reality bites and sucks for Trump. From Florida our coddled champion can throw tantrums at will. Get thee back, Don-boy.

Trump: A Walking Superfund Site

The chicken and the egg. Does Donald Trump’s diet fuel his mangled psyche or the other way around? Who knows but I think it’s a feedback loop of doom:

https://www.salon.com/2019/11/03/self-destructiveness-paranoia-and-disdain-trumps-unhealthy-food-choices-impact-his-mental-health/

The Economics of Adolescence Among Republicans

Guess who’s back. Phil Gramm, the person most responsible for the ‘08 economic downturn, has a new opinion piece in the WSJ, having been drawn into the fray by the wonderful surge in unreason. He condescendingly explains to the “takers” how lucky they are as though they aren’t the experts on what their lives are like.

Gramm is another instance of a Freudian’s field day—physically substandard, morally stunted and exhibiting compensatory intellectual disdain, a “Peter Pan” if there ever was. He avoids honest, productive enterprise while hating those who actually engage in it. In his case I condemn both the sin and the sinner, he is so loathsome.

Repressed stuff has a way of surfacing, however. Phil Gramm married a girl named Wendy, his partner in delusion and deregulatory crime.

That’s the Way the Country Crumbles

Every single Republican in Washington, it appears, thinks nothing of subverting the law and the government for personal and partisan gain. So, this is how it all ends, with a sigh and a whimper and a lot of undeserving idiots scampering around, not with high drama and people of character battling it out over knowingly momentous issues.

Honest Exploitation

A great shift is afoot. Republicans used to represent sustainable, honest exploitation. Now it’s suicidal and compulsive. I see two likely causes. Firstly, with increased mechanization and then robotics, labor is no longer such an important factor in production.

Secondly, Republicans, doomed forever to minority status in a democracy in which they openly championed the interests of a wealthy elite, gained power by playing political footsie with a faction of racist troglodytes in the American South and elsewhere.

Perhaps at one time they thought there would never be a price to pay. I don’t know but the troglodytes have finally asserted themselves after a couple of decades of giving up their votes without receiving the insane, retrograde social shit they wanted in return. 

Those days are over. Troglodytes are running everything and rampaging through the country’s rules and standards like so much chaff and waste. They crave an end to everything. That, or a return to Calvin’s Geneva, a rule remarkably resembling the Taliban’s. 

Bonehead’s Border Wall Falls to Inexpensive Saws

Republicans, being weak-minded, must have fixations. They try to arrive at confidence and feelings of certainty and security by reducing everything to a sound bite or sweepingly simple stab at policies requiring more intelligence and insight than they have. Therefore, we have the tax cutting fixation, the mother of them all. We have the free market and deregulatory fixations and the military spending fixation.

We have a fixation on cutting social services.

On paper, these add up to bankruptcy. In reality, these have added up to bankruptcy and a failing middle class. Hence the lies. Republicans, having caused social deterioration and distress, observable to anyone, have to enforce a break with reality. We are there now. All they do is lie. Enter “the wall” and Donald Trump. A person can be stupid and shrewd at the same time, you know. Trump not only speaks he thinks in fixations.

He’s a bigot and a moron, with a weak intellect.

This means he can’t adapt. He’s a one trick moron. Attack, attack, attack. Refugees are sawing through his wall with inexpensive tools. He’ll try to lie his way out of it, of course. He craves complete control with no accountability. In a sane world control comes with responsibility. Theirs is not a sane world but a world of lies. Let’s watch Trump lie some more. “I wanted concrete but the Dem’s wouldn’t allow it” might be his spin.

We will see but remember that nothing is ever his fault. The Tao of Trumpism and the Republicans is irresponsible living resulting in maximized capital accumulation. Their grail is greed—a quest for control, unaccountable power and their own earthly dominion.

They are all parasites and predators, incapable of productive, cooperative, responsible living. Jails were invented and built for such people. 

Watch for It

An eclipse is nothing in comparison with an ethical inversion. And, an ethical inversion can be viewed from anywhere. No need to drive all over and lie down in a field out in the middle of nowhere or put on special glasses. All you have to do is have a conscience.

We are approaching totality now. Good is bad and bad is good. Bloodied and battered, the truth is in retreat against an attack of lies. “Christians” live in hate, destroy people’s lives and insist they are destined for heaven. “Patriots” undermine the government.

The anointed guardians of democracy are the products of privilege, claiming infinite entitlement, to the extent that their frivolous desires outweigh others' rights even to exist, and they claim unlimited recompense. That is, “rights” are determined by power.

Those without power have no rights.

Individuals are so wealthy they can corrupt the government and deny the collective will of millions. ONE PERSON, that is. No institution can resist them when they form alliances. They have “think tanks” and PACs. They have organizations and own newspapers.

They have legions of lackeys who whoop at every victory for falsehood and decry attempts to enforce accountability and return the world to sanity. They attack viciously. They respect no rules. Laws are subverted. Equitable enforcement is impossible. People live in fear.

We are on the cusp now but ethical inversions can only be verified once they happen. No one knows when we will cross the line into totality and darkness. But the results, in chaos and brutality, are unmistakable. People without consciences are blind to inversions.

That aspect of it is confusing. They really can’t see them.

Prosperity Slut to Infest White House

Paula White, prosperity slut, will now show up for work at the White House and get a government check. Say what you will about Trump, he has an ear for insulting behavior.

Overwhelming Farce

Trump’s administration is trying to find its way to victory, against their fellow citizens, by employing overwhelming farce and impropriety. In some ways it seems to be working.

Hey Mr. Tangerine Man...

He of the orange countenance, the sultan of insults who can’t stand criticism, is reacting predictably to the threat of impeachment by going fully apeshit. We think we’ve seen the worst but nearly every day there’s some new low.

Big Dickhead Energy

Big Dickhead Energy is where you dominate everybody by being the biggest sociopathic asshole and maybe even mentally ill. Think of Donald Trump.

Pesky Blighters

Those pesky blighters in the Trump administration just won’t take legality for an answer. The “rule of law” is not only something they don’t respect it’s to be deliberately and arbitrarily eroded. Chaos and disorder are encouraged for their own sake or as an enhancement in their quest for unchecked power which is inconsistent and incompatible, of course, with any kind of legal constraint. In Trumpworld legality is for losers.

Captains Contagious

Where do we draw the line on innocence? Trump’s dupes buy the lie. Are the gullible guilty? We have to judge behaviors so the question is existential and academic. We have to judge output and results. We judge what people do and Trump and Republicans before him have destroyed people’s lives and caused many deaths. Yes, they are responsible. They are guilty. We will figure out punishments in the penalty phase.

The fear they foster is contagious but this pathogen is self-administered. The exposure is voluntary, by association. It is a choice.

Matt Gaetz, Gladiator

Pathetic, pudgy, ass-licking white boy Matt Gaetz sees himself as a gladiator, according to reports. I support self-invention and a certain amount of romance in life—the right and opportunity to have a personal myth to sand down some edges and inflate a few vain attributes into accomplishments and apparent merit but this is too much.

Gaetz is the water-boy’s water-boy, licking the ass-lickers’s butts while awaiting a shot at Trump’s own anus—a mascot amusing a master who is himself a charlatan. Gaetz is a Sancho to Trump’s Quixote but without irony or common sense, and another Republican beset with grandiosity. All the while his grinning head is submerged in the federal trough.

The Annotated Malice: A Collection of the Tweets of Donald Trump, President of the United States and Vile Defamer...

Someone will have the terrible task of collating and publishing the collected spate and drivel contained in the tweets of Donald Trump. He is the president and was in some way elected, a horrible truth to speak. These tweets will have to be annotated to place the incredible outpouring of insults, innuendo, invention and invective in some context.

This will be a testament to someone degraded beyond the imagination of most of us. He is a violent, angry person. He is ignorant, impulsive and implausible. He is reactive and abusive. He is greedy and conniving. He is treacherous, unjust and repugnant. A lot of shit will have to be owned before it is all done. He’s an asshole, an idiot and a tweeting machine.

The Kraut Who Came in from the Cold

Why pick on Peter Thiel? No reason. He’s only one of the many rich assholes asserting their uninalienable right not to have to answer to anybody. But, he did put an entire, profitable media organization out of business. That is intimidation in action.

Intimidation is now accepted, Republican governmental policy in use against citizens for personal gain. Trump and company are on a roll. Kellyanne Conway, who has family roots in the Mafia, called a journalist to apply some muscle. She thinks she’s a feminist.

So she says but I think it’s all nonsense.

They will do anything to win. Trump is asserting dictatorial, “constitutional” immunity, a terminal contradiction, that he isn’t legally responsible for anything he does. We are living in the age of assholes. They have come in from the cold and are openly claiming authority. A small group of infinitely greedy people already control everything.

Still, they want more.

Peter Thiel is just such an asshole. He wanted revenge and he got it, sending a huge message to a beleaguered and essential industry to always hold back and watch your step. Look to the rear now and then. The Kraut or one of his kind might be after you. 

Under-the-Bus Throwing

Versions of this idiom are used a lot lately. Trump’s allies and underlings try to protect their vainglorious boss and he tries to protect himself. Among the new conservatives, because character and integrity are non-starters, it is a sport and Ayn Rand is their honorary cheerleader and babe.

But “under-the-bus throwing” doesn’t roll off the tongue as one would like. Let’s just call it “treason” since it’s the elevation of self above everything anyway, including one’s country, and Trump is a fitting master, a hideous ethical black hole and charlatan. The country is there to serve him.

Under the bus it goes, if it suits. Remember, a Randian hero would rather blow something up than have it not be an appropriate testament to their greatness. Under the bus we all go.

Strange Sensibilities

Their boy, George W, Bush, got over a million people killed and exploded the world with his lies and incompetence. There has been no official assessment, accounting and legislative action against him. Republicans in the House, however, want to censure Adam Schiff.

They take a cue from their temperamental leader and his monstrous mess of an administration just steeped in and seething with illegality.

Schiff dared to criticize Little Donny Trump. They are princesses in a world of peas and Trump is the final snowflake—fragile and floating to his doom while protesting how he is so special and unique, a pouty prima donna raised to think of himself as a king.

Enablers and Abettors Scrambling Around...

As one would expect in an administration kept afloat by falsity Donald Trump’s enablers are having trouble getting their lies right. The lies are all made up anyway, by their nature, and only have reference to escaping responsibility and protecting the head craftsman of doom, Herr Donald himself.

Squirmy Mick Mulvaney had a time of it yesterday. And Mike Pence made sure to extol his glorious leader while trying to control the turd-fest Trump unleashed among the Turks. Asswipes abound among the Trumpists, some more servile than others in panting their appreciation for their master. 

A Head Between the Cheeks

I wonder if, in private, Republicans talk about the flavor of Donald Trump’s anus like it is wine, “tannic, earthy, and robust with hints of licorice, berries and talc,” or whatever. Bob Barr’s jowls must be overly occupied there, feasting away between the cheeks.

Trump Crosses a Line

Donald Trump usually follows “conservative” advice when he acts because he has no brain. Largely these people and organizations are ecstatic because he’s been implementing their awful, self-serving, destructive policies consistently. They get the crazy shit they have always wanted with some degree of insulation and separation from accountability.

But Donald doesn’t understand the military angle, that our forces are there not to protect America from actual threats but to further business interests. And Donald must be monitored at all times or he will improvise and do something incredibly stupid. So, he caves in to Turkey’s autocratic leader on a phone call. He was probably winging it.

But NOW some and certain “conservatives” are upset and criticizing him. Are there humanitarian issues? Yes. Are there foreign policy issues? Yes. Are there all kinds of issues? Of course. There always are, but they only get weighed when the larger issues of America’s corporate interests are at stake because that’s all they really care about.

Where were they when Donald did all the other stupid shit? As long as it aided corporations and rich people they were entirely on board.

Scorched Earth/Hearth

Republicans have been so utterly victorious for the past 40 or so years the Democrats can’t even see it. The pain would be too great. The change in perspective too vast. The shame and humiliation too much to handle.

There is a way around it—to understand how Republicans did it—because they weren’t brilliant or anything of the sort. They went crazy, going “scorched-earth” against their fellow citizens and taking them hostage.

Stockholm Syndrome thereafter defines the Democrats, or a similar kind of disorder. They were stunned into incompetence.

Winning is easy for cheaters. Winning is easy when you abuse your insider status and betray your country. Republicans are seasoned traitors and Democrats are still too shocked and uncomprehending to do anything about it.

“Scum” and “Animals” Now Approved Presidential Language

I have long called Republicans “scum” thinking it was an accurate and irreplaceable descriptor but wondering if it wasn’t unacceptably strong and vivid language. The President’s use of the term has reassured me of its propriety, allowing that he himself used it unjustly in spouting off, as is his habit, but we are accustomed to that by now.

“Animals” is one I hadn’t employed. But, hearing it used by the President, I instantly recognized how it applies to Herr Donald and his family of thugs and crooks. I would never have brought it out myself but it is obviously okay and I think it suits the Trumps well, in their bottomless greed and degraded, selfish, aggressive, cruel and primal behaviors.

A Note on Perspective

With yet another Trumpist, Thomas Homan, doing his full-blown Nazi caveman routine in front of the House of Representatives we have to ask ourselves what is going on. Are there really as many flaming Hitlerian sociopaths in our country as it appears?

I say no, but there are many more than we ever suspected and they are wading out of their mires upon recognizing the great white hope of Trump, a reeking shitpile of inhumanity and depraved heap of garbage and uncompromising criminal and scoundrel.

This is the perspective to which we must adhere, that it is bad but not as bad as it seems, replacing despondency and despair with disappointment. We are not who we thought we were but not as bad as the concentration of evil under Trump would have it.

An Important Announcement

I have long reviled evangelical Christians for their support of Donald Trump and their overall treachery, cruelty and stupidity. I am adding to that list conservative Catholics. They did not vote for Donald Trump to the same disgraceful degree but they are making up for it by combining ass-kissing and being in positions of high influence.

Bill Barr and Corey Lewandowski have prompted this change, though every Supreme Court justice considered conservative is tied to Catholic education and tradition. Those are the traditions of defending authority at all costs and being able to rationalize anything. Fox News and the Trump administration are seething with these idolators.

They bow down before the golden calf of Trumpism. Evangelicals are mostly too stupid to do the heavy lifting for their movement.

They are leaving it to Catholics.

Parasite Playground

Courtesy of Republicans Washington is now a seething shithole of parasites and vermin. Apart from the museums, that is. The museums are nice.

PO(TU)S at Play

There’s nothing Donald Trump loves more than dragging everyone around him into the same shithole he has long occupied. The entire country is his shithole sandbox now.

What Would Dickhead Do?

Christians today have a more accessible and observable model than Jesus to regulate their behaviors. They can emulate Donald Trump and consider what that moron would do. I feel sure that, given a choice of making a million dollars or making a million dollars while destroying somebody Donald would choose to destroy somebody.

Why? WHO THE FUCK CARES. It doesn't matter. Apparently, he enjoys belittling people and ruining their lives. It makes him feel good. It makes him feel like a big man—like a king, to which status he father used to exhort him. Nothing is more kingly than to be cruel, arbitrary and randomly vindictive with other people and pay no price.

This is the guy evangelical Christians support, chose to elect and enjoy observing in action. By this we know them for what they really are, satanists and an abomination to God.

The Redneck Ascendancy

Yet another scam is in the works. Hillbilly Elegy, soon to be a major motion picture, depicts a (presumably waning) society “in crisis” but hillbilly values have won. America is ignorant, violent and obsessively addicted. America is self-destructive and teeming with guns. America is now an honor culture.

Don’t be fooled. 

The evangelical voting bloc has produced an anti-intellectual, redneck ascendancy and Trump, an anti-intellectualist’s dream, is their president. Bring on the stupidity. Bring on the violence. Bring on the inarticulate anger and resentment. America is going down. We need an elegy for America.

America is full of violent, gun-toting morons and bigots.

Asshole Going Down

Our asshole, dimwit, piece-of-shit President is going down. When Fox News the Wall Street Journal break a story so bad even the Senate will have to go along Don-boy is toast. This is not so good.

The worst elements in the treasonous hierarchy of government-destroying institutions, from the conservative “think-tanks” on through, have had their way with our moron executive from the beginning.

We are left with destruction and—what next?—a Pence presidency? And, watch now as fuckwad-halfwit will try negotiate his way out of it. He might agree to resign with Pence’s promise of a pardon.

He has, after all, gone bankrupt before.

Everything is a shambles and the people behind it will say the system worked as they creep away with their winnings. We’re looking at a version of the 2008 recession. Thanks again, Republicans.

The destroyers will walk away not only unscathed but enriched. Thousands of people should go to jail. They should have to build new prisons and the executive branch should be placed in receivership.

We will not have dodged anything.

I would like to see, however, those Republicans drinking out of toilets like the immigrant kids they have incarcerated. Better yet, I want those prisons to be privately owned by people who contribute to Democrats.

Tune In

Watch Republicans, after years of lying about their patriotism and devotion to America and the Constitution, eat shit and bow down before Trump.

There is no war. There is no emergency, crisis or threat and, yet, Republicans refuse to obey the law but submit instead to their illegal leader.

I take it back. There is a crisis. The crisis is them. The crisis is Trump. We are turning into a dictatorship. And you can watch it on TV.

The Mother of All Lies

I’m not sure the history of our times will ever be written. It might be the end times or some descent into an Orwellian nightmare in which history doesn’t exist anymore. Anyway, if it does get written in some rational, intelligible, honest and even-handed way I wonder if the Second Amendment battle will be seen as a turning point.

If they could bully their way into enforcing an obvious lie in that case why not carry on from there? They wanted to have their guns and so fuck the truth. They wanted to have a war in Iraq and so fuck the truth. They want to cut taxes—ALWAYS—and so fuck the truth, that it is the worst economic and social policy ever.

Fuck the truth. Can anybody really believe that “rising tide” and “supply side” aren’t just incredible, self-serving lies at this point? So, it’s not about guns or economics anymore, it’s about ensuring that there is NEVER any accountability because they can’t have that. Do you see what I’m saying? The lies have value now AS LIES.

They have value independently of the content. The promulgators of this have to erode the truth to protect themselves. The Left has their lies as well as well but it is nothing like this. Theirs are more like exaggerations. Theirs are pitiful and pathetic. The Left’s lies don’t even empower them. They still try to empower everybody. 

How quaint. How passé. How ridiculous. And what a shame it’s why the country was created in the first place, to include and empower its citizens.

Elvis in the Afterlife

I am hoping for a sign evangelicals can respect, something to tell them Donald Trump might not be the best guy to run the country. I am hoping for Elvis.

Apparitions of Elvis might get through to evangelicals. Let us pray to Elvis. We are talking about the sweaty, sequin-suited version, the one out of Vegas.

Elvis, are you there, boy?

The a Great Decider Decides

To call the decision making process in the current White House “tangled” assumes an underlying coherence and intelligibility where there is none, unless referring to the windings of Donald Trump’s intestines. Here we have another Republican president who relies on his gut, the output of which looks a lot like what one would expect.

Let’s revisit the last guy who let his instincts rule his brain, the great decider himself, author of the Iraq war, bankrupter of economies and a man still oblivious to the idea he has ever done anything wrong. This is where privilege will get you:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-feb-09-na-transcript9-story.html

I Predict

Republicans are setting the stage for the next sadistic onslaught. They will act when they can justify it, if only to themselves, with a crisis or event, probably created by them or even imagined. They thirst for blood.

Was It All a Dream?

Were we ever the people we thought we were—responsible, decent, hard-working, fair, open-minded, caring and generous? We sure aren’t now, led by a crooked, lying tycoon and scrambling around grasping for more resources as it becomes evident the great game of consumption is coming to an end.

Was it all a dream? Were we ever decent people?

Pride and Innocence

It’s weird, but when life is most brutal there is a kind of innocence. This is because there is no culpability among animals. Animals are just being animals.

Cruel people betray their humanity. They become animals again—nothing but animals. In that world everything is meaninglessness and compulsion.

There is innocence there but everything is unintelligible. That is because they are sick.  The people, I mean. I like animals.

Anyone Who Supports Trump Is a Piece of Shit

Someone who voted for Trump might only have been stupid or deluded. There was no telling how he would behave. But, now we know. Trump is garbage. Trump is a piece of shit beyond all others.

No more excuses. Anyone who still supports Trump is a piece of shit. They share in his treasonous shithood. We know now what he stands for, cruelty and the destruction of everything.

Trump’s Johnson

Britain is an older, more deeply rooted culture and the Tories have refused to eat shit as readily as their American counterparts. Nevertheless, they have a Trump problem because Boris doesn’t care about anyone but himself.

He has already won, by duping, swindling, deceiving and blustering his way into his job and, as with Tony Blair, who followed another American moron into the abyss, Boris will walk away. He wins now no matter what happens.

Things He Said Today

The only act Trump has two follow is his own, maintaining standards of cruelty and ignorance for his followers who crave it, and remaining the center of attention through outrage oneupmanship. He leapfrogs himself, nearly daily—his only real talents are in denigration and persecution.

Sarah Sanders Fits In

Sarah Sanders has immediately found a lucrative home among the horrible shills at Fox News, one of many participants in the Republican platinum parachute program in which thuggery and loyalty are rewarded with admittance to a society of permanent, private-sector parasitism. Among Republicans public and private money are seamlessly fused in a system of graft, exploitation, and markets in influence.

Megan Kelly showed how coddled they are at Fox—no talent necessary, only a track record of slavish devotion to Republican dogma. She tanked on arrival at NBC, not that they are great shakes, but Kelly is a pure hack and self-interested, sycophantic warrior maiden, another sucker off the state and spin-disciple of Roger Ailes, laundering racism and treason for public consumption at the behest of Kochs and their kind.

Trump Denies Denying What Never Happened Anyway

And it's just another day in the life of a superpower...

The Good (Fake) News

Try to comprehend that the entire world might be destroyed by American, evangelical Christians and rednecks. Their lies are that powerful. They happen to constitute a critical voting bloc in the most powerful country ever,

And, they happen to be in love with lies to the point they will die for them. This is not as strange as it sounds, Think of all the cults that have held their adherents in such thrall. Evangelicals were inculcated from birth with the lie of the “Lost Cause.” 

That is the lie that the good side lost in the Civil War. The Confederacy claimed not that they were treasonous, racist thugs, which they were, but superior beings and the chosen tribe of constitutional government and God. 

In other words, it was one, huge lie. The Gospel always was a story—a kind of lie—but it was a beautiful, humane story of love and inclusion. American rednecks have twisted it into a horror show. The “Good News” was fake news. 

Evangelicals aren’t in love with a specific lie anymore they are in love with lying. The loss of the central lie of their own righteousness is death to them. They have surrounded it with a defensive perimeter of other lies.

To the rest of us it looks awfully offensive. Trump and the “Fake News” fit right into the same slot in their heads. There must never be accountability and the truth just be avoided to the point of death. These are lies with legs. 

Bad Moon on the Rise

I’m sorry to keep commenting on the ass-kissing festival of the Republicans in Washington and all over the country. It’s just so stunning and hard to avoid. Trump offers his bare ass unprejudicially to everyone.

Republicans queue up to revere and kiss the hallowed object. Catholics, especially, seem prone to this idolatry, abomination and sacrilege. I can make sense of the evangelicals and their support.

They benefit as the reascendant Confederacy, America’s original traitors. Among Catholics it’s a pure love of submission and the suspension of disbelief normally reserved for their religious practice and the theater.

What a sad spectacle of human degradation and debasement. Notice that Trump appointed Callista Gingrich, an ignorant whore and wench, as ambassadress to the Vatican after white Catholics voted for him.

This is a classic Trump tactic, rewarding loyalty with an insult—a test and demand for further shit-eating and implication. Catholics complied. Such true soldiers and cannon fodder are vested with opportunities in servitude.

Barr and Kavanaugh, for example, were exalted as reliably lying henchmen and hacks. They were already compromised by Bush’s crimes.

Catholics proudly serve Trump in many important positions, defending his falsehoods as they would the paradoxical, irrational and anachronistic tenets of their church—as though the lies are revelations.

Trump is a revelation, all right—of the perseverance of pure, primal evil in the postmodern world, an emanation of Satan in a digital age.

Murder on the Trump Express

There’s no mystery about what Trump is doing. It’s illegal from beginning to end. From top to bottom. Others are implicated. It might not be a conspiracy but it’s a cabal. Trump’s attempts to try to ram through and weirdly fund his border wall are one example. What a piece of shit he is.

In Trump’s corner and defense we have such treasonous filth as Barr and Kavanaugh, who gleefully investigated things as weighty as the “distinguishing characteristic” of Bill Clinton’s dick. They had NO problems with George Bush’s fruitful genocide, into which he lied and led the country,

They have their priorities straight. Neither of their presidents had a positive mandate, but, given an inch, took a murderous mile, reveling in created conflicts and tortures pronounced necessary for national security. I call it sadism but Trump has trumped Bush in applying it to children.

That is what pride, competition and accomplishment look like among Republicans now. Investigations are overdue. Not much sleuthing needs to be done. It is all well documented but it must be formalized and then prosecuted. At present they are themselves dispensers of justice. My ass.

Worship Me. Idolize Me. Bow Down Before Me

Sorry. Just working out the bugs on a speech for Trump for his second term. If he wins again he really will think he is the chosen one.

The Gathering Shitstorm

Well, it has become plain now that the American Republican Party, supposedly representing the country’s elements of dignity, tradition, decorum, fine dining, the rule of law, and the preservation of its citizenry and its rights and accomplishments, has degenerated into filth and shame, firstly by putting party before country, and then by putting the egotism and whims of its singular leader above the welfare of their society and of the entire world. Donald Trump has made it evident that he will do anything to get re-elected. He will do inconsistent, illegal, destructive and malicious things. He will screw anybody and everybody. He would, if he could, trade victory in the next election for a deferred economic collapse occurring the next day if it lasted forever.

Only he matters to himself. The rest of us are nothing. Republicans, accustomed to representing themselves as the country’s saviors and defenders, have collapsed at his feet mumbling, stammering and blubbering, and watching for opportunities for benefit and self-promotion. How is this not the inevitable extension and progression of the program begun in 1968? Republicans realized they could capture the southern vote—George Wallace’s vote—by playing to race between the lines. They had only to go low. And then lower and lower and lower, ending in their degradation and open pandering to bigots and avowed racists, engendering hatred everywhere. To think of the sacrifices expended to create, build and maintain our country and it comes to this.

An Affidavit

Out of the blue a guy I hadn’t see in more than 40 years called me from our high school reunion. We were friends as kids but he became a bad bully and I switched schools and so on. We hadn’t been friendly, I would say, since we were 16. Anyway, it was hard to tell but the call seemed to be to gloat. He seems to think he has won.

The guy was insanely competitive.

I hated to lose but didn’t get anything out of winning but a mild sense of relief. I’m not sure I even hated losing all that much but adolescent boys, including and especially this guy, would make it unbearable. Winning was everything to (him) them. I beat him at most things, as I remember, and I was, trivially, smart and a bit of a hero in Little League.

He admitted to being envious in the phone call. He had tried twice, both evenings of the reunion, and seemed determined to get me on the phone. I had REALLY stopped "competing" when I was 15. I had huge problems at home and at school and was just trying to survive. I remember being reduced to tears by my "friend" once and he didn’t let up.

I would sign an affidavit now if I could and a stipulation that HE HAS WON. I don’t care. But, I know it wouldn't make a difference. Think of Trump and the Republicans. The point is the cruelty. The point is the experience of actively beating up on people. There is no state or stable situation of victory and domination that will appease them.

My old friend was envious about my parents.

That’s what he said on the phone. They were wonderful people but it didn’t save us from fate. It didn’t save us from the bad luck of sickness and death. This compulsion to win, though, is immune to everything. It’s immune to empathy, understanding, and the possibility and viability of other values, such as compassion and decency.

You can be utterly helpless (I was) and suffering and they will still only want to kick your ass. My ass was already kicked. It didn’t matter. Reality never intrudes on that imperative to dominate and destroy their selected opponents who are conveniently defenseless. Weakness brings out the worst in them. Women and children first.

Not that I perceive women as weak. But, they do. And, their compulsion creates their reality, a fantasy and a delusion in which they can win. It is a setup. They pick on those who are already down or gang-up on you. Egotism runs everything. Most importantly, remember that they will never be satisfied. There is no end-state in security.

They crave the primal, visceral experience of lording it over other people and it is an implacable, irrational need, rooted in their own weakness and fear. Study up on Trump. There is no better example. Anyway, I say, nevertheless, to my old friend, you have won. Send me an affidavit. I will sign it.

Secretary of Deference

I am bothered by the inconsistent, irregular, unprofessional, disorganized and altogether inadequately managed ass-kissing going on in the White House. Granted, Trump is a moving target but I believe it can still be handled better under a new, cabinet level post, the SECRETARY OF DEFERENCE.

This is an important position. All the other members of the cabinet must answer to this secretary since deference applies to everyone and is more important that any other quality of decision making in an authoritarian regime. Lindsay “Cracker” Graham would be an excellent inaugural choice.

He’s a born ass-kisser if I have ever encountered one.

Uneasy Ride

Little did we know, at the time, but Easy Rider was prescient as hell. Captain America, representing America, was killed by rednecks. Now, America has been destroyed by evangelical Christians. That is, rednecks.

Democracy Dies in the Light of Day

I never once saw Donald Trump’s reality TV show. I never followed his exploits around New York though I beheld his tasteless tower at times. I had no idea he was such an evil, self-centered, stupid and morally stunted person.

However, I was aware of the destructive impulses of the Gingrich-influenced Republicans—that they came to annihilate America and oversee its reinvention as a state that runs on greed and cruelty, serving only the very wealthy.

And, so, I am somewhat unsurprised at where Trump is heading, toward the re-creation of America along the loathsome lines of Ayn Rand’s grotesque fantasies of heroically unbounded egotism, but I am very surprised at how fast.

Trump’s brand of worthlessness plays perfectly into the worst aspects of the determined destruction of rational government and decency. We are becoming an abomination and monstrosity out in the open and in view of everyone.

Our government is overcome by criminals.

Bear Witness

Does Trump shit in the woods? No. Trump shits in the White House. And, figuratively, that means that Trump shits on all of us.

Trump Killed Jeffrey Epstein

Obviously, Donald Trump killed Jeffrey Epstein. Who has the power? Who has the most to lose? Who is so stupid and reckless? It has to be Donald Trump.

Humane Torture

ICE and the the Trump administration have announced a new, HUMANE TORTURE push in celebration of which they have staged a well-rationalized roundup of illegal immigrants in Mississippi, a state known for generations and centuries as a bastion of civil rights and progressive concern for minorities.

Republicans have worked out the bugs on the at Guantanamo Bay and are therefore well positioned for its implementation. Reassurances aside, they have a track record on torture that should comfort all and allay any concerns. Worst case, they can call in Dick Cheney and his supporters, taking advantage of their expertise.

Treason Museum

One of my dreams, apart from placing a full page ad in the NYT accusing the Koch boys of treason—a takeoff and simulation of their daddy’s handbill accusing Kennedy (how can they complain?) of such—is of having a Treason Museum in Washington detailing the Republican destruction of the United States of America.

I would love to have it on the Mall but recognize that this is not practicable. I will settle for the house where evangelical congressmen have lived for years in prayerful hope of the creation of a theocratic state in place of our democracy, ultimately embracing the whole world. It would thereby displace this obviously treasonous activity.

Welcome to the Brave New World Created by Republicans

Guess what.

There was nothing inherently illegal going on when that guy walked into a Missouri Walmart looking like a Somali warlord, one of his drug-stoked supporters or an ISIS combatant, but with newer and nicer gear. The legality or illegality of it will depend on his ATTITUDE.

Now, this is clearly just another unforeseen and unintended consequence of the Republican hegemony, their fixed ideas about things and unyielding ideological bent, like causing the 2008 recession with deregulation or destroying the middle class with tax cuts on plutocrats.

We figure out if a person is a “bad actor” when they start shooting. That’s how you tell. Prior to that you withhold judgment. You see what I mean about their half-baked ideas and policies. They never think things through. Let’s say we have armed guards in the schools. And, let’s say some nut has a yearning for a child massacre.

Wouldn’t that person seek a job as a school guard just as a pedophile, possibly even unwittingly, might be driven to find employment among children. Republicans are idiots. Republicans lie all the time. Republicans are cheats. Republicans are cruel and spiteful and demeaning to other people.

They are also driven to control everything. If you don’t like what’s happening don’t blame me. Don’t blame Democrats. Republicans have caused it all.

Moscow on the Potomac

Mitch McConnell is extremely indignant that he has been accused of disloyalty. He has been obviously, forthrightly loyal his whole life. To the Confederacy. Someone, explain to Mitch that loyalty to the racist, classist, abhorrent caliphate of his southern roots is treason.

He, and people like him, is why we have a racist, classist government and monstrosity in Washington and, increasingly, a racist, classist monstrosity in the rest of the country. Congratulations, Mitch, the Confederacy is risen again. The stench is everywhere.

What Becomes of the Broken?

Broken people do bad stuff, that’s what happens. They have strange drives, unconnected to reality. They have issues. Often, they are fearful and have odd impulses and compulsions to dominate other people. They falsely see their personal, internal conflicts manifested around them and try to resolve those conflicts in self-created, delusional dramas. They are drama queens, like Donald Trump.

Bogus Family

The family of man. Think of all the bogus bullshit they told you when you were a kid. Think of all the nonsense about decency and honesty and fair play, that virtue was rewarded and evil, if not punished, wasn't the ticket to a wonderful life, anyway.

What a load of crap. What a heap of horse shit. Evil is rewarded. People are plagued and punished for being good. Donald Trump is president, issuing a torrent of insults. His hirelings victimize everyone they can, the innocent and powerless first and most aggressively.

This is America. This is life in America, where evil and ill-will and greed rule everything. The human family. What a lie. If it’s a family it’s a sickass family—full of persecution, envy, resentment and exploitation. If this is family I’ll take something else any day.

Flies to Shit

We should have seen it coming but almost every previously seemingly dignified “conservative” has fled to the reeking shitpile of the Trump administration and is feasting on the festering dung. That made me wonder, realizing I didn’t know, what flies actually do with shit. Do they ingest it, only use it for purposes of reproduction, or is the relationship more complicated and “symbiotic”?

Shit symbiosis, seems to be the answer, though the laws of conservation suggest ingestion is the primary drive. Flies can’t masticate, it turns out, only kind of lick or slurp, which I have noted before is the main conservative mode of interaction with Trump’s ass, the licentious locus, and though I had thought this only obeisance and idolatry it appears to provide sustenance. Flies are all oral and anal.

I’m sorry this is so graphic but recall the vast amount of carrion created out of human lives by the last Republican administration. We must go there. Like Bush before him, Trump is a shitting machine. We ALL are, to an extent, truth be told, but this is why human societies have evolved conventions about sanitation—in the service of self-preservation. Vile entities like Trump and Bush never make it.

They are arrested before the level of toilet use, their wealthy families having been able to afford to diaper them via endowments and to empty and dispose of the vast output of their anuses in perpetuity, the same wealth enabling levels of capital ingestion capable of creating torrents of societal feces and dreck. We live in an environment now rife with their rectal refuse, tasteful stuff to Republicans.

Anything that will bring them closer to wealth and capital, however predigested. Evidently it is in their genes or something and they find the stench irresistible and the shit sustaining. I offer no further explanation, only these observations of what is obvious to those with eyes to see, ears to hear and, unfortunately, defenseless nostrils with which to inhale the rank and indescribable stink of doom and decay.

Beyond the Valley of the Dickheads

I watch and read and I am stunned by the number of assholes there are in America. We are an asshole nation. We are bullies, creeps and cowards. If it were in any way self-correcting that would have kicked in long ago.

The correction will have to be a big one. The assholes will have to destroy everything to such an extent we will somehow be reborn. But I see no way to stop the assholes. They are as determined as they are crazy.

Huge Boomer Daddy Problems

I’m not surprised at all that huge daddy issues attach to the sons of “greatest generation” fathers, these fixations becoming undeniably evident with the election of Bill Clinton, the first boomer president. Clinton succeeded and DEFEATED a greatest generation homie—son of an eminent family, WWII vet and a guy who was shot down in battle.

Clinton drove those with daddy problems, now amassing on the political right, crazy with resentment. He was seen as a usurper—an unworthy, false and illegitimate inheritor of the mantle of national daddy and supreme leader. Righties imprinted on this resentment. Their presidential candidates ever since have been lesser and unworthy sons of prominent men.

Unconsciously, Clinton was perceived as “sleeping with” the mother—the federal government—revealingly labeled “nanny” by Republicans. Only Republicans get to suckle there, as they do so voraciously, because the federal government is the mother keeping them from having to grow up and out of a permanent state of dependency. Democrats are actual grownups, the father figures who must be destroyed in a fit of Freudian envy. 

Witness the current cycle of Democrats having to clean up Republican messes, changing their diapers after they shit themselves, George W. Bush being an outstanding example.

Mitt Romney might have passed as less than completely incompetent but he’s shown low character in failing to resist the Republican descent into an abyss of degradation and, of course, he made his money in the honored Republican ways, inheritance and exploitation—harvesting the productive resources of deserving working people, as enabled by the buying of influence in Washington.

McCain, too, suffered by comparison with his male progenitors on back, who fought in glorious wars unlike the inglorious mess of Vietnam. McCain succumbed to the pathology, betraying his country in his own way, hiring the scumball, Tucker Eskew, for example, who had slimed him in South Carolina years earlier, to tutor his massively inappropriate running mate, Sarah Palin, in the arts of sleaze.

George W. Bush. Where do we begin? Did privilege help inculcate such worthlessness or was he born that way? In his eyes there were hints of embryonic, organic brain damage and dysfunction. It is NOT NORMAL to engender the kinds of destruction he did without compunction. I argue for inculcation over a layer of innate inadequacy, a combination of nature and (possibly alcoholic) nurture.

Trump is presumably the end-point and perfection of incompetence and ill will. Many of us thought it was Bush but it is important to understand that they both crave and fear exposure, having never achieved escape velocity in adolescence and still cowering under the skirts of the nanny state, to which they are inevitably drawn. They are unadapted to circumstances, and have adopted the need to measure up on their fathers’ terms.

It’s an impossibility.

Circumstances don’t allow it. The opportunity is gone or never existed. They thrash about in pursuit of an authority that can be challenged and proven resilient and worthy when the appropriate authority is their role. Archetypal parentage is hopelessly and feebly defended by Democrats, not to disparage them, because it's impossible to defend in this fictitious arena. Arrestedness has produced a generation of monsters.

They are compelled to destruction. Only their inner resources can prevent it and those are occupied by evil forces compounded now by a legacy of shame too vast to be owned and acknowledged. We are, to an indeterminate degree, doomed, as only an annihilation of some sort can enable our rebirth. Hold on, friends. We are in for a severe reckoning.

Individual and generational authority issues are feeding on one another. It can only end badly. Batten down the hatches and all of that.

Send Him Back

Trump, in his sworn duty to uphold the Constitution, has cracked yet another door, the possibility of deportation and removal of someone for (supposedly) falsely criticizing American policies, attitudes and practices. Unfortunately, Ilhan Omar is an elected official, having won the popular vote for her seat, unlike Trump, and so she is therefore not eligible for removal, having been constitutionally vested in and legally fulfilling her role.

However, there is an outstanding candidate in Rupert Murdoch, whose unbelievably inaccurate, ill-informed, biased, hate-mongering, polarizing, partisan and reprehensible “news” site has done incalculable harm to his adopted country. In what way is Omar compromised? She makes her life unimaginably more difficult by defending the principles of American democracy as she was taught them and calling out our society for its failings.

Murdoch, on the other hand, is making a fortune treasonously setting Americans against one another with his lies, misrepresentations and such. He sows the seeds of division and discord everywhere, raking in enormous profits in the process. Murdoch is the one to deport.

Unreality Bites

Think reality is bad? Try out delusion. Reality is having to grow up, get a job, act responsibly and both accept and administer authority in the service of something higher, such as the greater, long-term good. In a delusional world none of this matters.

Kavanaugh Catholics

Outsiders got a rare view of the inner world of Catholic high school degeneracy—extreme, sick, submissive competitiveness and thuggery—in the Kavanaugh hearings. This is the cocksucker, tin-soldier strain among conservative Catholics.

Don’t be fooled by appearances of aggression, however obvious, common and extreme these are. It is fundamentally submissive. They are trained in a kind of servitude. They don't feel culpable. You better hope they adhere to true authority.

The violence of this disposition is unthinking and unregulated. It rests in submission to what they perceive as a higher cause and commitment. They don’t acknowledge responsibility, therefore. Now, it is the “higher” authority of Trump.

A Room With a View of Trump’s Ass

That would be, any room or office in Washington. Trump offers his bare ass unprejudicially to everyone. Republicans line up in homage. They kiss the golden calf. I mean, ass. Many remain on their knees and lick away.

Moon to Goon

Fifty years ago we landed a man on the moon. More recently we landed a goon in the White House and his henchmen are everywhere. What’s to celebrate?

Mitch the Bitch

Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell has spent his life taking it up the ass from and for corporations and extreme capitalist forces, pursuing a return to a plantation economy and a life of privilege for the elevated few. He has succeeded. Wealth is inconceivably concentrated again.

Himself, he has received a government check his entire life and married a fantastically wealthy Chinese heiress, realizing the dream of every Republican, money seemingly from nowhere. He might appear assertive to us but he’s actually entirely submissive and degraded.

When Mitch carries on about slavery and reparations it must be understood in this context. The problem is not historical. It is ongoing. McConnell might not look like some burly overseer in the cotton fields but he is one in the new economy of extraction and exploitation.

His authority is derived. His power is delegated. His character degraded. It is systemic and structural. And the slave economy is back.

Cache Me If You Can

Our humanity is increasingly buried under a corporatist crust. We are a substrate and something to be stepped on and used, raw material for "real" people, those who own significant capital and whose existences therefore count.

Eventually, fully mined, we are relegated to landfills as our utility wanes. We are husks, leftovers, tailings and waste. It's a misuse of money to support us. In our subterranean exile our lives are suspended and we can't move forward.

We are memories even to ourselves, the walking dead of capitalism, where productivity defines life below the level of the subdeities of corporatism and the supreme beings, the super-wealthy. We are cached, in a zombie netherworld.

Death Panel Convenes

Republicans never gave up on trying to destroy Obamacare. Now, a panel of judges is meeting to do just that. Tens of thousands of people will die. This is what Republicans stand for, destroying people’s lives.

Red Cape Award

Cue the music:

https://youtu.be/16B5Xm8_IKw

Anyone can offer Donald Trump the slightest challenge and he’ll charge it like a bull. The trick is to do it intelligently and creatively. And, of course, not to get gored. That’s how we maintain standards in America these days, by managing our imbecilic president through distraction. The moron will charge anything.

Cynical or Stupid?

I envision a day of reckoning for Republicans. I suggest a reality show, to separate the cynics from the idiots. The idiots believe the lies. The cynics know they are spouting and supporting nonsense.

Radical Cheek and Mau-Mauing the Flaks

Uppity lefties are disgruntled. The Sarah Sanders era has ended. Journalists might be prone to righteousness and indignation but with Sarah it was justified. All she did was lie.

They got extra cheeky in return. She shut them down and cut them off. She showed them. She didn’t have to communicate at all. Previously, at least they could report the lies.

These weren’t briefings but branding and ass-covering. Plenty of ass to cover in Trumpland, to be sure. Newly labeled as socialists and radicals, journalists attacked the flaks.

Good luck with that. The Trumpists have all the power, you know. It’s all they care about. They aren’t afraid to abuse it. In fact, they love it. What fun it is “owning” the Left.

Fuck governing. Fuck everything. The nihilists are in control. They are a marketing concern. What they are marketing is lies. It is all invented. Their only reality is power.

Imbecile President Turns National Holiday Partisan

America’s imbecilic and incomprehensibly self-centered president, Donald Trump, is turning a national holiday into a celebration of himself and a partisan event. What a piece of shit. It can’t be said often enough. He isn’t even worthy of the normal rights of citizenship. He is a crook who belongs in jail.

Metamorphosis

There was a huge vermin named Donald Trump who awoke one morning to find he had been transformed into a man. Once adjusted he discovered that his instincts and habits played out well in the human world. Donald cared only about himself.

He would do anything to get ahead. He had no conscience but was all appetite and lived in a gilded and lavish environment built on filth. He produced nothing. He consumed everything. Concupiscence, corpulence and sloth characterized his life.

He was widely admired for being such a pig and made president, a role model for the young. This is the end of our story, showing how human evolution reverted and conscious beings CHOSE to return to a lives as animals, insects and vermin.

Bonehead Prepares for Battle

Republicans, those of you who are young and healthy enough, enlist now in time to follow your glorious leader into battle. Do us all a favor and get yourselves killed.

My Mistake

I first started reading about earth issues in the 1970s. Clearly, I thought, the trajectory of fossil fuel-use and environmental degradation and abuse was unsustainable and suicidal. I came from practical people—engineers, farmers and technicians. I thought we would deal with these issues in a rational, productive, responsible way.

I thought societal suicide and annihilation were BAD. I still think it’s bad. But, that didn’t keep us from embracing it. I was wrong. My mistake. I thought we were better and smarter than that.

Psycho Analysis

Trump is nuts. He’s delusional and unstable. Thanks, Republicans, for ruining our country. You seem to be unstoppable. I’m going to stand back from it all. Please contact me when you are done with the destruction.

Manufacturing Discontent

Republicans, together with the vermin and cretins at a Fox News, have created an entire narrative of unjustified, delusional grievance, but that is crossing the line into actuality and becoming reality, where there is now plenty of grievance to go around, and many aggrieved. They do this by fucking up our government and society, in more ways than can be comprehended.

They do it deliberately, if not conspiratorially. They sabotage everything. Witnessing the rush to right-wing populism I am more convinced that the fear and economic hardship caused by the ‘08 economic meltdown is a primary cause. Of course, Republicans created  that by deregulating everything they could for decades and selling out our government..

Trump’s Satanic Witness

To be clear, I don’t think Donald Trump is Satan. Satan is not a worm. Satan is a force for evil. Trump is a worm. Or, maybe a slug. But, he is sure eating up everything.

Shazam That

Anybody use Shazam to ID songs? I want a Shazam to ID lies. Everyone would have to turn their phones off, though, and not use it around Republicans. It’s too much too process.

This We Knew

John Bolton, given the chance, would always start a war.

War for the Course

Trump’s efforts to bait Iran into a conflict are bearing fruit. The “administration” held back on its plans for a strike designed to minimize casualties. Similarly, I hope the government in Tehran will show restraint and only bomb and destroy relatively uninhabited, open spaces—like Trump’s golf courses.

This seems fair and prudent to me since Donald has not only refused to separate his private and business affairs from his (purported) public role he has cultivated their enmeshment, probably trying to position himself for enhanced profits when he is out of office. Also, Trump doesn’t represent the people.

He lacks support and is illegitimate in many ways, having lost the popular vote and then refusing even to try to do his job. Everything is personal with him. Iran’s response should be as well, and his golf courses reduced to smoking ruins. I hate to see anybody get hurt but they should then bomb his hotels.

They can notify the targets ahead of time. Also, there must be a clever way to make Trump Tower uninhabitable. Or, Mar-a-Lago. In this way the American people might benefit from being attacked, by getting Donald’s attention. Nothing else has worked. Nothing else will work. Donald is pretty dense.

The Clown

Following on the success of The Crown on Netflix we are owed a similar production on America's own royal family, the Trumps, titled The Clown since it will focus on Donald. The hand of destiny will be seen in Trump’s family’s rise, and the importance of inheritance. Whatever got him where he is it sure wasn’t character, brains or talent. This will be fully investigated and properly portrayed.

The Canons of Dort

Who is this Dort? I don’t know but we must judge Dort from the fruit of the Dort tree, which now includes such disparate characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Sanders and Steven Mnuchin. Let us judge. They are united by a love of injustice.

Dort defines life as something taking place in a realm of arbitrary authority and superiority. Life is therefore unintelligible. Some people are BORN better than others. Nothing else matters, so their behaviors are irrelevant. They can be the biggest piece of shit ever and it doesn’t matter.

In fact, injustice is reassuring to Dorters—an indication of the hand of God in human affairs. Striving for justice is just another futile effort and example of human folly. Injustice, therefore, is akin to holiness or at least a sign thereof. Justice is for the next world. To seek it here is heresy.

They all believe in an invisible hand ordering the affairs of men—either God’s or that of the capital markets. Oh, those must be the same thing. They have their capitalist God. This is Calvinism for you.

Go in peace...

to love and serve Satan, Sarah Sanders.

Die Like a Dog

I want to die like my dog. He did as well as he could as long as he could, never felt sorry for himself and appreciated every bit of kindness right up to the end.

Trump Tramp Chump Steamer

You don't book Trump for anything. He'll take on whatever cargo suits him at the moment. Hell, he'll throw it overboard once it's laded, screwing whoever hired him, seizing an opportunity to screw someone else.

And, this is the man we hired as president. Is there anyone worse? Never worry. If there is Republicans will find him. We’re Trump chumps. He only deals with chumps. Anyone else might make him responsible.

The Secret History of Semaphore

Communication is the transfer of meaning. In a pinch codes have been used, when normal verbosity was impossible. But what happens when the point is to obscure, and there is no impediment to communication but, rather, the floodgates are open?

What happens when the “bandwidth” is unlimited? Multiple streams are possible and simple, intelligible content is devalued. Signs, indicators and codes are then used in parallel with—on top of—the verbiage. Watch Fox News. It’s all over the place on there.

Wooly Bully

Our hairy antagonist is at it again. Trump is attacking—typically after smaller, less powerful entities. Apex predators don’t attack one another, after all, at least not in an environment of limitless prey. In America the prey lines itself up, volunteering themselves as food. Why doesn’t the entire world do that, Trump wonders. He’s not even hungry, just showing off.

Where Are They Now?

In my latest installment of “Where Are They Now?” I wonder what happened to P.J. O’Rourke, erstwhile budding Reaganite and Bushie, on the issues of pressing concern to plunderers everywhere, whence comes the next meal, meaning how they will pay for a third or fourth vacation house or find the means to try to stay in them all simultaneously WHILE trying to achieve the wanking orgasm of Republicanism in an explosive, virtual-reality orgy of selfishness. Sorry about my style.

I got influenced by O’Rourke who is usually as clever as he is smug, self-indulgent, hyper-critical and misguided. He writes funnily about his adolescence as though he has escaped it but we recognize the conservative dream of living forever on the daddy-dole while deflecting attention from one’s own dependency by accusing the daddy-providers themselves of it, a clever bit of distraction and leap-frogging, lying one-upmanship popular in the 60s. Darn, the style thing again.

That shit is contagious. Anyway, also contagious is the financial depravity, it turns out, now epidemic, practiced by P. J. and his friends among the “libertarian” right OR left, who desire to be left alone in their lairs once they are properly funded by theft, graft, blackmail and other forms of easy money. P. J., write us some more on the rule of law, man, and your boy Trump, and don’t try to lie your way out of it, as though he isn’t George Bush with the parental supervision lacking.

Call in some supervision or do it yourself:

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/13/books/pass-the-salt.html

If you are curious about the strident righties’ search for the forever-tit of freedom look at the latest on the NRA. The board there has rivaled Trump’s cabinet in its penchant for organizational milking.

Kowtow Conservatives

Republicans have figured it out. They insist on controlling everything. They DO control everything, favoring the means of blackmail, deceit and coercion, when needed.

Then they deny responsibility for anything. Their control is perfect. Responsibility is none. The only precondition for membership in their club is to have no conscience at all.

Or, to stay out of the way. Watch them drop to their knees, each at a time, from the Buckley crowd on down, and kowtow to Trump. This is American conservatism.

My Catholic Upbringing

I look back now on my Catholic upbringing in horror. My grade school was dismantled by groovy nuns who believed that teaching at all was too authoritarian, so they jettisoned that. Similarly with my high school but they had something else going, a psychopathology about winning at sports.

Then I had a classical education at a Jesuit university, learning the tricks of that trade, which I have seen deployed at the Supreme Court and elsewhere, where Catholics display their skills at rationalizing anything, ad maiorem trumpi gloriam. They combine this with competitive zeal.

Fox News is a very Catholic organization, at its soul, and we see the hallmarks. They are focused on winning at all costs and can rationalize absolutely anything, including mass killings. These misanthropic Catholic morons allied themselves with evangelical Christians, selling their souls.

Evangelicals have an understanding of existence that is utterly antithetical to Catholicism, not to mention life on the planet itself. Hooray for Catholicism. After their dismal record resisting fascism at the birth of the Third Reich they are doing it all over again, now under the sway of Trump.

What dumbasses. But they are winning—I’ll say that for them. Now what? All they care about is winning and nothing about the wreckage they leave behind. Bill Barr is the latest product of Catholic schools to disgrace himself completely, with the Kavanaugh hearings still ringing in our ears.

Clearly, Catholics are the first place to turn to find meatheads for your war machine, should you have one. They will fight like hell for an unworthy cause.

Hello, My Name Is Satan

What did we think was going to happen? That the Prince of Darkness would walk up and identify himself? “Hi, my name is Satan. Care to sell your soul?” It doesn’t work that way. Satan is cunning. Satan fills the minds of his followers with self-righteousness and determination—with arrogance and vengeful thoughts.

Vengeance for what? Vengeance for imagined slights and insults, or injuries and insecurities brought on by oneself and then blamed on others. Republicans represented a privileged minority and they only wanted to win. An opportunity arose, a racist voting bloc. All they had to do was appeal to that.

All they had to do was play the race card. People are so surprised now, as every pretense of decency and integrity falls away. The lies are so ridiculously obvious. Everything is thinly veiled. The greed is right out in the open, and the corruption celebrated and fantastic. This is what evil actually looks like.

This is what evil looks like not when it knocks on your door because it doesn’t happen that way. It enters elsewhere. This is what evil looks like when it is already in your house and among you because it lied and deceived its way there. This evil is already completely woven into our society. Welcome to hell.

Relocation

I have long thought that the national seat of government needs to be moved. Washington is indefensible. It could be obliterated in a bunch of different ways and we wouldn’t even know who hit us. Add Trump to that equation.

He has not only not drained the swamp he is locking us into permanent swampdom. And who would want to live in a house he has inhabited? To sit on a toilet he has used? Oh, fucking yuck. I wouldn’t bring in a cleaning crew but a priest. 

The whole city feels fouled and polluted. This is a chance, however, to start over. We should pass a lot of anti-lobbying and anti-corruption legislation, then move the capital immediately to somewhere deep in the middle of the country.

Public service should again be something people do from a commitment to something other than greed and a lust for power. That would be easier if our elected officials were living in a desert or fucking wasteland miles from everything.

A Speculative Post

This will be a more speculative post, in comparison with the hardened facts of Republican incompetence and degeneracy about which I usually write. I think Republicans are cashing out on the American dream. At some level, they believe that America is going ENRON. They are taking us there.

Look at the startling consistency with which Trump’s cabinet appointments and others of his officials behave as though there is no tomorrow, milking and bilking their way through their jobs, not giving a rat’s rectum about how obviously criminal and crooked they are. I think they’re cashing out.

They’re cashing out before the crash. The lesson of the last fiasco they created, in 2008, was that there would be no accountability. In fact, the only people they care about, the really rich, came out ahead. Average Americans got shafted. They are still being shafted. This is what Republicans do.

And it applies in non-financial matters, all the way up the line. The system is being rigged to GUARANTEE there will be no accounting no matter what they do, by packing the courts with thieves, ideologues, hacks and extremists. They are locking everything down for the big, explosive end.

It will probably be more of an implosion, now that I think about it. No matter. And I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it.

Everything Risible Must Converge

Republican insanity is approaching unity. Natural systems trend toward diversity.

Authoritarian systems, not.

The white boys want a monoculture—the most unstable thing in the world.

A monoculture of them.

American Amateur

I would love it if Trump were a real monster but he’s a frothing amateur—as feckless at that as everything else. He’s too much a goon to be a good villain. The forces behind him are scary, though, and Trump can still do inconceivable harm.

Rapt, Slapped and Trampled

Since evangelicals want the world to implode they should get it first and worst. They are legislatively bombing themselves back in time. Let them do it, I say. I can see them in their huts and hovels, Fox News blaring paeans to Trump and Trump to peons.

I interpret it as volunteering: To be trampled first by the four horseman, their arms spread skyward. To be slapped up-side the head by Satan, displaying their war wounds to Jesus riding in on a cloud. To have utterly shit lives until the end-times arrive.

No Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. No health insurance, disability or anything else. States Rights! Yes, let them have what they want. But don’t force it on us. It’s time we abandon the hope and goal of a humane society. Part of us might as well suck.

It’s what they seem to want. Let them have it. Let the rest of us, in more decent, rational places, take care of our own. I know, it isn’t fair to the innocents caught in Alabama and elsewhere, states run by troglodytes and assholes. But it’s the best we can do.