Elusive Butterflies of Bullshit

Words and stuff emerge from Trump's mouth and the political machine surrounding him--enablers, underlings and assorted opportunists. These butterflies--the edicts, tweets and whatever--are uncatchable by hand and there are so many of them. I am drawing close to some of them now.

Wait, they aren't butterflies at all but miniature predator drones disguised. They are miniature drones of destruction, reducing reason, integrity and intelligibility to mush and madness. Trump and his evil forces create confusion and despair. They instill hatred, mistrust and envy.

And those little drones are weaponized. The lies are ready to defend themselves.

Animal Drives

Since Americans have given up on their ethics and openly extol living like pigs I wanted to look inside that movement and see if there is a hierarchy there, and substructures and differentiation. Previously, as an outsider to the sty, I had approached it as a monolith, regarding it as an odd, aboriginal, anachronistic alt-culture, something mostly abandoned with the evolutionary growth of a prefrontal cortex, writing, literacy, and all the arts, traditions and technologies usually known as "civilization."

How naïve I was. I never wittingly chose to enter the sty but it has encompassed all of us in a kind of psychological, suburban sprawl of filth. The sprawl is now affecting the physical environment in an unprecedented and bad way, the conundrum of consciousness requiring that human beings be either more or less than animals. We can't choose to be exclusively animals again and exit the territory of the morality of consciousness, the subject of many myths such as the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Anyway, we have tried to deny our humanity and return to an idealized natural state, an impossibility. The first distinction I see among the swine is between determinists and romantics. Determinists argue that our animal nature is inescapable and should therefore be embraced and indulged. Dog eat dog. That, of course, is the inverse of the reality--that our humanity and uniqueness in the animal kingdom is a fact--and the argument is therefore reductive, circular and self-negating. We are singular in our power, if nothing else.

The romantics believe the sty is an appropriate place to inhabit and that it doesn't stink--a tenet and creed belied by a perceptible pungency. They wallow in the muck with abandon, inured to the stench. A romantic outlook can be a beautiful thing if it is rooted in reality. But all the lies, infighting and perversion evident in the shitshow reveal the truth of its squalor. So, the romantics believe that the sty is not inevitable but that it is our due. Evangelical Christians are romantics. Trumpists are among the determinists. 

True Trumpists are greed mavens and money-men--followers, formally or not, of Ayn Rand's hideous doctrines. Nothing in her cynical, incoherent work deserves to be called theoretical. Evangelicals, such as Sarah Sanders, compare creation to some fantasy of godly perfection and therefore expect the sty and roll around in it happily, not realizing it is their degraded creation and not God's. I have to go now and wipe the slime from my eyes. I will be back and report further on the awful mess we have fallen into.

Carrion Consciousness

This is what it feels like to be a corpse--a corpse of a country. The vultures show up out of nowhere. And there are so many of them. What a thing to witness.

Rudy Will Get His Lies Straight

Donald Trump has come out in support of his bumbling, incompetent counsel, Rudy Giuliani. He knows Rudy has his heart in the right place--loyalty before conscience, a reverence for authority, and a conviction that power is its own justification.

Donald knows Rudy will get his lies straight. It was lot to master on short notice.

Apocalypse Soon

Some shill and henchman of the apocalypse, an intimate of Trump, has reported he has never seen Herr Donald lie, only exaggerate. His interviewer expressed due amazement.

Be not amazed. These are not lies or even a web of lies but a delusional system, familiar to those with experience of paranoia. To get there the Trumpists give up on their humanity. 

No big deal, in certain circles.

Real psychopaths can't help it. Ours are mostly sociopaths, narcissists, greed-monsters and children of privilege. Their own sins are revealed in the accusations and insults they hurl.

Those apply to themselves. Back at you, Donald. It is necessary, to begin to understand it, to give up on reality. It will drive you crazy if you don't. Oddly, it must be appreciated as art.

It is the art of the end-times.

The Big Creep

I recall once a use of the word "you" that stunned me, coming from a German expat who worked mostly in Africa. It wasn't personal and individual, but a collective use, referring to me as an American and wondering how "we" could have resoundingly reelected the obviously rogue, illegal, incompetent government of George W. Bush after witnessing the destruction he and his hoodlums had caused already.

The damage was clearly still building to its climax in economic collapse and international military and diplomatic humiliation, so maybe we were only dancing with the girl we came with, out of a sense of honor or some other misguided, idiotic, chivalric try at consistency driven by vanity and false pride of a playground level of sophistication. Whew, I'm glad we survived that! It was an aberration!

Not so fast. Enter Trump.

Perhaps we would still like to think "we" are good people at heart and mean well but it isn't going to fly anymore--not since Trump, and reasonably much sooner. The level of denial involved in the conviction that we aren't represented by the actual, murderous, grotesquely brutish effects of our elected government is too great to stomach and suicidally addictive in its severity. It is as epic in its aspect as it is cowardly. 

It requires a level of dissociation worthy of the Taliban and other such groups that embrace the inevitable dishonor of a personal code of narrow, tribal focus, raping and murdering at will in the name of some assumption of a divine mandate. How are we different? We aren't anymore and Trump proves it. Donald is representative of us. No protest is enough. It never should have happened and "we" can't disown it.

Madness to the Method

There is madness to the method of Republicans. There is no rational goal, endpoint or outcome. Rather, they employ fanatical tactics to win battles in a war they will inevitably lose. Somebody tell them, we are all on the same side. You can't win by fighting yourselves and sabotaging the system that got you there.

Gag Economy

American workers, deemed not so much unworthy as replaceable and irrelevant by the capitalists, are being throttled and gagged. Watch for it, parallel worlds of powerlessness and plenty. The workers are so stripped of influence the capitalists don't even see them. Working people have no voice at all. And the parasites only grow stronger.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Actually, it was, but we were watching so much other stuff at the same time we mistook it for entertainment. Better luck next time!

Fly Me to the Moon

We're living among lunatics. We might as well do it in an appropriate setting.

To Be Is Not To Be

We wake up every morning to an unimaginable reality. Donald Trump, possibly the most selfish, loathsome human being ever, has been elected President. Every day he proves his worthlessness.

I feel certain no one could foresee how horrible he would be. Some modicum of competence and decency might have been inferred from his circumstances and milieu. That would have been a mistake.

There is no competence and no decency. Donald Trump is a piece of garbage. A shocking percentage of Americans still support him. Shame on them. Dissociation is our shield and protection.

We walk around in a cloud of unknowing, bowing to the impossibility of articulating our corruption. Facing it would mean a catastrophic collapse of our collective sense of self. To be is not to be.

Wings of Despair

I am an angel. I have an announcement—or a message, if you prefer. We, the angels, don't usually transmit messages directly anymore. We help to maintain God’s connection with His creation in other ways. But you have pushed us too far. We are at the end of our tether.

Angels are a lot less imperfect than humanity but still a far cry from God, if you get my drift. Assuming nothing, I’ll spell it out. God is very, VERY far removed from humanity in His power and perfection. Still, the connection is indissoluble and no more tenuous for the distance. Granting that, it is very unwise for humanity to presume on God’s beneficence.

It is very unwise for humanity to take God’s good-will for granted. Frankly we, the angels, are sick of having our own reserves of compassion unnecessarily drained and depleted trying to make up for humankind’s rebellion against and chronic perversion of the will of God. 

Please stop. God will not intervene if you choose to destroy yourselves.

You are making it too hard for us to do our job. We love you. God loves you. But what kind of idiots think it is acceptable to plunder God's creation? The "dominion" conferred by God unto humanity wasn't a license to destroy the world. It was a declaration of responsibility.

At that you are failing. Get a fucking clue. 

Scott Pruitt

Pruitt has been added to my list, together with George Bush and Hannity, of likely examples of the later-life effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or some other gestational disaster, based on their behaviors and that troubling, "nobody home" look in their eyes.

As a Democrat I believe in taking care of everybody. Therefore, I argue against putting them in prison because we are implicated in their atrocities by not having isolated them earlier in a fitting institutional setting, such as an asylum for the criminally insane.

There is no excuse for not pulling the plug on them now, considering that someone like Bush, even in retirement, might inspire budding sociopaths to conclude that they inhabit a culture without any accountability at all, encouraging socially harmful behaviors.

In other words, we will have more depraved, degraded, destructive people like Scott Pruitt running around who are not content to stew in their own hellhole of anger and ignorance but feel compelled to inflict themselves on the rest of us and control everything.

This is a fundamental problem, that in conditions of relative security, when normal people choose to enjoy their lives and embrace measures to ensure continuing contentment, others like Pruitt do the opposite. Fear causes them to sow the seeds of discord.

Scott’s secure phone-booth is symbolic. Like so many Republicans his entire psychology is defined by fear. They must have enemies. In their absence they invent them.

Trump Tunes

Trump's administration is so cartoonishly corrupt it stands as its own indictment. It’s not a matter for analysis but for observation. The way to try to comprehend it, then, is to picture them all as cartoon characters, the treatment as normal humans being highly prejudicial in favor of, well, normalcy.

There’s nothing normal about it. That's all, folks!

A New Utah

We need a new Utah, a place to concentrate evangelical Christians and limit the damage they do, as the Mormons are concentrated in Utah. I want to say it would be a dystopia of gun ranges, shoot-outs, roaming militias and Trump-fests, with public hangings every day or two and a red-light district unrivaled in the world, but I know otherwise.

I bet it would be a pretty tranquil place and look a lot like Salt Lake City in its renamed capital, Redeemer or Christopolis, because minorities and Muslims would choose to live elsewhere, ending the anxiety over the threat of the takeover of Sharia Law. Similarly the "gay agenda" would be laid to rest and marriage would again only be between one man and an indeterminate number of women to be specified at a later date. 

There would be a constrained and circumscribed kind of peace. Revival-tent religion will be merged with NASCAR, using the same venues.

It isn't that evangelicals don't want to take care of anybody--they don't want to take care of anyone but themselves. Think of the Taliban and remember that they have a certain appeal, notwithstanding an occasional stoning or unsurgical hand or head removal. They get stuff done and provide services and structure in really screwed-up places. Rest assured, they will grow no opium in Graceland, or whatever they call it, and sightings of Elvis will abound.

Black people will just live elsewhere. Muslims will stay the hell away. Catholics will convert or hold their masses in secret, as they did when evangelicals outlawed their religion in Ireland. Non-conformers of all stripes might be pitied as apostates, heathen and unbelievers have been forever, as pariahs and outcasts, provided they remain meek and powerless.

That is, the ones that survive the hangings, which are not negotiable. There are limits to the good-will and mercy of evangelicals. Hangings are a manifestation of divine justice and promote social unity and respect for the Lord's earthly dominion. The principles employed by the evangelicals themselves in disenfranchising Democrats will apply--that by concentrating the voting bloc their political power will be limited. 

The rest of the country can then return to its normal, rational existence and respect the rules of its founding. 

Do Fanboys Dream of Eccentric Creeps?

Vicarious living is a new hallmark of life in America. In an unrooted, touristy existence people seek stability and security through identification and investment in what they falsely perceive as more authentic and primally meaningful modes of being, I guess, like aggression and warfare.

Nerds and others satisfy mojo deficits in video games and fantasies of combat. Their less delusional peers are content with a decent job and thus gloat a little, inwardly, at the realization of their “revenge” against the more popular and adroit persons of their school-years’ acquaintance.

They feel vindicated. Compensation is what it is all about.

Feeling big, important and effective is what it is all about. Lacking it from within and, suspecting they are losers, they try to acquire it by association, sometimes if not often with other mortal beings and their aggregations. They engage in fandom, allegiance and tribal apprenticeship.

Jeez, it’s so submissive and pathetic. Can’t they see it? This is where geeks meet the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, whose aggression and fantasies of superiority mask the reality of lives spent dependently sucking off the government. They both ended up marrying rich women.

In that their real characters are revealed. Their legacies are destruction and vandalism, wrecking the things that the grownups built, unconsciously trying to find their power but ultimately expressing only resentment. Who cares, except that the damage they have done is so immense.

Donald the Buffalo

I was going to write something on Donald as a lion sleeping tonight or in his winter but he's not a lion he's a buffalo. Lions aren't born as privileged as Donald though there are still similarities--lions are basically all show and let their mane and roar represent them. 

Donald is more a grazer and furry monstrosity masquerading as something else. He thinks he's a DOER, a paragon and champion of efficacy and accomplishment when all he does is walk around and eat and shit and occasionally break a run in the safety of his herd. 

Our president--a hulking, hairy beast--is all image. The amazing thing is that the ideas of his independence and agency still survive as every other possibility of positive attributes, like intelligence, emotional stability and decency, falls away. It's because of his wealth. 

That is Donald's virtual and invisible herd, the comfort and ease he has known, that of the monied class, though he has no class at all, as New Yorkers know. Trump could never crack the ranks of the accepted elite among his rich peers because he's a boor and a pig. 

And now he's a president. Step back from it and behold the buffalo. It's a lot to take in. 

A New Nemesis

I need a new nemesis. The last guy I followed, to keep an eye on the temper and trends of the right-wing's burgeoning and morphing insanities, apparently got booted off the medium of Medium. He had followers and admirers. His success--he's a talented and arresting writer--might have gone to his head. The slurs, bigotry and invective began to be more open, undeniable and aggressive.

He was a backwater operator and a romantic--a crank and crusader of the old-school--appropriately powerless and marginalized. It makes the hate less upsetting, however much it is to be decried. But, of course, such people are now running everything and threaten armed rebellion if challenged. The "rule of law" to them is theirs. They own the franchise, exclusive of us, and will not give it up. 

So it is, not the rule-of-law at all, but thuggery. 

My new candidate for nemesis is Kurt Schlichter. But, there's a problem--I find his writings too poisonous, threatening and hate-filled to read. And, we know too well, his type are in the new mainstream and well represented by Trump. Look him up and try a dose of Herr Schlichter. See what you think. He recently ranted over a suggestion for a California-style Democratic resurgence.

Read it. It's nothing but thinly-veiled threats and an open call-to-arms in the event of an actual (or imaginary) constitutional, democratic reinvention of America as the state it was supposed to be before the Confederacy took over. I'll admit instantly I'm afraid of Schlichter. He's fantastically paranoid, as convinced he's under attack as he is attacking, projecting his fears all over the place. 

Maybe onto me, if he ever discovers I exist. 

Emotional Age Requirement

There’s a minimum age requirement to be president. What good does this do us if someone fulfills that minimum but has the emotional age of an infant? With Trump we see the dangers of insufficient personality formation, development and the fragility of his ego.

It reflects on us. We want to creep back into the womb of irresponsibility and lack-of-care for our place in the world and the effect we have on it. We are a generation refusing the responsibilities of adulthood--children, not of God (good) but of our own (bad) whims.

John Kelly's Cowardice

John Kelly justifies going after powerless, illegal immigrants because the "rule of law" must prevail but he fails to challenge or even meaningfully inhibit the tidal wave of corruption and criminality of the administration he helps define. He has always been part of a superior force and executed orders irrespecting their decency or merit. Now he calls some shots.

Of course he sees it as his duty to deport helpless people because of their technical illegality but the assault of Trump's team on every essential, constitutional, democratic function that irks them or gets in their way is not enough for him to stand his ground and insist it stop. Brave man, General. Yet another disgraceful performance brought to us by Republicans.

Paul Ryan Flees the Mess He Has Made

Paul Ryan, having finally realized the magnificent screwing of average Americans he has evidently desired since he was a boy, is wisely heading for the hills, not to witness its unfolding. The recently passed Republican tax bill guarantees a bankrupt government and decades of other unspeakable effects—all so that already-rich citizens can have even more. They have won. We are ruined.

I wonder what kind of mental and spiritual disease plagues these people, but I vehemently reject the idea that Ryan and his congressional colleagues who are giving up their seats are leaving because the atmosphere in Washington is too poisonous. I think they are leaving because the job, begun under Gingrich--the functional destruction of our government--is done. Mission accomplished. 

On the Myopic Incompetence of Democrats

Once in a while I step back and regard the myopic incompetence of the Democrats with the awe it deserves. They get beaten by the most inappropriate presidential candidate ever and their game plan is... more of the same. Democrats don't want to win they want people to agree with them.

They are so convinced they are right, with its implicitly insulting attitude, they misconstrue it as strategy. Democrats won the gay-rights thing and, instead of being gracious in victory, they immediately piled-on and insisted on equating bisexual and transexual rights with homosexual rights. 

Great job, dumbasses.

YOU might see it that way but to our opponents they are very different things. How hard would it have been to have simply said, at that point, we want everybody who plays by the rules to have a fair shot at a good life. Democrats really do want decency, fair play and equality of opportunity.

I recommend we put out attractive candidates with a positive message--and counterattack viciously. I recommend we resist the impulse to make the fate of the world depend on the feelings of transgender Americans. If we win we will take care of them. If we win we will take care of everybody.

Isn't that better than watching Republicans destroy the country and end life as we know it? The damage they have done is so severe it might be irreversible. Having accomplished the long-desired annihilation of the American state many are fleeing into retirement. Again we are left with their mess. 

It's just as it was after Bush and Trump isn't done yet. The flagrant criminality of Trump’s administration is so extreme and thorough it’s hard to keep track of it. This time, unlike with Bush, if we win we must insist on accountability. We repossess their loot and make them politically irrelevant.

Separation of Church and Hate

I believe in the separation of church and hate. 

I, Me, Mined

The ego has a new aspect these days--a data store. Citizens trade valuable real estate for trinkets and beads, unfamiliar with the sophisticated ways in which their assets can be deployed. Management of all the data has been handed over to a few trusted, corporate actors.

Only government regulation can curb the potential for abuse but the government has been controlled by Republicans willing to shut it down before they will constrain corporations. Congressional Republicans fall to their knees, tremble and slobber at the sight of extreme wealth.

They will do anything to be close to it and act mostly as butlers and in other servile roles for a chance to bask in its warmth. Meanwhile, the citizens for whom they are supposed to work are helpless against the new technologies. Their children are most affected, swayed and manipulated. 

Their minds are mercilessly mined for data. It is a brave new world indeed. 

The Tithes that Bind

The awareness that religiously affiliated and identified people are dragging us into perdition confronts us always. Seeing that clearly, the origins of earlier episodes of insanity stand in stark and illuminated relief. Among the legions of the more recent offenders are the evangelical degenerates swarming out of the South like a plague to infest us everywhere. They support Trump and do his terrible bidding, degraded hawkers and shills. "Beau" Sessions, Scott Pruitt, David Perdue and Tom Cotton are examples.

Irish Catholic white men, typified by the bootlicking faction at Fox, share the cultural heritage of their southern bros in having been utterly defeated and occupied--reduced to groveling, pathetic losers at the feet of their women, the experience for which they still try to compensate by showing their mettle and strength as bullies and cowards. The irony is obvious, if painful to see. False pride and retribution for lurking feelings of inferiority have been behind too many wars and other stupidity. 

Jewish neoconservatives mired us in an incomprehensible mess in the Middle East, placing our officially religiously unaffiliated country in the same position as Israel, now fair-game for the horrors of terrorism and every kind of venomous tribal enmity. Mitt Romney and some Mormons vent their legitimate, if ancient, grudges against the government in various ways, wanting to see it weakened and humiliated just like the southerners. Who, in all of this, is looking out for the well-being of the state?

Who is looking out for the well-being of average Americans? No one, effectively, that I can see. The religious fanatics and grudge-holders might still reduce secularists like me to prayer or acting on our fantasies of escape. I want more than anything to get away from them. 

Artificial Unintelligence

I remember studying literate cultures that somehow spontaneously lost skills and wondering how it could happen. Now we witness it in the American cultivation of incompetence. It is deliberate, narrowly self-serving, and short-sighted. It is seen most obviously in the ascendency of Trump, a product of inheritance and privilege.

Privilege is a form of interference. Personal and social devolution doesn't occur naturally, being the inverse and reverse of the mechanisms of Darwin. Trump, for example, was born too-big-to-fail. He nearly failed anyway but that is another story. In nature the practice, mastery and refining of incompetence can't last and endure.

Individuals and species would not survive. Habitual stupidity requires subsidies. We are the subsidizing entities which is why the sons of privilege are drawn to the government, the agency through which they rip us off, directly and indirectly. They also seek to "starve the beast" of democracy by fruitlessly burning through resources.

The law of interference begins with someone like Trump interfering with himself. This is commonly called denial or indulgence: the uselessness of the person must be denied by themselves or indulged, if not denied, by them and their "enablers." For decades Trump's family had to ignore the signs that he was helpless and incapable. 

Unconsciously sensing his own inferiority and neediness Donald became a horrendous asshole, in compensation. Interference was extended into Trump's relations in the world as he made the transition to being artificially subsidized and supported by the society, a hand-off, sparing his family further wasted effort and expense. 

Trump has been rescued when he should have crashed and burned naturally--interference at every turn. Multiply that by the thousands and you have the kind of societal decline and collapse we now face, though Trump is clearly appropriate as a figurehead for the movement because of his extreme fecklessness, ignorance and indecency.

He must be endlessly reassuring to the army of losers, henchmen, attack dogs and greedy reprobates he represents. History has taught us that this kind of situation cannot go on but it requires our continuing financial and administrative support. That support must be withdrawn at once, if our American species and traditions are to survive. 

China Targets Trump

With subtlety, intelligence and discretion the Chinese government has instituted retaliatory tariffs on American goods, apparently partly targeting the idiots who voted for Trump. Democrats have never had the stomach for the kinds of aggression and mean-spiritedness that are natural to Republicans.

The Chinese come to the rescue. I laud and applaud them. I hope they will become more specific and forceful in defending themselves against Trump and his gang of hoodlums, perhaps attacking certain states, companies and even individuals where possible, including Trump himself. I am loving this.

They should buy the debt of the Trump and Kushner companies and raise the rates or call the loans. Bankrupt the fuckers. Trump and the Kushners have screwed everybody they could. Responsible people would have divested anyway. Let them get a taste of their own evil medicine, administered by the Chinese. 

Go Chinese! Clobber Trump!

A Half-Century of Magical Thinking

Ajit Pai provides another reminder of Republicans' penchant for magical thinking. He says the obvious screwing of poor people he's proposing--in shutting down subsidies for broadband--is somehow (here comes the magic!) going to result in more and better internet among the needy. I have some experience with this, Ajit.

Poor Mr. Pai might be out of the loop: I have been trying for years to get better bandwidth. I can see it on a telephone pole from my property. There is plenty of it there but the utilities go underground at that point. Sure, they'll bring it back--for $8000 per household. So, I have lived a long time with lowly (but decent) DSL. 

I want my magic! Where's my trickle down and supply side? Where's my rising tide? Where's my internet and the promised democratic miracle in the Middle East for which we have paid so much? Again, we are left to comment on what a deep bench of smirking, incompetent, lying assholes Republicans have, men like Mr. Pai. 

Life as a Spectator Sport

I have lived among the savages and I try to explain to those who haven't the curious ways of those throwbacks and aborigines. How, reasonable people ask, can the support of evangelicals for Donald Trump actually increase after it is learned he has helped himself to some porn pussy?

You have to understand, I tell them, all the attitudes associated with the fatalism and existential despair of Calvinism. Why bother with life at all when your destiny is set from birth? Nothing anyone can do changes the outcome in the only thing that matters, your heavenly salvation.

Evangelicals aren't participants in their lives they are spectators. Now, think about how Trump works out in that scenario. He's entertaining, in a crude sort of way. He infuriates snooty northerners and the apostates among the elect. Evangelicals envy people who are invested in life.

They hate and despise humanity and all of creation because of its distance, as they interpret it, from God and perfection. What better example of human imperfection and hopelessness than Donald Trump? And, Donald reeks of the end-times and destruction. What more can an evangelical want?

The Man in the High Chair

The big baby in the high-chair--blubbering, bawling and throwing his food--is our president, a role model for the grownups, Donald Trump.

Black Like Thee

I've got news for you, southern white people. Like the idiots you are you are voting yourselves into the very situation you most wanted to avoid, being part of a mass underclass including black people. Physical, interracial intimacy, of course, is the ultimate horror and most of that is still to come but as you continue to impoverish and screw yourselves it will be more unavoidable and inevitable.

Perhaps you should listen to the losers out on the fringe who are pushing for a racist, segregated substate. I would love to see you go there. The world would see what scum you are. And you will no longer be able to hold down the decent people left in the country who have had to support you and try to undo all the damage you have done WHILE you blame them for the trouble you cause.

Truth Decay

Jennifer Rubin is writing mighty good stuff lately on the horror of Donald Trump and she's technically some kind of conservative. So, where is she, I'm trying to understand, on owning the disaster of George W. Bush? I might have overlooked it, because she cranks out a remarkable volume of journalism, but she still seems to defend him. 

We see in Bush Trump's smaller-dicked mini-me, a hopelessly incompetent pawn of the greater interests of world-domination, income consolidation and the irrationality of the religiously-driven social policies of southern, rebel, reactionary, retrograde, fundamentalist, self-styled "Christians". The actual faction in charge are the Cheneyites.

Cheneyites believe in American domination and exploitation. They believe in it for its own sake--gratuitously, universally and arbitrarily. It is simply an article of faith. Smoke that in your pipe, Jennifer Rubin. I'll believe you have principles when you apply something other than a survival instinct, which has clearly kicked in with Trump. 

Jennifer is afraid Trump is heralding the end-times. There I agree with her. But her criticisms of Trump, as strident and contemptuous as they are, apply equally to Bush and Cheney and other such criminals. The truth, Jennifer, will set you free. Own your shit. Join those of us who believe in rational, responsible, representative government.

Declare yourself a Democrat. History will remember us well, if with sad resignation at our failures. They will know the truth, how right we were, but they will know as well in their wisdom how impossible it can be to win against lunatics and paranoid, delusional people. There's a lot of regret on our side these days but it's still better there.

Something is Wrong

Authoritarian personalities are drawn to Republicanism. How they get so mean and bitter is another matter. I think it's a defect in personality formation, originating in a deep sense that something is vaguely, systemically, irreducibly and mysteriously wrong.

There is something wrong--with them. They project their suspicions onto the world at-large, seeing their own corruption and weakness in others and trying to tame it through them. The victims are left confused and disheartened by the irrationality of it.

An Extraordinary Populist Delusion and the Madness of the Republican Crowd

The overiding delusion of Republicans, who are now supporting a populist president no matter his obvious incompetence, is that they are somehow victims. They believe they are the injured ones--downtrodden and disenfranchised. They WERE disrespected, I will allow, but reasonably. Being racists, they construed the disrespect as existential when it was only circumstantial and behavioral. 

If they had stopped the behaviors--the paranoid, combative, divisive, war-mongering insanity--the disrespect would have ended. We would again have been a relatively united country and people. Instead, they maintained the entrenched and dysfunctional delusion, giving their souls over entirely to corruption. They disenfranchise their antagonists and abandon democracy and decency.

Republicans have controlled everything for decades and still feel persecuted. They rage about "taking back the country" when it is a reflection of nothing but them. They want to "make America great again" not realizing they are longing for the days of Democratic control or, at least, a time of balance and compromise. Republicans are lost and compulsively seek redemption in continuing depravity.

That, really, is madness.

Feeling Groovy

Donald thinks he's hitting his groove. His blight brigade charges on, despite desertions, heavy losses, courts-martial, resignations for moral turpitude, and self-immolations by suicide-stunt. It careens into the unknown.

Moron Donald is waging an imaginary war. His instict in the face of failure is to double down in pursuit of cosmic affirmation and always attack. He’ll take any kind of affirmation. It’s the only currency that matters.

I fear the casino fate awaits us. No way is drama-queen Donald going to admit to himself his incompetence. If he implodes it must be biblical. It must be epic and epochal. If he implodes all the damage will accrue to us.

So, why should he care. He doesn’t. When the crash happens he’ll rationalize, refinance, restructure and move on, leaving the mess behind. He'll leave the mess to us. We are the mess. Atlantic City, here we come.

I Call it Treason

We know now that Republicans choose party over country and themselves over party. We know now that they choose themselves and what they want--a Christian, fundamentalist, fascist state or an oligarchic one concentrating money and power. It might be some horrible, hybrid monstrosity, the culmination and codification of what it is under Trump, southern sleaze and various, sociopathic capitalists satisfying assorted lusts. 

That exact brew constituted South Carolina's ante-bellum coalition once. Republicans are traitors and Donald Trump proves it every day as he drags the country down and Republicans scramble to see what they can get before the inevitable reckoning and collapse. Huckabee Sanders and similar low-life are racking up points with Jesus in anticipation of the Rapture. Maybe Sarah will levitate before our eyes in the middle of some lie. 

Wouldn't that be cool, an ex machina evasion. And Donald and the rich boys assume they can weather whatever happens, as they did after '08, and eventually come out ahead. They took an oath and are there to execute certain functions, granting some breadth of interpretation and performance not to include the utter destruction and dismemberment of the entity they were sworn to preserve. What else and whatever can you call this?

I call it treason.

Baubles, Bangles, Bentleys... and Assault Guns

Now that Mnuchin and Cohn have seen a tax bill passed that will make them heroes in the Hamptons, I have to ask, what was the point? It's one thing to simply want more. It's another to do it in a public role for which you are paid and supposedly accountable to your citizen-employers. Isn't this illegal?

Yes, they work(ed) for us and are technically entitled to a PAYCHECK for ripping us off, not that it isn't a pittance in relation to what they already have. They actually took oaths of office. The crooks in Congress did as well but most of the Republicans swore-off again at Grover Norquist's house of shame.

They, the Cohns and Mnuchins of the world, are free to ponder existential questions of the meaning of multiple Bentleys and the marginal impact on one's life of another house or retreat, at the point at which they might forget how many they already have. It is a weird, fucked-up, fanciful place they inhabit.

I wonder how it would work out if we imported rednecks into their lives? I mean, require that the people who vote together live together. I wonder how they would get along and what familiarity would breed, not intending that they would necessarily mate. Remember, the rednecks have LOTS of guns.

It would be an interesting mix as the rednecks pondered the existential question of most concern to them, the marginal impact on their lives of yet another handgun, howitzer or massive magazine. And they must all dine together, as allies and compatriots should, on barbecue and Beef Wellington.

The rednecks will undoubtedly want to have their assault rifles in the dining rooms and restaurants, at-the-ready in the event of an attack, as is the will of God and their declared constitutional right. Let the rich people live with that crap. And bless them all and may they be together in peace, or whatever.

I Dub Ye Dubya...

No doubt Republicans will one day want to name battleships and airports and other shit after George W. Bush as part of their efforts to rewrite history and save their asses from accountability for all the deaths and horror they have left behind. Let it be known as the Battleship "Dubya" as the champagne splatters across its bow. The "George W. Bush" is entirely too dignified. 

Is Evil Battle-Ax Barbara Bush Still Alive?

Some of these people, I just want them to die. Like Billy Graham, certain Bushes have lived way too long. You think how much worse-off the world is because they were in it, and how they have never suffered any consequences but been unbelievably fortunate, and I only want to be rid of them. 

On the Massive Oedipus Complex of Republicans

It's easy enough to see the more egregious aspects of the Oedipal fixations of Republicans. Their presidential candidates--those seeking the office of national patriarch, nominal head and performative exemplar of masculinity--are all the sons of highly successful men, back as far as Reagan. Trump, Romney, McCain and Bush all had reasons to have father issues and have demonstrated a clear need to try to measure up and prove themselves, no matter that they had it made from birth and were almost irreversibly secure.

With George Bush the need was too transparent to demand analysis or explication. Observe how he had failed at everything and became president only through inherited wealth, family connections and repeated interventions when things went wrong. Eventually, a bipartisan panel including James Baker tried to save him from himself and the country from him. Their recommendations were ignored--the son's final, pathetic assertion of autonomy as he left the nation a shambles and a rudderless, hulking, fiery mess.

Fittingly, the Democrats Clinton and Obama, self-made men, were despised, reviled and attacked as usurpers at a level of extremity and irrationality reflecting the repressed, archetypal, delusional strength of the survival fantasies of Republican white men, who feel unconsciously threatened with annihilation by the dark, shadow forces of their insecurities and the inability to ever demonstrate actual self-worth. The feminine, nurturing side of the equation is in some ways even more compelling and shameful. 

The federal government represents mothering--the infantile font of sustenance and security, the source on which they all suckle. Their protestations against it, avowed attempts at avoidance and determination not to "marry the mother" all fail as they symbolically supplant their fathers and succumb to the warmth of the federal womb. I won't enumerate the sad specimens of arrestedness and compulsion but only mention Paul Ryan, whose life has been spent jealously depending on and sucking off the government. 

He probably decries it more than anyone. Similarly, most large corporations make their disgraceful profits by manipulating the government in their favor and taking advantage of the system. My only hope is that you, having read this, will have your eyes opened and see the sorry, submissive, self-serving mechanisms at work. 

Republicans continue to disclaim interest in the federal support they covet and, at the same time, reflexively take all they can get at the tavern and dispensary known as our national treasury, now to the exclusion of all other citizens as the disorder reaches its crescendo in Trump and his cast of crooks. When they rail against regulations and castigate bureaucracies as depending on the unjust proceeds of taxation you should see them as they are--small, frustrated men in denial of the reality of their fate.

Fry Me Up Some

There's a characteristically great Yiddish word, frayer (or fryer, or friar), that captures the American ethos of ignorance. Americans are suckers. Americans are sheep. Where else do you find people who will consistently vote themselves down the river into servitude and against their own interests?

Look at the graphs of the incomes of everyone but the rich, flatlining since the dawn and debut of supply side. Still, the morons vote for Republicans. They believe the bald-faced lies. Middle Class citizens get crumbs while Republicans rain millions on their wealthy associates and the idiots still vote for them.

An Unfair Criticism of Trump

Donald Trump is being unjustly charged with referencing Gary Cohn antisemitically, calling him a "globalist.” Trump was only speakingly carelessly. Remember, Trump is stupid. Donald understands innuendo and insinuation. But, basically, Trump is a boor. Trump is a dolt and a dotard. He finally violated Cohn's ethical imperatives, that more money must only go to the rich forever, with talk of tariffs. So Cohn quit.

That was more than Cohn could handle. He was fine with Nazi sympathizing, pussy-grabbing and killing people worldwide with impunity. But those are next to nothing in comparison with messing around with money and profits. Always, in assessing him, remember that Trump is a dope. Trump is a pig. Sometimes he might be cunning but he is not smart. He's a rich child with a record of failure. Like Cohn he's a crook.

I hate to see anybody criticized unfairly. Donald wasn’t being antisemitic, just stupid.

Mike Pence's Plan for God

How does a person recognize evil? Let me suggest that Mike Pence is evil, by a biblical standard, that men are known by their deeds. Pence is at least open about loving his role as Trump's most reliable lackey. But is Pence working for God or God for Pence?

Where does it say in the Bible that a society shouldn't provide for its citizens? Where does it validate the "prosperity gospel" and say that God loves the rich? Where does it say that it's our prerogative to invade any country we want and kill others at will? 

Nowhere does the Bible say any of it but the Koch brothers promote it at every opportunity. I posit that Pence works for them and their allies and that God is enlisted as another useful prop for their cause. And what a great prop God is--abstract and unaccountable. 

I think we know who is using who here. I wonder how God likes being a second-hand shill for Donald Trump? That’s awfully undignified for a deity. If Pence had any sense he would be quaking in his shill-shoes. Presumption against God is a scary thing in my book.

The Inexecutable Command: Be Like Jesus

Puritanism entails an inexecutable command to aspire to perfection. Take this command too literally and seriously and a person implodes. They burn up like Roy Moore. They short out and toe-tap in bathroom stalls. They rail against abortion and then ask their pregnant mistress to get one. They preach love and forgiveness and act out of hatred and fear. They condemn everyone but themselves. After all, they have a personal relationship with Jesus. 

About that and only that they are certain. Their salvation is assured. They are self-righteous, judgmental, hypocritical, egotistical and mean. Empower these idiots to manage and administer a society and the society implodes. Empower these idiots and you get Donald Trump, George Bush, endless wars, tax cuts for the rich and less food for the hungry. It's good they have Jesus on their side. Any normal person would want to kill them.

Human imperfection and the decrepitude of creation are more than fundamentalist, puritanical, evangelical Christians can handle so they execute a command to achieve the impossible and forgo their freedom and humanity. They forgo decency and compassion. They choose death over life. In a "halt and catch fire" command a computer stops whatever, presumably productive, task it is on and tackles a circular, flawed or unsolvable problem.

It has a meltdown. The computer requires a restart. Utopian Christians require a restart. I guess death would count as a "restart" by their metaphysics. So, die! I'm a little less otherworldly. I'd like a little sanity and justice in this world. I'd like healthcare and a secure old age. I'd like fewer guns and mass killings. Christians love the killings. It reeks of crusades and the end-times. It must be God's will in some way as it's conveyed to them by Jesus.

Man, do they love the misery of other people. It might bring them to Jesus and cause a conversion. Or, they die and get to see Jesus anyway. That's what the meltdown looks like when they run things, when your life is ruined by fatalistic crazy people and religious nuts. They will be like Jesus and identified with Jesus or there will be hell to pay, in this world. There is hell to pay. Go, now, ye Christians--HALT AND CATCH FIRE! Let's get it over with.

Suicidal Squeeze

Corporate profit is now the only force animating America. Corporations aren't only people they are royalty and divinity. They don't necessarily die. They are potentially transnational, transcendent, abstracted and mighty powerful, if not omnipotent. Corporations are gods. 

Bow down and pray for their pity. Only then can average citizens have the components of good lives--healthcare and the rest. Do you find this hard to conceive? There are apostles and angels in the corporate world, emissaries and intermediaries to whom you can appeal.

They are called Republicans. Watch how they grovel and kowtow before the ark of their covenant containing the holy of holies: profits and dividends. Meanwhile, undeserving, lesser beings are squeezed out of their existence. Beg for crumbs. Beg for your lives. Just beg.

Americans are dying before the altar and grail of greed. A high priesthood of lackeys and conservative shills stands between us and our own lives. They stand between us and our alienated rights. They stand between us and claims to our humanity and existence.

Let us pray to the gods of greed for mercy. They are all the gods there are now, the others decamped, evacuated and evicted from a place unsuitable for gods who demand decency and accountability. There is none of it here. We have no other gods to pray to anymore.

Trump the Traitor

It turns out that Christopher Steele, creator of the "dossier," has more integrity than Trump's gang of thieves can put in the pot collectively. Furthermore, though the Trump crowd might obviously be motivated more by greed, ego-gratification and a lust for power than anything, those traits are so fantastically out of proportion it appears many of those rogues have committed treason incidentally and unknowingly. 

Try to take that in. 

These people are so incomprehensibly corrupt and unfamiliar with accountability and responsibility they could destroy their country, which they are employed to defend and protect, out of negligence, ignorance and indifference. A pubescent mind-set is running amok so completely among them it conjures up images of biblical prophesies and dystopian, futuristic, science-fiction fantasies in its destructive capacities.

But it is the nightmare of mindless destruction we inhabit every day. The implication is that Trump isn't even competent enough to be accountable. He could only, justly, be released into the custody of his parents, remanded to guardians or placed in an orphanage or asylum. It's hard to pity such a pernicious piece of wreckage but the blame resides with us, the sick society that fostered, nurtured and encouraged him. 

We are such an unbelievable disgrace.

They Walk Among Us

Never did I dream there were so many assholes, lunatics and conscienceless reprobates among us. It is especially obvious after an event like the Parkland shooting, which is somehow construed by the most degraded, submissive right-wing shills and sycophants as a chance to enhance their crazy cred. 

Matt Gaetz and others like him have only one remaining place to go after the next inevitable massacre--to arm the students. Everyone else will already be armed and, of course, de facto and a priori, the answer can only be MORE GUNS. Or, rather than arm the students, we can turn our schools into fortresses strangely resembling prisons.

Maybe it's not so strange. The schools can have fences glistening with razor-wire, towers poking machine guns and guards fondling assault weapons menacingly. Who knew aspects of the New Jerusalem, our city-on-a-hill and the hoped-for utopia of evangelical Christians, would look so much like Dachau.

The Grand Delusion

The greatest delusion anyone can succumb to is that there is security in isolation. There is nothing in isolation. Isolation is a fantasy and an impossibility. Isolationism is nihilism. 

Isolation is death. Old-school Calvinism is schismatic and spiritually regressive. The only reality is you and God in an ineffable, one-on-one bond that is a solipsistic, mental-health mess of paranoia and a resulting collapse into delusional aggression. Oh, and did I say? 

We are all living there now, courtesy of evangelical Christians and Donald Trump. Welcome to the nuthouse. Watch what you get when you give up on reality. Thanks, Republicans.

A Fine Bromance

The insiders are falling like flies. To be an administrative intimate of Trump is to know the meaning of unstable and precarious employment. Who is left now? Hope Hicks and Omarosa are history. 

Who will hold Trump's hand? I think the musical version of Trump's White House, when it appears, must feature the unlikely bromance, now enforced by necessity, of Donald Trump and John Kelly. 

Picture them singing and serenading one another in their cozy, oval enclave, isolated more by the day, firstly from the competent stewardship of trained help, then from reality as they lose sight of it. 

Hell, we might already be there...

An important transition is taking place under our noses. Injustice is no longer a failure or an unrepresentative function and secondary, unavoidable, regrettable occurrence but an essential practice and defining trait of the American culture and economy. 

This, again, is an indication of the takeover of the American state and government by the forces of the Confederacy. At some indeterminate and unknowable time the economy will be unable to operate above some threshold of viability without injustice. 

Hell, we might already be there.