The Man with the Bag

Trump is playing "Bad Santa" this holiday season, persecuting people right and left. His bag of gifts includes cruelty at the border, continuing sabotage of Obamacare and slinging insults at everyone. Merry Christmas, America. Behold what you have become in the era of Trump, the opposite of everything Christmas represents. And fuck you, Donald Trump, and the evil, racist sleigh you rode in on.

Sariah Law

Sariah Law, as proclaimed and promulgated by Sarah Sanders, is authoritarian and ordained by God and his chosen ministers of righteousness, led by Donald Trump. It can't be argued against, challenged or constrained. 

To all the poor wretches out there who don't understand this, especially the lying, fake-news idiots in the White House press pool, just shut up. This is not about the truth but authority. Accountability is off the table.

Trump and the Cherry Tree

When little Donnie Trump was six years old he received a hatchet as a gift and maimed a cherry tree on his father's property. His father enquired: "Donnie, did you maim my cherry tree?" Donnie responded "No, father. That is fake news put out by angry Democrats." His father was bursting with pride as Donnie further explained that all the witnesses had signed non-disclosure agreements and had been threatened as well. Lawyers were issuing denials and destroying evidence of hatchets ever having been in his possession. 

Now, we know this is a fable concocted by Parson Huckabee and circulated by his daughter, Sarah, to illustrate a point: once your "chosen" status is guaranteed by wealth and worldly success it doesn't matter what you do. You are going to heaven anyway. Similarly, the good works of the social justice warriors will never earn them arbitrarily unmerited salvation so they are fair game and may be reviled and persecuted with all the other heathen. They are doomed, recipients of an unavoidable, unintelligible and cruel destiny. 

The moral is that there is no justice in this life. Only apostates and unbelievers seek it in their folly. In fact it is an insult to God and an attempt to circumvent his will to think that earthly existence has any meaning since it is all fated and predetermined anyway. We are animals in a holding pen awaiting slaughter. If we act like animals it is as it should be. The strong may dominate and abuse the weak. Innocent people may be killed. It is all by God's design. Nothing matters. This is the root of the evangelical rule of despair.

Life is a cruel joke. Self-serving, greedy and cynical people understand this. Others are losers and idiots. Trump has noted them as such, seeing through to the truth. Evangelicals revere Trump for this. The real truth exists apart from reason. It is revealed to believers alone, in the literal interpretation of sacred writings and emotional events in revival tents under the authority of those chosen by God for his ministry, like Jimmy Swaggart. Human reason is heretical, a tool of weak minds. Spiritual truth resides in lies.

Eyes on Trump

Trump thinks he was elected to do whatever he wants--to be our boss. In actuality he is supposed to work for us. I suggest we put cameras on our president, both pointing at him and one attached to his MAGA hat or combover. Let the people see how their employee spends his days.

Surely this will be enlightening, more like a wildlife study than anything else, a look into a person with all the sophistication, intelligence, and organizational and planning capabilities of a hedgehog, but less cute. "Let Trump be Trump" said some of his backers. I want to see what that means. 

That is our right. We are his employers. Geofencing and curfews might also impose some discipline and accountability on his improvisational presidency. The boy needs supervision and only we, collectively, can provide it. Trump-cam is sure to be a hit, generating funds to help maintain him.

He is very expensive to care for, continuing to suck down resources as recklessly as always. Now he is wasting our money at will. We will want to put a cap on that. It is time to corral Trump, perhaps with the aid of robotics and drones. John Kelly couldn't do it. I'm not saying it will be easy.

But it must be done. Trump is a child. He needs to be curtailed and contained.

Raiders of the Lost Can of Worms

Donald Trump isn’t compelled to plumb the depths of himself because he finds himself most interesting. It's worse than that. It will happen because he’s the only thing that exists to him. The rest of us aren’t even imaginings. 

We have no hint of existence. This is the man to whom the American people entrusted their nuclear arsenal and military might. For Donald there was no real surprise. He’s the last resort and destiny has placed him there.

His rise wasn't only the inevitable result of his greatness. He was always alone at the top but it took a while for the physics of it to play out as the inert, valueless matter, meaning us and the rest of humanity, sunk to the bottom.

There it belongs, leaving him free to breath the rarified air of divinity in a place reflecting his unprecedented and incomprehensible fineness and superiority. Never before has there been such a specimen of humanity.

Never again will there be. Trump is seeing to that. Increasingly the world is Donald Trump turned inside out, a morass of filth and can of worms for the ages. The world must end with him for the drama of it all to make sense. 

He wills it so. He is the ark, covenant and end-point of creation. He thinks so. Try to tell him otherwise. And good luck with that. On the scales of life Donald outweighs the rest of creation. That's his assessment of things.

Mercilessly Ugly and Irresponsible

I don’t think there’s any way to capture, in words, what’s going on in our society these days. It is too primal and insidious. We kind of have to dance around it, selecting some area for an impressionistic description and abandoning attempts at verbal containment. Right now I’m resisting the impulse to try to characterize it.

It can’t be done justice. Therefore, “mercilessly ugly and irresponsible” is my glancing blow for today at all the indefinable insanity. 

The One True Church of Trump

Be not amazed. Not only will all be revealed it already has--to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. God's plan is playing out as it should. Nothing humanity can do will stop it and therefore Trump must be part of the plan, a herald and administrator for the final days, which you should welcome. 

The righteous will receive their reward and be beside God. The rest will perish like those poor fuckers in that fire which was surely a sign and intimation of the fate of unbelievers. Our Babylon is about to be destroyed as was prophesied so batten down the hatches, boys. Trump is our agent of doom.

We welcome him for that.

Your Order Has Shipped!

America People: economic meltdown, environmental catastrophe and societal collapse have shipped! These are on their way and should arrive any day. Thank you for your order. Returns are not accepted. And thanks for shopping at the Republican Warehouse of Worn-Out Ideas!

Trump and the Unknown Unknown

Donald Trump is too stupid to know how stupid he is.

House of Turds

Americans can’t even muster real villains these days. Ours are cardboard. We have offenders so arrested they’re in diapers or, in any case, not potty proficient, and then legions of ass-wipes. The ass-wipes interest me. Who chooses such a trade? And then serves transparently ludicrous pretenders?

Is it any wonder they are so sensitive about their dignity? They trail Trump around, or Bush before him, cleaning up mess after hideous mess. How dare anyone malign, challenge or insult them as they tail Master Donald with reams of two-ply, sani-wipes and powder with which to dust his white-ass ass?

Americans always were derivative--a nation of imposters, charlatans and wannabes aspiring to some kind of borrowed authenticity. Even that eludes us. It isn’t novel to suggest we are a people destined to track to and converge on a lowest common aspect. But who ever thought the lowest would be so low?

God help us--we inhabit episodes of Maury and Jerry Springer. And reruns, no less. It is so unworthy it calls into question the survival and possibility of dignity. Go now, and marvel at every lie of Sarah Sanders. Her brother is said to have once hung a dog from a tree, you know. Maury, are you there?

You Might Never Wake Up

My father's life got destroyed as we, his kids, hit adolescence and I think he just carried on as best he could assuming he and we would come out the other end of it someday and there would be a return to normalcy. There never was. We never recovered. 

That is my fear with Trump. We think it's a phase or growing-pains or not representative or temporary insanity or whatever. Having been through a situation that didn't play out well it makes me very nervous, suspicious and skeptical. We might never recover.

I Am at Peace

Not really, but I believe we help to create and influence reality by the way we think. So, what the hell, I might as well try.

Someone to Gloat Over Me . . .

Correct me if I'm wrong--isn't Donald Trump and that incredible array of crooks he's imported into the federal bureaucracy SUPPOSED TO WORK FOR US? 

As far as I can see every single person in Trump's orbit, meaning all of us, whether supporters or resisters, share a common fate in relation to him--to be dominated, disrespected and gloated over, as underlings and degraded hangers-on or defeated opponents and losers. We are all monogrammed or branded now as serfs and servants, lost lambs on the Isle of Trump, herded hopefully over assorted cliffs, sacrificed and burnt to embers in honor of the gods of greed or marched into the ocean and drowned for fun. 

The New Gelded Age

When "Trump, the Opera" comes out there will be a chorus of castrati representing the Republican white boys, many of them paid, elected representatives, who have abandoned their souls and kowtow to Trump, singing the praises of Donald--paeans--and songs of submission and fealty.

Their sopranos are aghast at criticisms of their master. They dance frantically while wailing about fake news. Tom Cotton, Trey Gowdy, Mitch McConnell, and even Lindsey "Cracker" Graham, an unreliable witness, lead the cast. They were gelded long ago, critics observe, but this is different.

The level of degradation is just so extreme.

Trumpolini and the Midterm Meltdown

How does a fascist respond to defeat? Denial. Insults. Lies. Accusations and inflammatory, divisive rhetoric.

Fascists respond to defeat with threats. Fascists isolate themselves and their followers and preach revenge.

Trump is a fascist. His followers and acolytes are fascists. The Republican Party is the American Fascist Party.

Way to go, boys. We are shadows of our past selves, vain and unrecognizable, trailing a troll into the abyss.

The Peoples Temple of Trump

More people than we know probably want to escape from the People's Temple of Trump but they are afraid--and with good reason. Even before the coming of Donald nothing but enslavement to Republican dogma had been tolerated within. Remember that John Roberts, after ruling against the overthrow of Obamacare, was threatened in various ways and verbally attacked.

Washington lives with this anxiety. James Comey gave in to it before the election, releasing info on Hillary to avoid later accusations. He surely assumed she would win, having too much faith in the voters. Republicanism is a religion and Trumpism a rogue sect of swamp slime, a cult of personality and venality. Dissent is not allowed. Believers must remain spellbound and obedient.

There is nothing irrational in fearing their wrath. Trump's only skill is in demeaning and threatening other people. He is the great belittler. The "rule of law" is nothing to him and there is no higher place to appeal. The courts are increasingly under his control. He thinks so and will tolerate no resistance to his whims. His wishes are the law. His desires are to be indulged unquestioningly.

Notice how he retreats into reassuring pastimes as his administration crumbles, playing golf and holding rallies in which he is treated adoringly when he is supposed to be running a country. This behavior presages his doom--and ours. He is running from reality and will only escape with blood on his hands. Confronted with his own inconsequence, he will exact a terrible revenge. 

The spirit of Jim Jones is alive in Trump. He must play God or everyone dies. Drink not the Kool-Aid. Watch for wavering cultists. They will slip notes to you requesting help. Never doubt the fanaticism of the true believers. They will destroy anyone and themselves before they give up. They exist for Trumpian grandiosity and the parallel reality of their morally benighted master.

The American people have made a madman and lunatic the most powerful person in the world. He controls a nuclear arsenal and commands a vast military machine. The lives of other people are meaningless. Only those who serve him have value, contingent on their continuing usefulness. Absenting real threats he still attacks constantly. God help us if he is truly threatened. 

God help us anyway.

Inherit the Whine

In our topsy-turvy world victors whine their asses off. Republicans have controlled everything for decades through strong-arm methods and deceit, creating a mess and culminating in Trump, in whom injustice and incompetence are personified. 

Ill-will compounds it at the defensive perimeter where accountability is denied. There must be no accountability because the crimes are too great. Republicans guard that door with heavy artillery and the armor of delusional aggression.

Within the walls there is wealth and hordes of degraded lackeys serving their masters. Outside the walls increasingly powerless people scavenge for scraps. Lord Donald looks out from his tower and reviles, rebukes and insults the paupers.

How dare they expect anything? How dare they meekly try to assert their rights? Donald is the one who has been wronged. His true inflated greatness is yet to be recognized. He bawls like a baby over every imagined slight and lashes out. 

He will never stop whining. The massive void and vacuum inside him can never be fixed or filled. A soul would normally reside there. Trump is a monster. Blame his supporters, the lovers of death and despair, for this ascendency.

I Had a Dream

I vaguely remember how I ended up with the kind of life I have now. It was a kind of a choice. More accurately, it was a hazy intention or "bent" actualized and playing out through opportunism and improvisation. It could have been vastly different on the surface and that intent would still be there.

As an adolescent I was an idiot, a sponge soaking up everything indiscriminately, mostly garbage. Bad luck was interpreted by me as injustice, reading meaning into something entirely arbitrary and accidental, but it caused me to start my researches, initially into Sartrean existentialism. 

Some of the early environmental writings had a huge effect on me. Small is Beautiful, by E. F. Schumacher, seemed so obviously true I couldn't imagine societal evolution occurring in any other way. Rampant corporatism would make most people miserable and so surely they would reject it, right?

Wrong! Was I ever naïve, but not about the misery. Sixties idealism, social-justice Catholicism, and encountering some Mennonites on a farm all made me want to have a simple life lower down in the economic food-chain, closer to nature and perhaps being directly, physically, elementally productive.

How hard could it be? I was living in a land awash in resources and grew up in a city with an enormous middle class. That city is now the opioid capital of the country, by the way. And for me? I have a simple and pleasant life. I am directly, physically productive. But I am plagued by the awareness of injustice.

There is nothing accidental or arbitrary about the misery being foisted on many Americans. It is deliberate and the result of deceit and a quest for unbridled power among a minority of rich, sociopathic, self-serving people. My personal dream is intact. My expectations for our society are destroyed.

Smallness is still beautiful. Find it wherever you can. Hold onto it and have it nurture you because the macrocosm is going totally to shit. 

Prepare Yourselves

Well, Americans, sit back now and watch as your country is destroyed by the hideous piece of shit Donald Trump. Whatever the reality Trump thinks his disgraceful fear-mongering and appeals to assorted forms of tribal hatred served him well in the midterms.

That means we are going to get plenty more of it. The end of life as we have known it is here. Hold on to your hats.

Election Disaster

The election results are not as they seem. The "good guys" did not win. Democrats have never been able to stop the Republican assault and they won't be able to now. 

Nobody knew what kind of president Donald Trump would be. Now we know. He is possibly the biggest piece of rubbish in human history and Americans still support him.

Americans reveal themselves to be mean, ignorant and bigoted, the equivalent of hardened criminals. They are owning their depravity. Americans are embracing hate.

Americans have rejected righteousness. They have given up on justice and decency. We are witnessing the spiraling of a society into ruin, a national fall from grace.

Republicans are an identity movement, defined only by resentment. Their stand for nothing but their own dominance. There are no principles or rational policies. 

They are lost. And they are taking us all down with them.

Bridge Over Troubled WaWa

Poor Donald wants to be a hero so he has to invent crises. He's so arrested it's like watching an infant with its play-toys mimicking adult behaviors.

There's Trump with his cap gun at the border defending the country against... helpless refugees fleeing countries destroyed by us. Go, Donald!

Be a big man! But there's no daddy to bail him out now. We will be left with the mess, just as with George Bush, a man of similar psychological makeup.

How hopelessly, pathetically screwed up these Republicans are. How defeated and complicit we are in their delusions. We live in fear of goblins and ghosts.

The thing to fear is Republicans. That's the secret and the reason for their aggression and belligerence--fear of the exposure of their incompetence.

The Rapture is Upon Us

Behold the signs. A man named Trump trumpets the "end times" with a droning appeal to hatred, persecution and fear. The damned self-select, flocking to him, choosing evil and revealing their preference for hate.

Envy stalks the land as hordes line up on the side of resentment and division, claiming this puts them on the side of God, a mortal sin and blasphemy. The devil’s lies are everywhere ascendant. Trump is triumphant. 

He gloats. He goads and insults the weak, the Children of God. Those who choose love are mocked and abused. Confusion is everywhere. Lines of moral consensus are obliterated. Anger prevails. Truth is crushed.

Yes, the end times are upon us, not as deemed and determined by God but chosen by us. The gift of free will is used to renounce human decency and dignity. We have chosen death. We have chosen destruction.

We have chosen the devil's agent, Trump. The walls are breached. The blasphemers and killers of Christ march in victory. Hope is hard to come by. If you pray please do so now. The crisis of God's creation is here.

Vote Against the Goon

How hard is that?

Assholes to Ashes

My only real hope now is that we can be reborn out of the ashes of our past selves. We have already failed and imploded and don't know it yet. As surely as our "leaders" are walking corpses and avatars of the undead America is a machine without a living soul, soon so inhuman the vultures won't even need our bodies for sustenance.

Ashes we are, desiccated beyond the point of reconstitution and rebirth. Our Camelot is brought down not in high drama and a battle with identifiable evil fighting good but in bathos, petty bullshit and meaninglessness compounding itself and growing exponentially into its own doom in a petri dish expanded to the ends of the earth. 

Assholes have brought us there, the court jesters of the apocalypse wreaking revenge for years of humiliation inflicted on themselves by themselves because of authority issues or whatever imaginary nonsense compels them, a sick internal reality now exploding into a compulsion to crush normal people and their standards of decency.

We never cared about them in the first place and they can't see it. They are still punks and pretenders. They aren't winners but louts who have made losers of us all--more so of us because they had less to lose in the first place being idiots and imposters. They are now the lords of dust and ashes, a world in ruins bereft of hope and salvation.

Only the Good Die at All

Evangelicals have it figured out. You have a conversion experience with some charlatan who appears to have advanced degrees in hucksterism and bullshit and you are guaranteed salvation thereafter no matter how you behave. You might as well be wicked.

The fools who think good works get them into heaven are all going to hell. Wickedness, combined with worldly success, comprise a higher state since you know those folks haven't fallen for the heresy. God has obviously chosen them. They are among the elect. 

Earthly success is evidence of election. The heretical do-gooders, however--SJWs, as they are now contemptuously known--all die and are damned to hell. You get eternal life on top of a nice, sinful, easy ride. Self-righteousness becomes you. You get to have it all.

The City of God

In case you were wondering what the "city on a hill" envisioned by the Puritans looks like when realized at a national scale just look around you. The evangelical version is a city of lies. The evangelical version has killed over a million people in the Middle East. The evangelical version takes away the means of life from powerless and vulnerable people while further enriching the wealthiest and increases military spending whenever possible. The evangelical version closes borders to people fleeing societies destroyed by our manipulations and demand for drugs. 

The evangelical version of the city on a hill is a city of death. It extinguishes light and lives in the shadows of greed, violence and fear. They hunt the truth like prey and kill it. If there is a God in heaven they have condemned themselves by their actions. 

I will witness to that. 

He Stoops to Conquer

Our boy Donald plays every seedy card he can to enhance his primal power. No doubt, together with the carrier of the nuclear "football," someone follows him around to fumigate and decontaminate each space he has occupied as he vacates it.

The toxic atmosphere is reduced to the point of survivability but the poison still has an effect. They fall like flies, every hint and reminder of decency fleeing in moral panic. The shells of men are left standing like the discarded husks of morphing insects.

Bodies are enlisted as souls are compromised. Ghouls and zombies stalk the halls of a “white” house. Evil can never really be “incarnated” because the inherent innocence of creation resists its full incorporation, hence the “casting out” of demons.

Cast out the demon Donald. Remove him from your life, for the survival of your soul. Evil is always in the world, whatever its appearance of dormancy. When conditions are right it grows and spreads, fungus-like. Refuse this evil its preferred conditions of fear.

Refuse to be its host. Keep the faith. Your body might not survive the demon’s onslaught but the soul can. I know, it isn’t fair. Nobody did anything to deserve this but it is a reality—the reality of the soul-sucking purity and intensity of the evil of Donald Trump.

Terrifying Stuff

The latest trend in Republican lies and distortions is to accuse protestors and resisters against their reign of terror of aggressive and violent "mob" behavior, further objectifiying their invented enemies who have been baited and goaded into action. Objectification of this sort is an important step in justifying their own violent desires. 

How far will it go? Who knows, because it is already further along than we ever thought possible. It is uncharted ground. Death, after all--the killing of their political enemies--is only the ultimate in disenfranchisement. They are convincing themselves that any measures are fair in maintaining their power and crushing their opponents. 

Suspend Everything

Olivia Nuzzi's interesting White House encounter proves our worst suspicions true, that the highest levels of authority in the land are populated with people so degraded, self-centered and disgraced they don't deserve to be treated and understood as legitimate occupiers of their positions. Therefore, every day we go about our lives as though these baboons and goons are in any way normal and deserving officials and functionaries in a democracy we only solidify their hold on it. 

We become more implicated. 

They become more entrenched. No one should observe a holiday or participate in any national tradition not necessary to their livelihood as long as this goes on. Cancel Halloween, for example. Cancel every holiday except Christmas. I will let that one pass, though it should be a day of prayer for the salvation of our country and reflection on what we once were and where we went wrong. Everyone should sit during national anthems at ball games. No one should recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Pledge allegiance to what? Our constitutional democracy and republic no longer exist. This is an emergency. Our crisis is upon us. We should have constant, daily reminders that this is not acceptable. We should be in mourning. Black armbands are appropriate if full funeral attire is not possible. Representatives who kowtow to Trump should be anathematized in every possible way, greeted with scorn and consternation in public. And we should always be immediately recognizable as resisters. 

We must take a stand.

Living in the CSA

Well, my Yankee friends, for decades I preached to you that there was something rotten in the land of cotton and now you demand explanations for the lie-fests hosted by Sarah Sanders. Remember when I told you that the Civil War never ended in the South? 

Remember when I told you that lying wasn't an activity there involving discrete occurrences and moral lapses that were later repented but a state of being necessary for psychological survival? "Compartmentalization" doesn't capture this because it is the defining trait of their psyches and it fails to produce an “integrated,” functioning result in a Freudian sense by ending an untenable schism and conflict or at least making it livable.

Rather, every defense mechanism has failed and unconscious drives are running the show, not merely "informing" daily life but compelling these organisms on to the murderous flameout demanded by the dark matter they have projected onto minorities and other false vessels for their fears--the fear of justice for their own inhuman corruption. 

Notice how incapable they are of acknowledging uncertainty over the matter of their own salvation. They MUST believe they are pure, chosen and on the side of God. 

It is an inversion in which the larger qualities of conscience and humanity are defeated and ruled by a demented, personal, rogue, Satanic government of lies seething with the seeds of its own destruction. The criminally insane have taken over the asylum. We have been hijacked by terrorists and defeated by a mob now looting our corpses. 

They have no plan. There is no future, goal or intelligible end-game. They are the damned, having forfeited their humanity to the need for certainty. 

The Confederates are addicted to untruth. It is a compulsion and an internalized civil war fated to end in explosive disintegration and self-annihilation. It is punitive, persecutory, beyond cynical and utterly degraded. Sarah and her southern compatriots are unaware of the drives that animate them. The apparent calm is a sign of their thralldom. 

Now, Trump may be the most incredible liar ever but it is a personal attribute. He isn't part of a social movement or an example of mass psychosis or hysteria. He's an outlier elected opportunistically by greedy people, idiots and religious fanatics. Sarah, by contrast, is an icon and cultural phenomenon, their Greek goddess and patroness of lies. And there will never be an accounting. There will never be justice. Not within that context.

I’m here to tell you that the Confederacy has won the Civil War. They never stopped fighting and now they have won, racism having been subsumed to class hatred and classism having routed democracy, equal protection, inalienable rights and the rule of law. Understand Sarah as speaking for the CSA. Understand Sarah as a clarion of the army of the apocalypse. 

Then it makes sense. And, remember, the apocalypse is something they desire and deem good. Onward, into the abyss!

America is Suffering

America is sick. America is suffering. Soon enough, America might be dead. The disease is Donald Trump. The disease is Republicanism. If Republicanism isn’t rooted out America will die. We might already be doomed.

Answerable Only to God, If Anyone

It seems that the White House and Sarah Sanders might be ending the whole institution of press briefings.

And why not?

Sarah has made it clear that she answers only to God with whom she has a personal relationship ensuring her salvation. So, why pretend to care what the American people, her employers, think?

How perfectly this fits with an executive branch that answers to no one.

Almost Gone!

Get a last shot at democracy while you can! Vote in the next election! Someday soon you will remember the experience and marvel at the naiveté of the poor fools, you included, who thought our democracy was unassailable and permanent.

Fail and Flail

Megyn Kelly is flailing and failing outside of the comforting confines and protecting womb of Fox News. Again we see the bullshit factory exposed as a fortress of lies and hypocrisy.

Republicans tout competition and a fantastical form of "freedom" from the outside. That is, they inhabit a separate realm of privilege and the absence of accountability. 

Raw Kavanaugh

Brett Kavanaugh has revealed himself to be a partisan hack and a technician of doom, not a legal sage, scholar or an open-minded individual. He has no business being on any court.

The Horror Show Continues

There will never be an end to Republican lies, their quest for power and insistence on ideological purity. I couldn't watch the Kavanaugh spectacle but he proved to be, as I suspected, a pure political hack.

He embodies lying and hypocrisy in a way perfected by Republicans. It guarantees the incapacity of conscience. They have found a way to turn conscience off. Or, many ways, it might be more accurate to say.

Rewards are administered for ideological alignment and punishments for waywardness. Weak, striving, self-serving vermin like Kavanaugh will never stray. He is a partisan, political person to his core and emptied of integrity.

Kavanaugh is aghast that he is accused of sexual assault but it was done in an entirely legal, forthright and appropriate way. He pursued Bill Clinton like an avenging troll in that irregular, rankly partisan investigation.

Later, of course, he discovered he had principles of respect for executive authority and immunity from judgement under George Bush whose crimes defy enumeration.

The Great Pout

I resist the implication that Trump is anything other than the fulfillment of everything it means to be a Republican. His presidency is the reigning achievement of Republicanism. Trump is George Bush, bailed out by family money and protected from real danger but having shed his effective army of babysitters, a loose cannon. He is an actor like Reagan living a narcissistic if less attractive fantasy.

Republicans, after controlling things for decades, still believe or at least pretend to believe that they are put-upon, maligned and disadvantaged.  We see in Trump the apotheosis of everything Republican—the aggrieved attitude, the aggression, the greed, the resentment, the delusional grandeur and attachment to melodrama and the sense of a mission to right the wrongs of being disrespected. 

What a mess of mistaken, retributive folly. Republicans need to believe that incompetence will never be exposed and uprooted and that justice will never be had. They deny any responsibility. They have never gotten over being uncool in college or some other form of delusional insecurity. Kavanaugh, no? Behold, the Great Pouter prepares to preside:

Get the attitude. Donald is in the lion's den. It is a den aspiring to decency and accountability, the things he most fears and resists. Fear not, Don-boy. Bush destroyed the world and walked away. I doubt you will ever get what you deserve, as a crook and a coward and a bully, to be stripped of everything and put in jail.

Entrepreneurship as the New Salvation

"Entrepreneurship" has entered the arena of fable. Americans can't seem to do anything without it becoming a matter of salvation and a justification for separating individuals into predestined groups of lesser and greater innate good. We were never created equal or endowed with anything other than an inescapable destiny which might be manifested in temporal, worldly success.

Freedom doesn't enter into it. We are everything but free because we believe everything to exist and occur by the perverse, incomprehensible and apparently arbitrary will of God. Arbitrary destinies and injustice are reassuring signs of the divine will at work. Successful entrepreneurs are manifesting their predetermined destiny as members of the chosen class of the "saved."

The Troll Army Has Some Trouble

Trolling. Bullying. Harassment. Abuse. All assume a power differential and the impossibility of retribution or justice, that the perpetrators are immune to their own tactics. Oh, but how they squirm and complain when it unavoidably happens, that upending of the order of the universe wherein they are arbitrarily and permanently on top and infinitely deserving. When they get a dose of their own awful medicine they whine like anything. 

Often, of course, their tactical advantage is in the willingness to go lower and play dirtier, sometimes in ways inconsistent with the continuing existence of the system that supports them and makes their mischief possible. Brett Kavanaugh resists justice and proclaims his purity and innocence--in reality, his sexual incompetence--which again makes his boorish and brutish behavior more understandable, believable and likely. Ah, adolescent boys. 

He is aghast at his mistreatment. His allies react with typically nasty, irrational, ill-considered counter-accusations. They are indignant at the resistance. 

View the privilege. It is pure privilege. Brett, the vicious little Puritan, gleefully took every cheapshot he could at Clinton, in an illegal and unjust persecution, the original and only modern American witch hunt and "high-tech" lynching at that level. Then he was PART OF and fully implicated in the horror and murderous reign of George Bush, which has left over a million dead and and untold lives destroyed. Stuff just happens, on their watch. 

Yes, there are grownups in the virtual room, hardened sociopaths, unlike the opportunists. Their perverted consciences choose power over principle. Those are not the trolls, street fighters, underlings, hacks and henchmen of the movement but its invisible hand and guiding spirit. Kavanaugh, currently a hack, seeks elevation in his status into a certified bunker of privilege. He is still an enforcer for the untouchable uber-rich hovering above the fray.

He isn't rich but he wants to hover. He wants that status. He was screened to ensure he was a true, degraded follower of the cause, and ideologue immune to the inroads of conscience--consistent, pure and unwavering in his corruption--a bad actor to begin with. After the mess he is going through now he will only be more vengeful and vindictive on the Court. Great. Just what we need, a warrior troll in place of a complacent, self-satisfied hack.

Deconstructing Reconstruction: The Nihilist Assault Group

If we ever needed salvation from nihilism, the time is now. I've heard it pointed out that some terrorists are nihilists, people without political goals, but I think that nihilism can reside within a rational frame of reference, as a tactic, and then rise up in an uncontrollable Freudian melodrama and begin to run the show. So it is with racism. Reconstruction ran this way. Deconstruction is a technical term used originally to apply to the analysis of texts.

It seems to have become loosely associated with leaving things in pieces when I think, in fact, it assumes the integrity of the whole in order to function as an analytical framework. But the leaving-in-pieces part appeals to nihilists in a broad, fuzzy, adolescent-boy, wouldn't-it-be-cool-to-blow-this-up-and-see-what-happens kind of way. This appears to be the underlying ethos and ethic of the Trump administration--institutional self-destruction. 

It is our society's suicide by Trump. Anyway, think of how, in your own lives, a rational tactic can play out poorly in a larger context. More money is good. You pursue more money and, presumably, more happiness follows. Aha, but there are other, un-independent variables on the same side of that equation. There's a bunch of them, factoring in the irretrievable time lost in the pursuit and how that focus affects you and what happens when the kids realize daddy is deadbeat and a money grubbing dick.

Turning now to Steve Bannon we see that in his mind, assuming he's not out of it, deconstruction appears to entail stripping down an entity--our entity, the federal government--to its most essential, limited level of function, leaving in in parts on the ground, which would then supposedly be reassembled by master, government-craftsmen from Breitbart and Heritage and similarly revered organizations, never mind that it would have been nice if he'd asked our permission, seeing how they didn't exactly get it in the last election and the thing being "deconstructed" is ours and us.

Never mind, never mind--because they know they are right with all the assurance that denial can get you. And deconstruction, it turns out, is a fancy, ambiguous term for dismantle. Why would Steve use such a word? I looked it up and it doesn't apply, in its usual sense, to something such as the government. But it sounds cool, abstruse, learned and abstract and most Americans don't want their government dismantled so its annihilation must be rebranded.

State of Nature (lite)

Frustrated by their inability to kill their fellow citizens by a direct assault on healthcare Republicans are now attempting the old tactic of defunding Medicaid to death, simultaneously bankrupting the government. Budgetary necessity will later be used as an excuse to try to destroy Social Secutity and Medicare.

Republicans want a dog-eat-dog, brutal, barbaric kind of society but only up to the point at which it affects them adversely, an arbitrary and biased choice, since the entire social contract is at risk. They are challenging not just the formal aspects of our social system, its laws and traditions, but civilization itself. 

Why should people acquiesce when deprived of the means of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness let alone when those rights are explicitly granted to them? They should not but it is clear now why we have the anti-democratic push from the right--so that government "of, by and for the people" might perish from America.

Wonder no longer why they want to have hoards of guns and unlimited, extra-judicial control of domestic surveillance, foreign intelligence services and the military. They want to control everything. That power will be employed selfishly. That power will be employed against us, those among whom it was intended to reside.

Professional Racist

Consider that one of the most powerful people in America, and therefore the world, Stephen Miller, can only best be described as a professional racist. It is his defining characteristic and attribute, however it might appear on a résumé.

I Hope for Jesus

I don't believe in the second coming and I have a qualified belief in the first but I long for Jesus now, convinced that those most adamant about their association with HIM are working for the other guy. Sarah and "Beau" Sessions are my stand-ins for all the promulgators of lies and corruption.

Who knew there were so many of them? It was always thus, that human weakness creates a market for souls. It is so glutted and deflated the owners are giving them away. The great stories in the myths of the civilizations reference dark times of decay when evil ascends and confusion reigns.

But I never thought to live through it. I thought the myths had been pastured and replaced by articles of reason, a scientific method and institutional wisdom of another kind. Was I ever wrong. We are consumed by stories and, for our sins, the false ones, cooptions of reality, are winning.

A Report on the Wrecking Crew: Mission Accomplished

Thomas Frank wrote an observant and prescient book, The Wrecking Crew, about the barbarian horde within our walls, Republicans, determined not to streamline, pare-down and improve the federal government but to destroy it. It is still unclear to me what their real motivations were, apart from vandalism and adolescent, sociopathic recreation.

Greed, certainly, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Mission accomplished. Our government is on its knees, ready for beheading, and sabotaged beyond recovery. Good job, boys. Put away the sledgehammers, dynamite and other tools of ruin. Are there limits to your thirst for vengeance? I haven’t seen any sign of it, especially since the advent of Trumpism.

I thought the election of Obama was a rejection of the politics of national suicide and self-destruction but you barely broke stride. Now that we are under the control of ideologues and a miraculously incompetent and depraved piece of shit what do we do? Where is our promised utopia? Where are all the wonderful effects you swore would ensue?

It was always a lie: https://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/the-wrecking-crew/

Heroes of the Devolution

All that is wrong with America is attributable to Republicans. Since they insist on controlling everything how can they not be responsible? Such an overwhelming wave of corruption, incompetence and malfeasance is hard to keep organized in a person's head. 

I can't do it, so I am proposing a Rogues' Gallery History of the United States. That is, assigning credit for messes to the idiots and ideologues most responsible, starting with American agriculture, the destruction of which can be credited to Earl Butz. He decimated smaller and family farms as best he could. "Get big or get out" was his slogan. He was asked to keep food prices from rising in the face of the 1970's oil shock so that Nixon might get reelected, a typical rationale from hell.

Next there is Robert Bork, whose love of monopolies influenced Reagan to deregulate businesses and deprofessionalize the government. Remember, Republicans don't like businesses generally they like BIG businesses. Little guys can go fuck themselves. Think of Bork the next time Spectrum or AT&T makes you livid. Bork wrote a book extolling the benefits of monopolies. Both Butz and Bork were open about their aims. This is before the movement went clandestine and guerrilla.

Newt Gingrich and his soldiers from evangelical hell created our hopeless divisiveness with their contemptuous and contemptible self-righteousness. Republicans have always excelled at generating economic downturns and depressions. Their brand of predatory capitalism--welfare for the rich--produces booms and busts which result in horrific injustice. Phil and Wendy Gramm are behind the ideas Newt finally, permanently enforced, deregulating everything possible. It's an Enron economy.

For military industrial-complex malfeasance we cite Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. When Republicans talk of "synergies" consider this: they pour trillions of dollars into needless military hardware which money then comes back to them in part in campaign donations if not in more direct ways. They are corporatists of doom, peddlers of death, arrogant traitors and paranoid misfits. They prefer to put a match to the money of working Americans than see it used on social welfare.

Haley Barbour will represent the seedy society of lobbyists. He initially recreated the ways of Mississippi in Washington. Decisions are made by rich white men cutting deals in back rooms. This method of minority rule has taken over the whole country as state legislatures fall to well-monied, self-serving monopolists, power brokers and bigots. The revolving door is very active in this sphere though vested interests, collusion and corruption permeate everything everywhere now.

Stand back and look with wonder at the new America created by Republicans. It has nothing to do with anything but empowering the rich at the expense of everyone else. 

The Left's Big Lie

Democrats and the political left are overdue for some self-scrutiny and reform rather than the usual handwringing. The white women's party now marches on in continuing confusion while the Right explodes into pure fascism and compels the country downwards. How hard can it be to direct unified, coherent criticism against an entity, the Republican Party, that has left a trail of destruction for forty years culminating in Trump?

The good news is that a core belief of the the Left, on the evils of racism, has been proven right. The bad news is that white women, as a political movement, are racists, getting it into their heads that they were above judgement and existentially correct--not because of the integrity, humanity and decency of their opinions and policy prescriptions but because they were women. Why? They thought they were better than men.

They have proven that they aren't, most recently by voting for a depraved ignoramus and unrepentant ape for president. Perhaps that is good news too, in a way, that women really are the equal of men, even in arrogance, myopia and fecklessness. But while we are working out our shit on this the world as we have known it is coming to and end. Sorry to scorn the massive American consumption bash and exceptionalist ego-fest.

It is time for a change.

What If God Was One of Us?

Actually, God was. "GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD..." We are the ones who despise it, thinking it ours to destroy, the presumption, arrogance, apostasy and betrayal of evangelicals and the greedy, conservative elite.

God is always among us. The "second coming" isn't a temporal event. The end-times are always happening because our lives are always running out in the inevitability of death, and HOW we choose to live is therefore urgent. 

Choose well, my friends. The killers of Christ are active among us, having a field day, as they say. Love your neighbors, and don't trust those that don't. It's a simple command and worth following. Choose love.

Everybody's Talkin' At Me

The barrage of voices is so great it's impossible to filter or take in. I need a break. Give me a break. I can't hear a word they're saying because there's just too much of it. It's making me numb. Maybe that's the point. But it's my fault for listening. I'm turning it off now...

A True Parallel

Indignation and disgust are the only reasonable, possible reactions to the latest revelations of Catholic, clerical sexual misconduct coming out of Pennsylvania. In scope and severity this abuse of power is stunning and damning, no less so than with Trump and his cabal of crooks and cronies in Washington, where their positions of trust and power give them the chance to enrich themselves and screw others in defiance of the stated, implicit and implied duties of their jobs, thereby destroying lives. They should be in jail. Waterboarding should be used to determine their guilt. They believe in its efficacy, after all...

It's Not the Truth that Republicans Fear...

It is Justice.