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.

Religious Freedom

Religious freedom. I’ve got it. You’ve got it. Who’s worried about it? Jeff Sessions is worried about it. He’s worried about it because his religion and the religion of likeminded southerners and others isn’t Christianity, it’s racism.

Yes, his religion is under attack. His religion is rightly vilified and fought against. His religion, in its public expression as discrimination and abuse, is illegal. Understand now that this has nothing to do with real religious freedom.

It’s about the freedom to be a bigot.

Cut Bannon's Balls Off

Steve Bannon's miserable presence has resurfaced, enlivened, as a defender of Trump after a whirlwind, pro-Nazi tour of Europe. I know that any Democratic presidential candidate will cut his balls off. They will strip him naked and march him down the street to be lashed and battered. Bannon will be pistol-whipped and pummeled. He will be kicked and spat upon. His eyes will be gouged out and his fingernails extracted. He will be hurled from a wall and dragged by a horse. He will be drawn, quartered and roasted on a spit. He will be drowned upside down. He will be knee-capped, IRA style, in honor of his Irish roots. His teeth will be pulled from his head and shoved down his throat. He will violated up the ass with prods and pokers. He will be vivisected and embalmed alive. We will drill holes in his skull and suck his brains out. He will be fed to sharks and snakes.

I'm only trying to get in the spirit of the next electoral cycle as fantasized by Bannon himself, master of sadistic tropes and similes, though maybe I’m being a bit more graphic. I mean it all metaphorically, of course. No harm intended, just like Steve...

Inscrutability Clause

Some people are so critical it's necessary to crack their psychology to try to understand them. There we see a perspective--there's no need to comment if there's nothing wrong, if nothing needs correcting. Similarly we now see, in Republican circles, that the truth is left to its own defense. 

Why bother asserting it? It's the lies that need defending. Republicans chivalrously show up to fight for the honor and virginal purity of untruths. Untruths aren't sullied by the stain of human reason. Untruths have a whiff of godliness about them, being inscrutable, abstracted and otherworldly. 

Take that, ye peddlers of the blasphemies of reason, thou arrogant apostates and defamers of revelations! 

The Renunciation

God calls everyone. There are those who don’t listen or for whom the call is drowned out and hard to hear. They are so involved in other things. They are so involved in themselves.

Then there are those who reject God and the very idea of God. This is always a form of idolatry. It’s impossible to exist in that vacuum so they try to fill it, often with themselves.

Originalist Sin

It appears that we are destined and doomed to another douchebag "originalist" on the Supreme Court. They fight the culture wars with the muskets and swords of Jesuitical indirection, rationalization and obfuscation, not that these weapons are ineffective. Anachronism puts an end to rational investigation.

They are claiming primal, biblical insight into the aboriginal meaning of our founding documents, so the temporal disconnect serves them well. With those documents held hostage, under lock and key, they only allow exceptions and concessions when they like, notably in armaments and the tools of empire and invasion.

An important subtext to the 2nd Amendment is that the founders were terrified of the prospect of large standing armies and stores of munitions. I demand therefore, in originalist spirit, that we return to actual muskets and knives, kept in the homes of average citizens and practiced upon varmints and Injuns, militia-style.

I will let them have billion dollar warplanes when we can have appropriate, available education and medical care. How have these not changed as much as warfare, influenced by technology and industrialization? Meanwhile, if we are stuck with him, at least Kavanaugh is supposed to be a courteous originalist prick.

An Emerging Understanding

The Cohen tapes make clear that Trump is capable of lucidity, planning and organized thought. It means that Trump is a con man. Con men belong in jail. Friends, we have our answer. Trump is a criminal and a crook. We must LOCK HIM UP.

Dog Eat Blog

Why do any of us bother? Look at the list of possible candidates to run against Trump. It is painful. This is a choice? Maybe Kirsten Gillibrand. We know now the entire Republican establishment is locked in the cockpit with Trump and they will fly us into a hillside before they do the decent thing and shoot him in the head (metaphorically, I mean...) and return a qualified person to the controls of our hijacked and ailing democracy.

Energy, determination and idealism abound in the ranks of the opposition but at the top it’s nothing but mind-numbing inertia and incompetence. Where is the fucking outrage? I’ll tell you, it’s so simple—every time you open your fucking mouths you talk about the lies. You assert that everything Republicans say is a lie. And... THEY caused the Great Recession. THEY bankrupted the government. THEY sent your jobs away forever.

THEY spent all our infrastructure funds on money-eating military fiascos in the Middle East WHILE cutting taxes on their cronies. All of this happens to be true. Yes, this is my report and writing assignment returned to you, dear Democratic leaders. I submit it humbly, and prayerfully ask you to GET OFF YOUR FUCKING ASSES AND DO SOMETHING. Thank you, they say, and turn away to their tea and scones. I return later for my response.

The dog ate my blog, they say.

Spicey's Lament

Sean Spicer's book absolves him of any responsibility for the crimes of Trump's calamitous rule. He was only doing his job. He was following orders. Donald was duly elected. It all happened so fast. They were heady times. Someone was holding a gun to his head.

Well, maybe not that last one but it all sounds very Third Reich. Sean, I recommend a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. You are not absolved. You are responsible. Quit trying to save your own ass and think about somebody else for a change. 

The Existential Tourist

God doesn't give a shit about you. Your destiny was sealed at birth and you weren't one of the elect. The Bible tells you so, in so many words.

The Falwells tell you so. Franklin Graham tells you so. All the "prosperity gospel" preachers tell you so. God made your bed and you are stuck with it.

What to do, what to do... It's awful not being chosen. What are we doing here? Why did God make us, anyway, if we were only fated for shit?

These questions are unanswerable but you must have faith. You must have faith in your own shithood. The elect are entitled to life, eternally.

You are only an existential tourist, probably ballast for the lives of superior beings. Don't let it get you down. I have no other answer or advice.

This Vicarious Life

One manifestation of Puritanism is a reverence for celebrities. They, the chosen, realize their destinies and lesser beings look on in awe. Puritanical cultures are polarized. Fortunate people are existentially super-enfranchised and their lives are validated and enhanced by their successes. Their lives burgeon and swell with a surfeit of every good thing. It is enabled by the assumption of their limitless deservedness.

The thing builds on itself. They are somehow more human. Conversely, little people accept a reduced status as their due and participate in their own belittling. Their lives shrink in significance, They are coopted into intensifying the polarization and validating their own inconsequence by fatalistic and sick beliefs, becoming so separated from the “haves” they don’t even feel envy. They invest in the lives of the chosen as spectators.

It is a carnival and calamity of inhumanity, corruption and existential folly--degrading to everyone involved. The egos of the elect achieve magnificent, delusional proportions. Poor and working people see their lives shivel and diminish in their own estimation and presumably in God’s. They receive routine intimations of their end in ashes, dust and decay as others see their godliness materialized in earthly rewards.

Like a Rolling Stone

Many tactics comprise the compromising onslaught of corruption bedeviling our beloved country. But the sum of these tactics is a tactic in itself, if not a strategy--to overwhelm the opposition with the sheer scope and intensity of the treachery.

Always, those trying to protect the institutions and traditions of democracy are back on their heels. And, for the perpetrators, no stain of accusation sticks as they roll along like a stone, one outrage after another, now on a downhill path of momentum.

There must be a valley there somewhere. There isn't a point or goal to the destruction. It's now its own end and an addiction--compulsive vandalism. We watch, helplessly hoping--hoping it will end and that something will be left when it does.

One Appropriate Remedy

There's only one appropriate remedy after the double-whammy of the release of a new batch of indictments from Robert Mueller and Trump's amazing display of selective, self-serving credulity in Europe--he doubts, challenges and insults our allies, presumably decent people in positions of accountability, and kowtows to a mafia boss and enforcer with an indeterminate mandate. 

That they have in common.

Anyway, the 2016 presidential election should be nullified. I won't call Trump a traitor. I wouldn't even accuse him of an act of betrayal. There's nothing for an accusation to stick to. Trump is an ethical non-entity. He's "non-compos" and out-to-lunch. Let’s give him a permanent lunch break. He deserves it. But the tide of insanity that elected him is going nowhere. We need to deal with that.

Fundamentalist, evangelical Christians are behind it. They reject reason going back to the Enlightenment. They are afraid of its implications for salvation and the worship of God, so their posture in relation to God is degradation and their motivating impulse is fear. America is an Enlightenment country. They reject that. The "treason" runs that deep. It's a massive movement of unreason. 

Synchronized Sinning

You wonder how they do it--the soul-crushing lies of the southern white children: Sarah Sanders, Mitch McConnell, Jeff Sessions and all the rest. The lies flow out of them. Would that evangelicals went to confession!

"Father, I lied my ass off." Next week: "Father, I lied my ass off." Would you find a new priest every week to keep alive the presumption of contrition? Or justify it as white lying or in the service of a greater good?

I don't know. Somehow all the lies, justifications and rationalizations sync up and I don't think it's a conspiracy. There's a river that runs deep in these people—of repressed hatred and fear. It must be rooted in an injury.

Ah, the Civil War and desegregation. The rape of the South. They was done wrong. Clearly, they have no conscious access to the hate. Not most of them. They go to church. Their identities are entirely based on Jesus.

They identify with Jesus. They have had a faith experience and know they are saved and destined for heaven. They are certain they are good people. What do you say to that? I wish they would just stop lying. 

Plead diminished capacity for them but there are still all the lies. I know, they can't help it. It's strange that they insist on personal salvation. They behave like ants or some other kind of insect--like they are programmed.

A Self-Righteous Little Prig

I'm putting this out there, hoping someone with the opportunity and some kind of voice will call Brett Kavanaugh a "self-righteous little prig" as he is considered for confirmation. 

On the Road Again

We've seen it all before--the Trumpian road trip--but it's still startling when the insanity kicks in. Was there ever a man more self-centered and incompetent? Watch as the insults fly. They are the point. There is no end-game, unless you mean the evangelicals' national death wish. Aggression is the point. Donald is entertaining himself, as always, instinctively dominating everything and succeeding because he will play dirtier and go lower. 

Six feet under would suit him.

Trump Shamu

A quick look at Brett Kavanaugh's record and it's obvious why Trump chose him. Trump is covering his criminal ass and he identifies with Shamu and killer whales generally. In fact, it's amazing that such a perfect fit would exist.

Brett helped steal an election and defended the rights of corporations (read, "predators") to the exclusion of citizens. Corporations have rights. Individuals, not so much. He sided with Sea World against culpability for an eaten attendant.

What could be more symbolic and Trumpian? We are fodder and detritus. Working people are no longer needed in Trump-world, that burden having been shifted abroad. Opioids destroy us. Life-expectancy declines as profits soar.

Kavanaugh persecuted the Clintons over nothing and then argued for immunity as Bush wrecked the world. He has asserted that a president, while president, should be impervious to prosecution. Well, what did you expect?

It's time for our boy Trump to be beached. Kavanaugh will resist that in every possible way.

Take That, Motherfucker

I was really rooting for black people back in the day. I still root for black people. They have been treated unconscionably, down to now. Thus, it was a blow to my early hopes for racial progress when the black guys began using "motherfucker" every other word. I supposed their PR person was away that day. But now I understand the amazing wisdom and perception of the black guys.

They know lies when they see them. They know innuendo and cant. The mealy-mouthed bullshit masquerading among white people as wisdom and concern doesn't fool them. They see the structural inequity and oppression. And they saw, before it was obvious to us all, that America is the land of motherfuckers -- the realm, kingdom, plantation and domain of assholes and injustice.

The Metaphysics of Me-ism

I hesitate to call Donald an egotist because it sounds abstracted and analytical. This is a man who, if he were placed on a scale balanced against the rest of creation it would, in his estimation, tip in his favor. It would continue to tip in his favor as the exercise expanded into interstellar space, galaxies, the cosmos and parallel dimensions.

"Egotism" doesn't capture that, seeming to me to assume a normal social context of competing egos and assorted ids and other, unintegrated bits. Donald's subsumes, encompasses and negates all other "existences" thereby swallowing them up as an unimaginable orifice of life-negation, a kind of digestive tract of doom. 

Now, then. What is the metaphysics of that? Even evil has a context. This is something claiming status as the context, a godhead, an entity that thinks it is "meta" everything and is therefore “meta” nothing and without higher content, a bodily being postured not only as transcendent but all-encompassing. Trump is therefore self-negating.

He is so powerfully so he also negates everything around him, like a force field of ruin. His evident and somewhat encompassing corporeality negates his assumptions of superiority. This is the metaphysics of Trump, characteristically resting on an inversion and constituting an anti-metaphysics and regression into nothingness.

Yes, Chinese...

Yes, Chinese, it is really happening. You are being hit with the full force of the brilliance of the deal-making and negotiating skills of Donald Trump. I know, it is hard to take in and comprehend. You were accustomed to working with the neolib's and the Wall Street types who would sell their mothers for short-term profits. You could understand that. It was sick but at least intelligible. Though, I have observed that you respect your mothers more than we do. It is obvious from the Chinese people living among us in America.

The neolib's would sell out their country and fellow citizens in a heartbeat but, what the hell, if Americans were stupid enough to elect them that was their problem, right? Sure, you knew you were getting away with some shit and would have given ground but Herr Donald isn't acting within those parameters. He only wants to feel like a big man. 

That is the point, the incredible feeling of the POWER of not caring if the whole world economy implodes because of you and millions of people die, the freedom of the riotous abandon of not giving a shit about anything at all. This is the face of the American social-conservatives, an ill-wind from the south. They are "premillennialists"  and believe the destruction of the world will be followed by a reign of Jesus, for 1000 years. It is crazy as fuck. You can see why they love Trump. He has "end-times" written all over him.

Anyway, we are in the same boat. Rational, caring Americans are in awe of Donald's fecklessness and depravity. Let us join together to depose Trump and create a better world. Word is, our elections are pretty easy to hack. As an American I might be held responsible but y'all can go ahead full-steam and try to influence the midterms and beyond.

May God be with you. We are pretty helpless over here. The other side is too well-funded, driven, and now as reckless as Trump. They are batshit crazy. Sorry, do you know the idiom? Look it up but don't get too fixated on the terminology. What I mean to say is, on behalf of myself and my fellow citizens, HELP! And, welcome to the guano-sphere.

No Safe Space

Beginning when I was about twelve we began to have family problems. Up until then I thought we were very lucky but it went bad quickly. It involved my sister's flaming descent into incurable instability. Her eventual death was indirectly self-induced.

Then my mother got sick and died. Meanwhile, all of the other structures I thought unshakable and permanent began to weaken and decline. My father was too stunned and overwhelmed to counteract the chaos. It wasn't that bad, by some standards.

But it was to me because I hadn't been "hardened off" when I was younger. I didn't have the boundaries and defenses. I look back now on my vision of myself from the inside and compare it to my actual behaviors and to how I must have appeared. 

I was a mess. Shame sets in. I had no "safe place" to enable me to recover. My childhood home had become a place of unrest and pain and there was nowhere else. People need safe spaces--especially children but even as adults. We have none now. 

Trump has seen to that. Anyone who thinks they are safe is uninformed. And people who don't feel secure act out. They lash out and misbehave. It's not admirable but it's understandable. Shame sets in. Denial sets in. If it's bad enough it can't be faced. 

The people have to die, symbolically or actually. That is where we are heading--some kind of death and then possibly a rebirth. Symbolic death and rebirth is easier and a more likely outcome but it doesn't rule out a lot of actual death among the innocent. 

Our entire society might implode or end up in the ditch, collateral to the crash-out of the addicts. It is all from within. We have no rational threats. We are our own enemies. Primitive shit kicks in when people feel unsafe and Trump pushes every button imaginable.

It's the only real talent he has. He is a born a bully and a troll, with one reaction to every challenge, to smash and humiliate anyone who resists him. THIS man is supposed to be responsible for the “rule of law” in our culture. It isn't just a travesty. It's a horror. 

Pray for the ditch. Pray for a symbolic death and a possibility of recovery. It's the best we can hope for now.

The Inhumanists

"Sadism" sounds so weird. Who would do that? They don't know, of course, that they are doing it or they think it is justified. It involves compartmentalization, projection, a delusionally defensive outlook or some other misanthropic personality malfunction. It's as easy to recognize as it is incomprehensible. 

It is all around us now, more openly than ever. It feeds on itself. Trump, the seething opportunist, doesn't even "present" in this way. I don't think he means to hurt anybody, he is that disconnected. For the real thing look at Jeff Sessions. Look at Mitch McConnell. Look at Paul Ryan. There will always be individual sadists. 

A society can absorb that. What a society can't absorb is an identity movement of sadists, a tribe of persecutory sociopaths. And we have that now. It is the old Confederacy. The Reb's were unable to get over the insult of finally having the Yankees try to end their regime of violence, hatred and oppression. 

We are living in the Confederacy now. Everything is about property and privilege. They vote as a bloc. It has enabled them to take over. Our system is based on assumptions about individual behavior which are based on assumptions about individual human nature. Those assumptions are now false.

The tribalists have won. The country is no longer ours. It's a sick entity reflecting a sick minority. The innocent will suffer more than anyone. It's always that way. The delusions create stronger drives than any sense of reality. Hate and division is stronger than togetherness and love, in the short run. 

We might be in very big trouble. The inhumanists feel small. They feel vulnerable. They feel slighted and insulted. In their twisted minds the anger and aggression are justified. They actually enjoy seeing other people suffer, as hard as that is to understand. It makes them feel more stable and secure. 

This is very sick shit. And we are awash in it.

Colored People and Catholics

If a hurricane comes your way pray you are not living in a place with a lot of colored people and Catholics, like Puerto Rico or New Orleans. You will be screwed. Better to be in Texas. Texans figured out how to suck off the government decades ago and never let up. And it sure doesn't hurt that there are a lot of pretty white Protestants there.

Logos vs. Chaos

We are witnessing much more than a partisan political struggle for short-term ends or even a battle for the soul of a nation. It is Star Wars, good against evil, and we are too conditioned to diminish our daily experiences in relation to mythical clashes to see the significance of it. Sure, it is an assault on decency and moderation.

Yes, it is the rejection of compromise and conciliation. Truly, it is an assertion of the "will to power" over inalienable rights. But it is more than all of these. It is another attempt to plunge humanity back into the abyss of meaninglessness. It is chaos overtaking intelligibility, the inversion of everything civilization stands for.

Scumbag Millionaires

I have never begrudged anybody anything. But now those with the most want to deprive everyone else of everything they can, even to the point of throwing away money on fruitless wars and burning though it in other ways to keep it out of the hands of their inferiors.

Watch how sociopaths and scum flock to the Republican Party, drawn to its cruelty by a lust for power and opportunities to bask in a culture of trolls and bullies. There must be a similar thing happening among the money people, as opposed to the social conservatives. 

The implication is that many of the wealthy supporters of the Republican web of lies are wealthy not because they are good but because there are not. They were willing to go lower--to do anything and abandon every shred of personal integrity to make money. 

These crooks and scumbags are the ones on the offensive, I believe. There are many good people with plenty of money. They are not the ones voting for Trump and supporting socially destructive, malicious measures of every kind, like more tax cuts for themselves. 

License to Lie

We can see now how well the Trumpian political brand, bullshit, melds with the new Republicanism, trending for decades to a lack of candor, transparency. legitimacy and competence. So much of it has to do with permission, working mostly subliminally.

Be the worst you can be. Trump and his political faction represent the sanction to hate, to lie, to steal, to insult and disenfranchise fellow citizens, and to uproot and annihilate the shredded American ethos of decency. Remember, we used to stand for something.

Shun Someone Today

My favored treatment for Sarah Sanders would be the ducking stool, plunging her into the Potomac on a charge of being excessively argumentative. Shunning is much too easy on her. However, in these tough times when "conservatives" have an alternative universe of lies to flee to I'll take a solid shun, to which Sanders was subjected recently.

In a more fair world her children would be snatched from her and detained out-of-state. Sanders and her political movement have been conditioned to assume there are never any consequences. There weren't even in the case of the criminal Bush regime which killed hundreds of thousands of people. I know, first we must have justice for Hillary.

What are war crimes in comparison with using a private email server in the service of one's country? Not that Bush and his crew didn't do more of that than Hillary, of course. This is the fundamental, racist, illegal and unconstitutional precept of the modern Republican Party, that there are arbitrarily different standards for different groups of people.

I Think We're Alone Now

America isn't isolationist it's isolated. Who wants anything to do with a bully? We assume whatever we are it is the best and better than everyone else.

We are the chosen people. Self-chosen, that is, a nation notable now only as the assholes of the world, an island of sociopathic greed and cruelty.

Winding Down

I have been deciding to wind down my life a little early, not that I have any plans or desire to die. Neither have I previously had the intention to withdraw from work or any of my other activities but I think I will now, because, why bother? The old pursuits seem pointless. For so many of us there is the awareness that we have been taking too much for granted thinking we lived in a sane, rational, somewhat fair, humane and sustainable democracy.

All of that is gone with the wind and burned to ashes. Not only have we failed to live up to our image of ourselves, it is so extreme it's not possible to believe we were ever the people we thought we were. We have lost our past, present and future, like a romance that ends so badly it discredits what you thought you once had. Even the good memories are tainted. Trump and his supporters have ended the illusion. The American romance is over.

An American Madman

Look at the most recent pictures of Trump. This is the face of a madman, those jowls slurring words in their smack of orange and spewing incoherence menacingly at the behest of a hostile, seething, malicious brain.

Soul Sacrifice: a Tragedy in Two Acts

Act One: Southern Baptists sell themselves to Satan to maintain an apartheid, terrorist rule in the American South with religious sanction.

Act Two: Republicans, using the Southern Strategy, mortgage their souls to these evangelical agents of doom for power and political success.   

In the end the Devil collects the debt. Payment is made in souls. America declines into a predatory and misanthropic political and cultural wasteland.

This is the story of the lost souls of America, resulting in the moral, ethical and spiritual destruction of the society. Many innocent lives were lost.

Many lives were ruined. All for nothing.

What's My Lie?

Swirling around the drain in their vortex, I want to make a case for better quality lies.

Republicans have gotten lazy and careless. Individual, lying creativity is perishing in the corporatization of deceit. They corporatize everything. Why not the prevailing social movement of our times: indirection, obfuscation, denial, distortion and duplicity?

Why bother being original when you have already won? With that in mind and the trend in reality entertainment up to the level of the White House, I recommend initiating a new game show to recognize and reward individual excellence in lying, What's My Lie?

How to Feel Sick

Want to feel sick? Recall and review all the pain inflicted on the country by Republicans in the last 20 years and think how unjustified it has been at the polls. More Americans voted against George Bush than for him in 2000. More Americans voted against Trump.

Decent people, in this situation, would have acknowledged the necessity of trying to reflect that negative mandate and shown some respect for the electorate. Instead these scumbag “winners” have shown nothing but contempt and opportunism.

Worse yet the Bushies, apart from botching their response to 9/11 in relation to national security and preparedness, used the tragedy to aggressively put through partisan measures having nothing to do with security, such as catastrophic tax cuts and deregulation.

And now we have Trump and his obsessive recklessness. They have to keep the insanity at fever-pitch for fear Americans will have a moment of clarity and see how they have been betrayed and screwed, finally rejecting the abomination.

Dancing Queen

Donald is the dancing queen, grooving-out in front of us all, ever the center of attention and craving praise. 

Cue it, ABBA. Shake it, Donald. It's forever Friday night at Donald's house. Rich people make their own rules.

True Shit

Blink. Just blink. Don't think. Look at what we are now, the land of Donald Trump.

Sinful Nature

Ivanka Trump and the White House have announced a line of aromatics, essences, colognes, perfumes, incenses, room deodorizers and vapes designed to help Americans get over their problems of despair at witnessing the dissolution of our society, the loss of its traditions and principles and the descent into madness. The line is called Sinful Nature.

An array of products has been engineered to produce feelings and attitudes of calm and compliance in the face of threats and instability. Ivanka has lived with this all her life, watching her father stumble from one misguided impulse to another, oblivious to the effect it has on his family. She has found that olfactory therapy helps her to survive. 

Visit the White House website for further information and to make purchases. The products have been tested on prisoners and detainees and, while not guaranteed to be safe, have helped participants in these trials withstand mental and physical abuse with greater serenity and grace. Their hideous cries were reduced to whimpers and groans.

Also, it made it easier for those applying the screws to continue with their work. Screaming and shrieks of anguish can hamper the most committed and hardened technician. They can't have that happening among the enforcers, a few of whom have been unreasonably affected recently by children weeping incessantly after being ripped from their parents. 

CALM DOWN, everyone. Enjoy an essence or a vape. It's probably not going to be okay but there's nothing you can do about it. All proceeds will be funneled through the Trump family's charity. Wait, that is being investigated. In any case, revenues are allocated to help build that beautiful, incredible, great and amazing WALL we have all been waiting for. 

Trump’s Asshole

Previously I have felt it wouldn't be fair, in an administration so rife with corruption, ill-will and incompetence, to choose a champion jerk but I think we have a winner in Trump-world, Stephen Miller. Steve Bannon is well gone and Jeff Sessions, I think, is his own asshole, so there you have it.

Miller's quiet presence has asserted itself in the unspeakable, deliberately confrontational, sadistic and viciously inhumane separation of children from their illegal-immigrant parents, who are fleeing problems mostly of OUR unowned responsibility. We have ruined any chance their countries had at functional government with our limitless demand for illegal drugs and in other, interfering ways. 

Stephen, congratulations. You are Trump’s asshole. Relish the experience. This is an honor that will go with you to your grave, may that be sooner rather than later, you unforgivable, reeking pile of garbage.

Republicans and Self-Fulfilling Expectations

People end up creating the world they believe in. You have to hope that most are rooted enough in reality to help create a world that makes sense. Not so with Republicans, of course, whose denial of reality is only the beginning. Their substitute is so sick and cynical it encourages a world of brutality and exploitation.

There are MANY examples of this but seeing a terrified two-year-old crying in horror as her mother is frisked by ICE agents I couldn't blame anyone, identifying with or pitying the child or the mother, for hating America and everything it stands for. Similarly, George Bush reassured Muslims of their worst fears about America. 

But, behold. There are Muslims as greedy, fucked-up and cynical as the Bushes and their successors, the Trumpists, who are outdoing even the the Bush crowd in their viciousness and greed. The Saudis and some other Arabs are coming around to this apocalyptic way of doing business. Fuck everyone else. Fuck the future. 

Grab everything you can and try to screw any potential rivals or justice-seekers into a permanent state of impotence. It's the American way, man. 

Behold the Blitz

At some point you have to step back and regard Republican corruption with awe. They say that's what happened to people who lived through the London blitz--that many of them lost all fear, became immersed in their powerlessness and passivity, and marveled at the display of mindless destruction.

False Witness

There are at least two kinds of false witness, deliberately misreporting something someone has seen and reporting about something someone has not seen. In the case of Jeff Sessions, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others citing biblical authority for persecuting children I think it is safe to say they have never truly glimpsed the transformation of the love of Christ in their hearts and minds.

I can't condemn them personally, only their behaviors. But they have, in effect, condemned themselves. For the other kind of false witness turn on the TV and tune it to Fox News. There, day after day, events are miscast in a consistent and systematic way, tearing down feelings of trust in individuals and institutions to the benefit of those seeking, always, more money and power.

It's interesting that Fox is doing just what the Russians have been doing in their attempts to undermine our democracy and weaken our resolve. They create increasing division, confusion and polarization.

Reason to Believe

I think the refusal of the Democrats to fight effectively for their values shows they are true believers in the resiliency and long-term stability of our system of government. The assumption is now wrong. Voters construe it as a lack of commitment and investment.

Democrats come across as inept and ideologically weak. Republicans, on the other hand, are blindly convinced of their rightness in a tribal way. Democrats, it might be too late, but there is only one choice now: ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK.

The Friends of Destruction

Well, guess what. The Republican Party is now the party of Donald Trump. For several decades I have been haranguing people saying they didn't understand how crazy it was, that Republicans had become revolutionaries and an army of apostates determined to reinvent the country as something unrecognizable and profane, a new thing serving only the welfare of a fraction of its citizens. That time has come.

Republican masters and organizers are grazing in the grass and the rest of us are heading for the ditch. If you think it's bad now wait until they destroy the economy again. They always do--with profligacy, with greed and its enabling deregulation and with fiscal insanity. They deliberately squander resources to keep them out of the hands of the rabble. They enrich themselves and run away. The end is here.

First in Treason

The last will be first. Suckass South Carolina is the state to watch as the leading edge of the Confederate wave. There the electorate consistently votes for the most degraded candidate, determined now by loyalty to Trump. South Carolina is at the bottom--morally bankrupt and bereft of hope--but in the new world order of Trumpism that places it at the top, as the state most willing to sell its soul and destroy the Union. 

They did this once before. Remember?

Giving It Up For Glory

Trump went to Singapore with one goal, personal glory. He gave away the store for that.

Where Assholes Dare

All-asshole government is now the norm. Policies, procedures and pronouncements are chosen and selected for insult-effect.

It is a government of baiters, trolls and bullies.

The Abbreviated End Times

The Rolling Fuckwad Abbreviated World Tour, Shower of Insults, has slunk to Singapore after disgracing itself in Canada but it's the degradation, after all, that people pay to see. Everything else is so boring. Humanity looks on, breath abated.

The titular head of the free world and another murderous little monster will drill holes in one another's heads, prospecting for ego gratification. The rules, designed to prevent calamitous collateral damage, are suspended in the name of art.