His Fraudulency, Jackass, and the Dark Side

Needless to say I was not thrilled this morning.

I awoke with the thought that here we were, We the People, with the quarter of our countrymen, and probably the ones that got that fucking "D" in Health class, handing us a go cup half full of warm Bud Lite for breakfast chortling "Now watch this shit!"

This was not a heartening thought.

Because we know how that ends; the flaming shopping cart a twisted wreck at the bottom of the cliff, the singed riders curled into commas writhing as they cup their genitals in pain, and the uninjured onlookers tittering in a manner both ashamed and nervous.

You know I have no expectations for the 45th President of the United States. As a man he is a spiteful bully, a pig-ignorant, querulous, greedy little man whose career to date has been that of a flim-flam artist, con man, and grifter fueled with his daddy's money and others' credulity and forbearance.

As a "public servant", well...there might have been some hope before today.

Still, even with my expectations as low as the swamp that His Fraudulency seems to have dragged to find his executive officers (a mix of plutocratic thieves and ideological dopes or, in the case of his Secretary of Education, both, and in spades...) the Trump inaugural address today managed to fail to rise to that sub-zero level of adequacy.

This was not the speech of a chief executive. It was the polemic of a tribal chief whose tribe thrives on darkness, fear, and hate.

Fallows has a good summary of the oration here. He notes that:

"What the speech did not have is any of the elements that marked its predecessors. An awareness of institutional continuity and resulting burdens. An ambition to make a fresh presentation those in his own country and around the world who were not part of his original base. A demonstration that he himself has been changed by the consequences of his new role. A vision of hope and progress that extends beyond fealty to his own self."

What the speech DID have was what we've already heard from this joker; the dystopian vision that, first, portrays the United States as a blasted hellscape and, second, portrays He, Trump as Our Only Hope:

"Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now."

There was the usual nonsense about how Our Once-Mighty Armies have sunk away:

"For many decades, we've enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we've defended other nation's borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America's infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay."

I could go on, but why? You've heard all this ridiculous "make America great again!" nonsense since this time last year. It doesn't make any more sense now that it did then.

And there was this:

"From this moment on, it's going to be America First."

Ok, look. I know that the fucking Tangerine Toddler is too ignorant of history to know this. Hell, I'd be surprised if he's even watched anything outside his own publicity stuff and Vivid Videos.

But somebody in his entourage either needs to tell him to knock this the fuck off or own the goddamn fascism it implies. Somebody in his posse has got to have at least some dim notion that Charlie Lindbergh luuurved him some Nazis and that's what "America First" has come to mean. You don't walk around saying "Hail, victory!" because of what it meant seventy-some years ago. You don't walk around saying "America First" unless you own up to the baggage.

GudDAMN.

And...here's what he didn't talk about: automation. Trump has nothing to say about that, largely because it neither fits his bill of particulars against the Obamian Dark Ages he is rescuing us from nor does it fit the agenda of his bankers whose profits stand to burgeon from replacing people with machines.

What happens to those people? Trump doesn't say. Maybe they can get jobs sheetrocking once all those Mexican rapists are deported.

And this shit?

"The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world."

...the fuck? You mean that kwashiorkor kid in Somalia? THAT little bastard's where my 401K went?

C'mon. That wealth hasn't gone any further than the Walton and Koch and DeVos family bank accounts, you nimrod, and you know that perfectly well...because a fair bit has (and, probably, will soon) find its way into yours. Your GOP pals have made sure of that. I wish Bernie Sanders had been there to slap you up the back ofthe head like Moe does to the other Stooges for that lie.

This went on and on, lie after lie, half-truth after half-truth. Pretty much all of what we've seen from His Fraudulency before. We've seen it, gang. This is it. This is what he's got. There's no hidden depth here. There's no surprisingly thoughtful awakening as he realizes that he's now Chief Executive of the New Rome, of the de-facto global imperium.

It's all Jackass all the way down; all ranting, butt-hurt third grader who's managed to memorize half "facts" off the internet conspiracy-theory page he read last night.

This is it.

The thing I really hate about today is that through him the worst ideas in American history will take full possession of the levers of national power. The anti-Americanisms of the Malefactors of Great Wealth: Greed. Proud stupidity. Shameless selfishness.

The filthy rich have finally reversed 1932 and are poised to return the bulk of us, to the degree that they can, to a coarser, meaner, poorer time, the Gilded Age of their waking dream.

And this, this sad, bloated little grifter with his mail-order bride and his ridiculous combover and his doughy orange meatface, this is all that stands between us the the Kongressional Wingnut Kook Kaukus' mad demands to hammer us into as close to a ginormous Carnegie mill town as they can make us.

We.

Are.

So.

So.

So.

SO.

Fucked.

Post-Trump Ruminations

Frank Moraes has a good post up about the direction that progressives might take in light of the minority rejection of "liberalism" last Tuesday and, specifically, the problem that is being widely discussed about how - outside of the open racism, xenophobia, and misogyny what are, let's not kid ourselves, a big part of Il Douche's appeal to a basketful of deplorable white people - to fire up the Democratic base.

His first point, on the Electoral College, is indisputable. The damn thing is nothing but a ridiculous vestige of the slavery era. But, since it was designed specifically to over-represent the slaveowning South (and, thus, white landowners in particular) but has morphed into overrepresenting rural whites, for the Republicans that’s a feature for them not a bug.

Frank seems to think that they'd be good with 86ing it. I'm not so sure. For all that they make mouth-noises about how much they haaaaaate it it’s worth noting that it’s 40% failure rate was a felix culpa for the Party of Personal Responsibility. If the GOP was being honest I think they’d admit that they don’t reeeeally want to chance relying on the popular vote in presidential elections...

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Here’s the thing on the “Democratic base”, and the same problem I have with all the morning-after analyses that blame the Democratic Party for not being more responsive to the “economic anxiety” of the white working class.

If the Democratic Party doesn't want to become the straightforward "non-white party" there has to be some appeal for non-racist, non-xenophobic (basically, "non-asshole") whites. One problematic element for Clinton was her close ties to things like globalization and "free trade" agreements lile the TPP and NAFTA. The single strongest arguments that Bernie Sanders' supporters are using for this loss is that Clinton did nothing, or even attempt, to deploy Bernie's populist, anti-globalization/offshoring, anti-inequality platform.

The idea is that if the Democrats provide ideas to help with "economic anxiety" that they could have peeled off the non-asshole white voters from Drumpf.

The problem of non-intellectual/semiskilled living-wage jobs isn’t going away. The “problem” isn’t so much that those jobs are being stolen by Mexican rapists (tho the willingness of undocumented immigrants from the southern tier of the Americas to take piss-poor-nonliving-wage-jobs DOES have a lot to do, IMO, with the continuation of those jobs as piss-poor-nonliving-wage-jobs) but that
1) barring tariff protections, restrictive trade legislation, and a massive forceful reduction in capital mobility those jobs are going, or gone, and won’t be coming back, and
2) many of those that ARE here are being rapidly automated.

A Democratic party that stood for an end to that would have real problems. The press, neither knowning nor caring to know the technological and fiscal issues, would hammer it as the Party of Luddites and the Party of Protectionism. The People of Wal-Mart would shriek like gelded hogs as the price of cheap plastic crap soared. Manufacturers would whine and squeal about being forced to employ buggy-whip manufacturers...

Don’t get me wrong; I think that the Democratic Party needs to think hard, and come up with SOME kind of better solution to issues like global trade, trade agreements, deindustrialization and offshoring than they have.

But I think the problem is that, very much like climate change, this is an insanely tough challenge, a very, very complex issue and one that would require a massively complex, interlocking system of legal, economic, social, and political changes to solve...if, indeed, it IS solveable.

And you also have to factor in that our political system is ridiculously poorly designed to solve problems like that. Our public is ridiculously poorly prepared to inform itself, think through, and vote intelligently on problems like that. Climate change is, IMO, the canary in that coal mine and We the People have done horrendously on that issue.

So...while I agree that the Democrats need to do “something” about this whole “economic anxiety” problem I’m not sure that they can arrive at a solution that will carve off enough of the white nationalists who want to hear Trump tell them that he’s gonna build that big, beautiful wall and bring all those jobs back in a shopping cart also filled with rainbows and cuddly puppies.

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This goes for Bernie and the "Revolution" movement, too, by the way. I think his message on trade agreements and economic inequality was and is a good one. I think the Democratic Party needs to embrace it, and become more openly...perhaps not "counter-globalization" but more intelligent on globalization. Right now the DLC/Clintonist message is "Globalization! It's What's For Dinner!". That's fine for the sort of Democrat that books a suite at Davos, but the rest of us? We're not getting much out of that, and the lack of enthusiasm showed bigger than hell this past Tuesday.

But. Even if Bernie closed the trade loopholes, kiboshed the TPP and NAFTA, and got a top tax bracket back in the 90's...the problems of deindustrialization and automation wouldn't go away, and I'm not sure whether Bernie and the Sanders Movement has thought about what happens the day after the TPP is burned down to ash, either.

I'm saying that I think the the Democratic Party needs to move Bernie-wards on trade and globalization. I'm ALSO saying that I'm not sure that solves the problems that make this issue such a perfect one for a demagogue like Trump.

Welcome to our new Tangerine-hued Overlord!

Well...at least we won't have to worry about all that obstructionism!

Still...here's what worries me most about yesterday.

The GOP has much the same priorities today as it did in 2001; taxcuttery, deregulation, privatization, in essence to destruction of what remains of the environmental, labor, and safety regulations, the welfare state, and the New Deal left by eight years of Reagan and eight years of Bush (and eight years of a pretty damn centerist Clinton...) - a return to the pristine unmoderated vulture capitalism of the Gilded Age.

Ironically we were spared that in 2001 only by Osama and Bush having to spend the next seven years chasing muj in the desert instead of running down granny's Social Security or kicking the apartment doors of gay adopters.

Today Trump and his supporters have no such distractions. Trump himself has shown very little enthusiasm for wars other than the usual war-on-terror bullstuff that's carried on thru Obama's tenure. Osama can't come to our rescue now, he sleeps wit' da fishes.

Nope. Donnie's got a TON of time and inclination to use it to endorse Paul Ryan's Randite boner and Joni Ernst's kill-the-fags butthurt. He's got nothing to do but grab us by the pussy and return us to the Republican paradise of 1899; when men were men, women were life support systems for a vagina, and when you could dump your coal tar and your fly ash in the crick without some prissy bureaucrat whinin' about "drinking water" or some such faggy shit.

Since now I think we get to live in an Dickensian cosplay only with real hunger and sickness here's the thing, Red America:

You voted for this. You own it. It's all yours. Now you get to Make America Great Again.

And...

When your poor neighbor's Medicare voucher runs out and she curls on her front steps in pain unable to afford her medication just remember; you voted for this.

When the guy at the taqueria who used to make those great churros is gone Friday just remember; you voted for this.

When the fence wire goes up across what used to be your favorite wilderness trail just remember; you voted for this.

When the DA refuses to indict the three men who roughed up your daughter's gay friend just remember; you voted for this.

You've been whining for years that political correctness and liberal prejudices kept you from making America great again. Those are now gone, swept away; in six months you will control all three branches of the federal government. Your dreams have come true.

And when those dreams become your fellow Americans' nightmares, just remember;

You voted for this. You own it. I cannot stop you. I tried. I failed.

What happens now will be on your heads, for good...or ill.

As for me..?

You will be unsurprised to know that I despise the President-elect and all he stands for. While I cannot do much I will do everything I can to fight him and his party's agenda. I will work, to the extent I can, here in Oregon, every minute for the next four years to mitigate the damage he and his minions will do to my friends, my state, my country, and the world. If I cannot do that I will work, at least, here in Oregon to build a great, big, beautiful wall to keep Trumpism away from my friends that he would pursue; my gay and lesbian friends who fear the loss of their legal marriage, my immigrant and Muslim friends who simply fear, period. My daughter, who is afraid that when he gins up a trade - or a hot - war with China that she will suffer the fate of the Japanese in WW2.

He IS the President. The laws under which our nation is governed have rewarded him and his supporters with the right TO govern. I'm not going to imitate the Republicans under Obama, I'm not going to be a whiny little titty-baby and spend the next four years refusing to accept that and trying to dirty-trick my way into undermine his legitimacy.

Fight his agenda? Sure. Refuse to accept his victory, #NotMyPresident? No. He is my President, and yours, much as it hurts me to say that.

And I swear, I will not rest for the next four years until I can no longer say that.

Notes from a constitutional crisis

About a couple of weeks ago I put up a post that bitched about how modern "conservatism", as embodied by the U.S. Republican party, had 1) no viable policies that didn't effectively promise a New Gilded Age of concentrated wealth and widespread poverty, and 2) no intention of allowing the United States to function unless if functioned in such a way as to enact their policies.

For this I was called "unconvincing" and "meanspirited".

Well.

What I find insanely frustrating is that while I don't expect all Americans to agree with me that the current GOP is completely bughouse politically - there were all sorts of people in this country who believed in slavery, after all; "say what you want, at least it's an ethos..." - I would expect them to agree that our current system of government, flawed as it may be, is generally superior to a dictatorship.

But...refusing to accept the governance of people who don't share your political views is just exactly that. It's what dictators do; they use force to prevent those who disagree with them from effectively disagreeing with them.

That this has become the default position of one of the only two political parties we allow ourselves is madness. That this madness is not routinely characterized as such by the public press in tones of the utmost horror is beyond madness.

Damn near a third of my "fellow citizens" are objectively in love with dictatorship providing that they (or their political surrogates) get to be the dictator.

I have no idea what may come of this.

But it cannot be anything good.

"...the fun is having lots to do and not doing it."

I did promise I'd write no more about the 2016 election, and, technically, this post isn't about the 2016 election but my fears of what that election represents.

As I said below, it is blindingly obvious to anyone that hasn't drunk the wingnut Koolade that the GOP in it's present incarnation offers only two things:

1. Stooging for open oligarchy, and
2. Comfort for white nationalism, Christian theocracy, and fear of the "others" (whether those others are gay, or brown, or Muslim)

And that's really it. There's no "hope" there. There's nothing aspirational. There's no vision of a future United States that isn't a polluted, plutocratic, conservative-Christian feudality. That's it; if you white (male, Christian) you right. If you brown...well, fuck off. And you lib'ruls, homos, uppity wimmens, nigras, beaners, immigrants of all stripes, Muslims, atheists...aaaaand I might as well stop here because I'm just depressing myself.

But this toxic stew of corporate-fondling, hate, narrowmindedness, bigotry, and weath-whoring is embraced by damn near four out of ten Americans.

Now...don't get me wrong. I'm not in love with the mainstream corporate-whoring Democratic Party. The Dems' neglect of the horrible effects of capital flight, economic inequality, and crony corporatism are a huge part of why we're in this mess right now.

But.

The Sanders movement shows that the Democrats CAN be pulled to the left.

Not only can the GOP not go there...it's obvious that it won't even let the corporatist centerist Democrats go there - it won't let them be corporate centerist Democrats because they're insufficiently fucking nutzoid for smacking homos, luuurving Jesus and snowflake babies, hugging rich people and big corporations, and bombing the shit out of darkies and fuzzy-wuzzies.

The parallel that jumps to my mind (and I’m not the only one, given the spate of articles about this…) is the rise of Jacksonism in the 1820s.

And the reason that scares me is the damage Jacksonism did; the next thirty years of American politics were dominated by Jacksonians and Jacksonian policies like internal minority genocide and external aggressive war. Plus the malign neglect of slavery (or the outright approval of and expansion-encouragement of it). A whole bunch of our worst Administrations were Jacksonian, culminating in Buchanan. Basically Jacksonism was the bedrock on which the Civil War was founded. The worst feature of the politics of Jacksonism was that they made it impossible for the United States to simply outlaw slavery as Great Britain did between 1830 and 1845.

The upside of Trumpism versus Jacksonism is that we no longer have a franchise limited to white males. The downside is that the GOP’s propaganda machine has done a helluva a great job pulling in the “white male allies”; Christian theocrats, people fearful of imaginary jihadis under the bed, and the plutocracy into a coalition that looks like it represents about 40% of the public.

And the downside of that is that this basket of deplorables is dead-set against allowing the United States any government but the one they desire.

Do I think that we will see “another Jackson Administration” anytime soon? Probably – and hopefully – not.

But I think that the GOP has become a self-licking icecream cone; I think that regardless of whether the media comes down hard on the Trumpeters after November that this hard core of Jacksonians will not dissipate, and the United States will be, in effect, dealing with the same situation that broke the nation in 1860; there will be a large, indigestible, irredentist minority that will never, NEVER accept the legitimacy of their opponents. No non-Jacksonian/Trumpter will be allowed to govern. Obstruction will be the order, not just of the day but of the week, the year, the decade.

Eventually the American public will look for a “savior”, and a Man on Horseback seems all the more likely to be that "savior".

Hopefully I will bide safe in a ditch when that happens.

Quo Vadis II: Desperation Boogaloo

So yesterday I posted my thoughts on the GOP. Trump or no Trump, that sonofabitch is trouble and the short answer is, simply; needs to be taken out behind the barn and shot in the head.

But...

Here's my concern.

The problems inherent in a post-industrial economy are genuine. Forget that the idiot Trumpeters are responding with the Wrong Rage, baying for a moronic pussy-grabbing caudillo whose very stupidity will ensure that he will be a tethered balloon for the oligarch-pandering wealth-whores that run the rest of the GOP and, thus, end up doing nothing or worse for the poor meatheads who pine for him. Concentrate on the economic cause of that rage.

The last time the United States was run as an open oligarchy it was a complete shitshow for everyone else, and it was turbulent in a way we've completely forgotten in our cushy era of labor-management peace and relatively level inequity. Outside the people who didn't count - the wommens and the darkies of whatever complexion (the red, yellow, and brown were included in the outcastes) - the period between the 1870s and the 1930s were distinguished by a welter of riots and strikes and the every-present threat of "anarchy" in the form of scary bearded anarchists (definitely foreign, probably Jewish, suspiciously dirty in some vaguely Slavic or Latin sort of way...) lurking under the tablecloth with smouldering bomb in hand.

And this didn't even count the ACTUAL scary foreigners in places like Communist Russia and Fascist Italy or Germany. Until the recent mania for "Islamic terror" we've seen nothing like the sort of social panic that "anarchy" caused and the resulting Red scares and things like bloody strikebreaking and police spying and ethnic hatreds and lynchings and...well, you get the idea. It was a bad time not to be a Rockefeller or a Carmody and let's not return there.

It seems to me that there needs to be some sort of political alternative for the sort of people who broke for Trump this election, one with less open racism and xenophobia.

And there is, by the way; Sanders Progressiveism, featuring all the nutritious populism and economic egalitarianism without the toxic racism, sexism, and xenophobia! But the Trumpenproletariat won't take it because, well, eeeeew, Dhimmicrats and Defeatocrats and Feminazis, oh my!

So even if the Sanders progressives were to capture the Democratic Party as the teabaggers captured the GOP there's no way forward there.

What else?

Libertarians are, frankly, nuts. Anyone whose party platform calls for abolition of both the income tax AND all federal firearms regulations shouldn't be allowed to play with cutlery, much less the national debt. The simple notion of these libertarian idiots (but I repeat myself) trying to fund enough law enforcement to round up the sorts of people who would go out and buy an M240 Bravo to put behind the razor wire next to the fucking mailbox makes my head hurt.

Greens? Perhaps when they cut their ties with antivaccination goofballs.

And there the realistic political options end, at least for now.

I find all of this very depressing. I can see the problems, and I can see solutions...but not a viable way to get the U.S. public from here to there.

WASF.

Fortunately it's almost 5:00pm, so I can begin to start drinking heavily.

Quo Vadis?

John Scalzi has a fun post up at his site talking about the Tangerine-hued Shitgibbon. It's pure schadenfreudelich entertainment, except for this:

"I feel sorry for many of my individual friends who are Republicans and/or conservatives, who have to deal with the damage Trump is doing to their party and to their movement, even if I belong to neither."

Because 1) if you're a "Republican" or a "conservative" you made this golem (as Scalzi points out), and 2) without Trumpism there are neither "Republicans" nor "conservatives".

Seriously.

Think about it. Because if you’re still a Republican at this point you’re either one of the deplorables or…what? Still in it for the tax cuts in perhaps the least-taxed of the industrial democracies? Hoping for a juicy piece of privatizing the Bonneville Power Administration? Wishing on a “deregulation” star that your chemical company can return to the fucking pre-Love-Canal Era of Dump Yer Shit Where Ya Wannit?

I mean…take the fantasy economics, the theocracy, the bigotry, and a vague yearning for imperialism (a new American Century) out of the GOP platform and what’s left? The Cuba Embargo?

First, I have absolutely zero “sympathy” for anyone who votes to foist that vile pottage of stupidity and used food on me.

Second - since I swore not to write about this election this isn't about this election - my point is that there is no way for "Republicans" or "conservatives" to "deal with the damage Trump is doing to their party and to their movement" since fucking Trump IS their fucking party and their fucking movement. “Conservative” in the US has come to mean a credo-like faith in many things that are objectively vile. Trump has not made them more vile – he’s simply stripped off the pretense of civility that made them seem less vile.

For example; think about the Republican and “conservative” position about women. "Women" as in "what role do women play in American life?"

You know what the GOP/conservative version of that role is. Kinder, kirche, kuche. From marital subservience to forced reproduction to forbidden lesbianism to workplace harassment and underpayment to day-care to...well, to pretty much everything the GOP default position is; grab ’em by the pussy. Make ’em do what Daddy knows is best. Patriarchy, beeyotches!!!!

What is Trump doing...other than saying that out loud?

The Big Problem of the GOP, though, is that if you dump Trumping...what is left?

What other than DLC-style New Deal Democratic policies, that is..?

Without Trumpism all the GOP really has left is stooging for open plutocracy, and I can’t imagine even at this point that the Trumpenproletariat will be willing to openly go all D.B. Norton Motor Corps on 9 NOV.

I wonder, though...anybody willing to wager all the money in their pocket against all the money in mine that sometime over the next four years we see a mashup of the “alt-right” Stormfronters and the teabilly Trumpeters going full-on Blackshirt? The GOP becoming a genuine neofascist/white nationalist Fronte National?

Release SFC Kraken!

A friend of mine sent me a comment with the attached image that...well, it completely brought out the Army sergeant in me. And the more I think about it, the more it's so...well, so completely "me" that I had to post it.

So. Here it is:

"I'm not saying that these things can't be done. I'm saying that when Sanders says "we can't afford to stop fighting"...arrgh!

To give you an example; I got a call from the Oregon for Bernie Sanders 2016 people last week. The nice girl was asking me to come to some sort of "Rock Against the TPP" concert.

How did this do anything to stop the TPP, given that Congress isn't going to vote on it this year and the process is currently idle, but that Oregon's delegation (outside that rat bastard Walden) is already pledged to vote against it. Well, ummm, yeah, it won't, really. OK, says I, then how do we DO something to stop the fucking TPP? Ummm...I'm not sure, says the nice girl, but the Sanders meeting is Tuesday and I'll be sure to ask. OK, you do that, and here's my e-mail; you send me a quick note and tell me what they told you.

So far? Nothing.

That's my frustration. So far there's been no effort to unseat the bastard Walden and turn Oregon all blue. No efforts to secure the defenstration of the GOP in Salem. No efforts to galvanize the fucking rednecks in Clackamas County or propagandize the hicks in Gold Beach that they need to understand that public health care and a decent minimum wage and a return to the 90% top bracket will make the safer than another fucking AR-15. There's been NO LOCAL EFFORTS at all.

STOP fighting? When do we fucking stop TALKING and START fighting?

Tell ya what.

I'm gonna go to the next goddamn Sanders Tuesday night meeting and I swear to fucking God; Imma bring a piece of dimension lumber and wall-to-wall counsel those pie-in-the-sky fuckers about how you go in and win a goddamn knife fight.

I'll give you a hint: it ain't about going to a goddamn concert."

Sigh.

Sometimes the sergeant in me comes out at very inopportune times...

Now we know.

In re: Mister Trump's "Second Amendment Solutions" statement today, in 1972 Hunter Thompson wrote this:

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for. Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"

And now we know.

(h/t to Charles Pierce, who mined this priceless quotation from the depths of prehistory...)

Toto, we may not be in fucking Kansas but I think we've been here before...

In the past couple of months I keep coming across stuff like this: apologetics for the Trumpendross that basically claims that "It's NOT about racism, it's about Trump's embodying empowerment for and rejection of contempt for poor white working class people!"

Fuck that dumb shit.

Because these Trumpenproletariat had a perfectly good alternative that offered all the populism, all the ire against the "elites", economic insecurity, offshoring, inequality, and the New Gilded Age, only with 100% less racism, sexism, bombing-foreigners-ism, and the assorted idiotic nonsense that is embedded in a "Trump candidacy".

Sanders.

The C.H.U.D.s that have flocked to Il Douche could just as easily have turned out for Bernie; I mean, if the appeal there was really all about wanting a return to the Good Old Days when a Man could earn a Living by the Sweat of His Brow and not just about hatin' on some nigras and beaners.

Instead they ignored him in droves.

So Trumps appeal has nothing to do with "economics".

It's about hatin' on nigras and beaners (an uppity wimmens and lib'ruls).

I was a trifle too young – only 11 in ’68 – to remember much but what I do remember of the 1968 presidential race was my parents' incandescent hatred of Wallace and LeMay – “the bigot and the looney”, I remember my father the Master Chief calling them, between Wallace’s open racism and LeMay saying that he’d use nukes to win wars.

My sister and I set up our Halloween pumpkins in the backyard on election day, dubbed one “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” and pincushioned them with arrows with the old wooden bow my father had made back in the Thirties.

The economics are missing but in almost all other respects I don't see much of a difference between the Wallace-LeMay campaign and this year's Republican candidate's. It's all about scary dark people and more strength.

So I have no new outrage about Trump that isn’t tempered by my overall loathing of the renegade madness of the bizarre mashup of economic royalism and theocratic triumphalism that is the current GOP. Trumps’s a Republican so that is to say, he’s against civil rights, women not being property, equal prosperity at home and an absence of punitive violence abroad. His “positions” (those that aren’t utter nonsense, like the shitgibbonesque “border wall”) are bog-standard GOP positions, which is to say utterly Gilded Age punching-down punishment of anyone not in the two-yacht family.

So I can watch the latest metastsization of the brain-cancer that has destroyed the higher functions of the GOP since Reagan conned it into submission and Gingrich fed it the monkey brains with the ruminative calm of an arsonist contemplating where to place the accelerant so as to ensure that the shitheap of a madhouse goes up quickly and thoroughly enough to roast as many of the vile coterie of malicious gibbering loons inside as possible.

Electoral Sigmoidoscopy

I won't pretend to be in luuuuurve with HRC. She's an order or magnitude better politically and as a homo sapiens than the clown the GOP is running, so there's that.

(For what it's worth, the funniest piece of political news of the week has been Trump inciting Russian intelligence to pirate Clinton's e-mails. Because it's such a perfect sort of Trump-thinks-about-as-far-as-the-tip-of-his-of-course-it's-not-tiny-it's-YUUUGE-penis thing that Trump does all the time. In that the fucking dope has, in effect, just given the Russian commo intel people an open invitation and excuse for when they hack President Trump and Secretary of State Gingrich's private e-mails.

The laugh is in watching Trump thinking how that Trump - being the Smartest Guy in the Room - is SO going to "out-deal" Putin because he knows Putin and he's such a smart deal-maker, while watching Putin's smile of contempt for the combed-over skinsack that is so immense that it's practically visible from orbit.

The old KGB operative knows perfectly well that he's going to play the simpleminded egotistical blowhard like a fucking ocarina, and he smiles and nods and just knows that he has to sit there and the boob will trigger the booby trap and blow himself and his country sky-high. Watching Trump think he's playing Putin is kind of like watching Wile E. Coyote setting an Acme trap. Or it would be, if the dumb fucker wasn't within one standard deviation of being leader of the Free World...)

What kinda gripes me, tho, is to hear my Bernie pals griping about how Sanders would have done SO much better in the general.

Seriously, folks? Given that the GOP Pretty Hate Machine never really spun up against Bernie we have no idea what would have happened once the swiftboaters and ratfuckers and liemeisters started in on him the way they have on HRC for the past 20 years.

But let me take a guess.

Socialist? COMMIE! Ranty Grampy? Hippie tax-and-spender? Free college? JEW!?

Think that might have come spewing 24-7 from Fox and Fat Rushbo and Beck and Breitbart and all the other flying monkeys of the Right? Think that the "mainstream media" might have picked up on that? Think that might have been hammering into the U.S. Publc's teensy tinsy brains from CNN and MSNBC and freaking ESPN for all I know.

So. Be proud of Bernie for what he represents.

But don't kid me you KNOW he'd have cleaned up in the general. Because you know as well as I do that the Public is an Ass and the GOP is a bunch of mad renegade proctologists.

And, yeah. I kinda feel that way about this election, too.

Tings Bruk Down, Part 2

I'm sitting at my desk here at work. Not working, obviously, but just waiting for the clock to run down. My Timbers are playing tonight and I'm idly wondering whether to go. I've been immersed in soccer lately. Copa America. EURO 2016. The local teams, Timbers and Thorns. As well as writing the Thorns for Slide Rule Pass. So I'm honestly torn. I'd kind of like to see the match. And I'd kind of like to go home and do nothing.

As I sit I'm reading the Internet. News, opinion, various blogs and websites I enjoy.

Every so often I check into my Facebook for good stuff like this:

Lee: I lost my electroporation virginity today - although my partner was electrifying, it was brief and shocking and I won't know for days whether I'm satisfied. ‪#‎scienceporn‬

Comments
John (a.k.a FDChief): I have this mental picture of you reclining on the lab table in nothing but a lab coat and cigarette holder while the device intones (in the HAL voice from 2001): "Procedure complete, Lee. Are you sure it was good for you..?"
Lee: That sounds like every day in my lab, John.
John: Well your work is a damn sight more fun that mine, Lee. WTF? GEOLOGY was supposed to be the place to major if your primary interest in science was primarily intoxication and reproductive anatomy. When the hell did you biologists get so lascivious?
Diane: Does HR know?
Lauren (Lee's daughter): I swear, you and John Lawes could write a book on things your offspring never want to hear
John: But not, alas, cooperatively. Apparently biology is the New Sexology and I appear to have completely missed THAT memo...
Lauren: You should ask her to recite her diatribe on pornographic pollination. I was scarred for life after that one. I swear, parents say the darndest things
John: That's the point. You get to be pains in our ass when you're little; we get to be pains in yours when you get big...It was worth the price of admission explaining to my daughter about puberty.
Lauren: My mom drew me a scientifically accurate diagram of the uterus and phallus. It was very educational
John: Knowing your mom...I'll bet. And probably pretty funny.
Lee: I don't remember any of that...

Some people give good Facebook. Some people post reams of fucking cat pictures and links to everything and nothing. It's like letter-writing. Remember those? Let me tell you; I could write a terrific letter. Most people? Not so much. That translates over to the electronic version of epistolary friendships, too, and I'll let you guess which is more enjoyable.

But here's the other thing I found on FB today:

"Democrats appointed to the Democratic Party’s Platform Committee by Hillary Clinton and the party’s chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, defeated a ban on fracking on June 24."

This was from my friend (and commentor here) Mike's feed. Mike and a lot of the comments on the original post were, understandably, furious.

It just made me sad and sick at heart.

Because I just don't see that there's a real hope in hell of "doing something" about anthropogenic global warming (or "AGW" for short...) through our political process. And if that's not possible...well...I'm not sure what this planet will look like with a return of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and I'm not sure I want to.

That, in turn, got me to thinking about what look like very similar electoral situations; Great Britain's "Brexit" referendum and the people who wanted out of the EU, and the coming U.S. general election and the people who want Trump.

In both cases there seem to be a fairly good prima facie case for opposing both Brexit and Trump. Both appear to be based largely on rumors and lies and fed by nativist anger and racist rage. Both appear to be like hitting yourself in the face with a hammer to swat a fly on your nose.

But in both cases there's the arguments my friend Mike and other lefty pals employ against HRC; that the "Remain" argument for the EU (and the "better than Trump" argument for Clinton) are, in effect, demanding your vote for something deeply flawed, something that rewards the rentier class that has effected a silent coup.

Mike and the Sanders supporters make good points about how the current system is horribly skewed against the "regular" Joe and Molly. How things like trade deals and crony capitalism strip people of jobs and wealth, and how people are sick of being "ruled", in effect, by unelected corporations and capitalists. I agree. The current economy isn't "good" for people like me, or my family.

The current system isn't "good" for the planet in terms of accelerating climate change. Both need to be changed.

But what bedevils me is...how?

Republics and democracies aren't good a big, radical changes. They're not good, either, at demanding that their citizens do things that they don't like to do in the short term to make things better in the long term. Remember when Jimmy Carter asked us to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater? The average U.S. citizen knows perfectly well that things like eating McDonald's rainforest-beef hamburgers, driving an SUV, and living in a 3,500-square foot house with a quarter-acre lawn in a city built in a fucking desert are bad ideas.

They just don't want to not do them.

And - short of war - it's hard to either make them or persuade them TO do them.

That's why I eventually bagged on Sanders. Because I'd read things like this:

"We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies and other powerful special interests.

We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade. Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour. We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.

We need to end the international scandal in which large corporations and the wealthy avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes to their national governments.

We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels."

...and I'd think, yeah, you're right. That'd be great. That'd be awesome.

How the fuck would you do that?

I mean, how does President Sanders go to Congress...the same Congress that has a House full of shit-flinging flying monkey wingnuts and a Senate that has enough of the same to prevent cloture, remember?...and tell them, yep, I want to cut the Defense budget and spend it on solar and wind energy. I want to reform the tax code to prevent capital flight and return the top marginal rate to 90% like back in Ike's day. I want to cut CEO pay. I want to raise tariffs to prevent offshoring and job loss.

These are fucking people who think that the problem is that there's not enough oil drilling in fucking National Parks, for fuck's sake. These are people who are elected by even stupider people who think that the world was created 6,000 years ago and that Jesus wants you personally to have the full tank of gas that those dirty, smelly Mooslim people stole and hid under their deserts.

Add to that the people, like the people who voted "Leave", think that "international cooperation" means Brussels telling them what shape their bananas should be.

And you have to convince all these people; the good folks, the worriers, the activists, the goofballs, gomers, nativists, racists, ignoramuses, conspiracy-theorists, ding-dongs, and low-information knotheads to be patient, compromise...and to give up their styrofoam cups and cheap plastic crap from Wally-Mart and NASCAR and put down their Confederate flags and ride the fucking bus to work.

What president could do that?

Hell, Jesus riding on a velociraptor and carrying an AR-15 couldn't fucking do that.

That's what kinda drove and drives me crazy about Bernie. Yes, these are all good things. Now...how do you get them? How do you convince people or coerce people or force people to stop building suburbs? To stop driving to work? To stop buying disposable diapers? To stop living in McMansions? To stop voting for people who tell them that they don't HAVE to stop doing all those things because "global warming" is a lie?

I want to hear not an uplifting speech. I want to hear a plan. I want to hear an actual strategy. How are you going to beat down FOX "News"? How are you going to force-feed Michael Savage and Rushbo and Coulter and Malkin and Beck and every other talk-radio moron a nice, hot cup of STFU? How are you going to get people who don't want to accept the science of climate change to accept it and live the lives they need to live to help change things? How are you - in detail, now - going to get people to ask for more taxes and less cheap Chinese-made crap and more equity?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't keep working for this good stuff Bernie talks about.

I'm saying that by its very nature it's a ridiculously difficult, painful, time-consuming body of work. That you're going to get beat. A LOT. And that you're going to have to grit your teeth and work with people you don't like...like goddamn DLC triangulators and people who want fracking regulated rather than banned.

And that's fucking hard.

So hard that I'm not sure it can ever happen.

And that, in turn, really depresses the shit out of me. The worst are, indeed, full of passionate intensity. And the best...well, they're getting sick and tired of trying to roll that rock uphill.

I want to believe that there are ways. Real ways, practical ways, workable ways, to make all the good stuff that Bernie wants happen.

I just can't see anyone actually producing them.

Crossroads

My Sanders-supporting friends, let me put on my "older than dirt" political partisan cap and say this just once;

You stand at a crossroads now.

You can continue to strive for a more progressive Democratic Party in the future, for a lessening of corporate and wealthy interests within that party (tho if you think you're gonna get anywhere near "social democracy" in a European sense within the next century you've been huffing glue...). You can build grassroots organizations to help push the "Overton window" back to the Left.

Or you can retire to your tent to sulk about unfairness and corporate eeeeevil and stacked-deck primary processes. And as such you'll have as much effect on the political future of this nation as...Ralph Nader has had after 2000.

I've been there. I campaigned for John Anderson (remember him..?) back in 1980. I was a Dean partisan. I've labored for progressive candidates since I was old enough to vote. And I've been frustrated again and again watching "conservatives" work constantly and successfully within THEIR party to hijack it. Look around. The Donald isn't a "rogue Republican" - he's the Climax Teatard, the ultimate expression of what these Chrisopaths and antitaxers and Tenthers and Segregation Now - Segregation Forever diehard Dixiecrats have been drooling for since Reagan.

Since REAGAN; thirty-five years. Thirty-five YEARS, friends.

You want a "Sanders" in the White House and a Democratic version of the "Freedom Caucus" in the House? Are you prepared to work patiently for thirty-five years rather than throw a massive tantrum in this one?

Because that's what it'll take. And you can take those first steps today that will take us there then.

Or not.

Your call.

/rant...

Something Berning

I waited until the last minute to throw my ballot envelope in the drop box at the Goodwill down on North Lombard.

Partially because I could. Oregon makes it dead easy to be a lazy voter. You don't have to actually go anywhere or do anything other than open your ballot, fill in the little bubbles (or write in "I.P. Freely" if you don't feel like voting for any of the many unopposed candidates on the damn thing), then lick it closed and dump it back in the mail. Or, if like me you're too goddamn cheap to stick a postage stamp on it, toss it in one of the big blue-and-white democracy dumpsters dotted around the city.

But partially because I just really couldn't get too excited about Exercising the Franchise.

I tried to work up some enthusiasm for this year's election. There were fifteen - fifteen! - candidates for mayor of Portland including someone who was identified on the ballot sheet as "The Ack".

Seriously.

There were a couple of tax proposals - a gas tax and a boost to the property tax for our historical society - that I wanted to pass.

The ballot was remarkably free from the sorts of loony sonsofbitches I complained about back in 2013. Which is good, don't get me wrong. But which isn't really very exciting.

And there was the Democratic primary.

Early on in the process I went to one of the Sanders' get-togethers. I call it that because that was really all it was; there was nobody from the Sanders campaign staff there, and no real organizers from the local party apparatus. There was at that time no physical Sanders campaign office in Portland; indeed, the Portland office finally opened weeks after the one in Eugene, apparently due to a lack of college students or something.

I like Sanders' platform of economic equity and geopolitical caution, so I thought I might see if there was anything I could do to help. I put my name down on the volunteer list, and waited.

And waited...and waited.

Finally the Sanders campaign contacted me. To see if I wanted to...phone people in Iowa.

That was the theme of the following several months. The Oregon Sanders campaign came looking for people to go on a road trip to Ohio, or to call voters in Arizona, or to mail fliers to South Carolina. Nobody bothered to see if the guy with the bad temper and the sore hip and the limited non-working free time wanted to campaign in his own state.

Until, finally, they did. By which time, I'd had a chance to meet and talk to people like this...

"...if Sanders does not win the nomination. Will the supporters he’s energized show up for Clinton?

Ditlefsen said she’s hasn’t made up her mind yet. “I don’t even want to say that I would consider Donald Trump,” she said. Rather, she said, a Trump win could somehow advance Sanders’ agenda. “Possibly if Donald Trump was elected, maybe he gets impeached for doing some crazy thing. And maybe not,” Ditlefsen said. “Maybe we just realize after four years that we need to jump into this political revolution.”

...and I'm sorry. These people are goddamn fools.

Handing the United States to a real estate shyster and his petty fascisti won't "advance Sanders' agenda" of income equality and financial regulation, and only a political mouthbreather would think so. But I kept hearing a LOT of this bullshit from Sanders' people here. "Crooked Hillary" and how superdelegates were an Illuminati-confirmed scheme to steal the nomination. "Bernie-or-Bust"; how a true populist revolutionary would never, never stoop to compromising with Wall Street Hillary's corporatist agenda.

I wanted to hear Sanders' talk more about his ideas for his administration's energy policy, his foreign policy, his fiscal policy. I wanted to hear how he'd govern faced with a Congress filled with shit-flinging Republican monkeys whose entire agenda consists of Lurvin' Jesus, Lickin' Guns, and Hittin' Homos.

I didn't.

Instead I kept hearing the same thing this guy did:

"All candidates repeat themselves. But this one seemed truly engaged only by his economic message. When he discussed other subjects — racial inequality, foreign policy, the environment — he seemed to many to be going through the motions for a few minutes until he could return to his billionaire-bashing theme. A Washington wag (some said it was Vice President Joe Biden) said, “Every sentence in a Bernie Sanders speech is a noun, a verb, ‘Wall Street.’”

and I wasn't impressed. I ended up deeply unimpressed with Sanders.

A lot of Oregonians disagree with me. More than half Felt the Bern, and Sanders took the majority of Oregon Democratic delegates.

(I pause to note that Il Douche swept the state, which merely reiterates what I've told you before; Oregon is caricatured as "Portlandia", land of the hipster, but is in fact two deeply different places. The "blue" parts are damn blue. But the "red" parts a blood-red. There are few GOoPers as goopy as the Oregon shitkicker variety, whether from the deepest hinterlands of Malheur County to the wanna-be-hinterlands outside Oregon City.)

The Oregon primaries are over. My gal Sarah Iannarone came in a fairly distant third in the mayoral race. At least the gas tax and the OHS levy passed. And now we have a whole summer to look forward to hearing about...

Donald Trump's penis.

Fucking hell. Just kill me now.

Friday Jukebox: Transgender Toilet Trauma Edition

Soundtrack for today's post:



(from Suzanne Vega's brilliant "99.9F" album...)

So I'm a little baffled. I haven't paid enough attention to the usual wingnut suspects to "get" their argument for spending time and money worrying about the junk of who's using the public bogs. Part of this is the whole nutroll of how it seems like "conservative" politics seems to have been boiled down, like last week's roast chicken carcass, to a hot, steaming mess of Lurvin' Jesus, Lickin' Guns, and Hatin' Faggots.

So I'm not sure whether these jokers have the screaming fantods about a guy in a dress using the ladies' room, or a gal in Carhartts sitting down in the guy's stall because it's a potty thing or just simple, straight-up hatin' on people who aren't conventionally gendered.

Thing is...who worries about this?

When I hit the head at, say, Civic Stadium during a Timbers match I'm a LOT more concerned that the drunk guy next to me at the trough is gonna miss the target and wet my shoes down...or that the guy in front of me in the stall line had spicy Chicken Vindaloo for lunch.

What the possibly-not-born-a-dude in the next stall is sitting on? NOT on my radar.

And, seriously, WTF? How is that a "problem"?

Seriously.

I kinda get it if this is really just about politics and rilin' up The Base. Show a red-blooded Republican a picture of a homo and watch him or her get spun up like the little girl in The Exorcist when the priest shows up. They can't help it, so I can kinda see how a GOP "strategist" might think that hammering on the predatory homos in the public pissers might work as a "get-out-the-vote" kind of thing.

But...still. It seems to me like the whole "scary-crossdressing-homos-are-lurking-in-your-potty" meme as a fearmongering tactic is some pretty weak and oddball stuff to try and get votes on. Like I said; who seriously worries about that shit? You'd have to spend a lot of time on alt/transgender/toiletrape to even believe that was a thing.

That, or be stupider than a fucking bag of hammers.

Because as an electoral lie/tactic? Seems to rely on waaayyyyy too much on your targets being hooked on transgender toilet rape porn AND dumber than a fucking bag of hammers.

But..."conservatives"...hmmm.

Maybe not.

The Care of Devils

It goes almost without saying that a huge part of me is equally revolted and angered at the ridiculous carny show that has become the Republican Party and its loathsome Presidential candidate field. Krugman is perfectly correct; the obviously lunatic, con-man, and carny currently running ahead of the rest of the klowns is only less acceptable as the potential Chief Executive of the most powerful polity in the Western world because of the obvious unmoored insanity of his personality, not his "political positions" (such as they are) which are, in many cases, mildly less loathsome than those of his supposedly more conventional competitors.

But, much as I hate to admit this, the current widespread enthusiasm for the vulgar talking yam - among both the public and among the press - is horribly fascinating as a glimpse into mind (also such as it is...) the American public.

The degree to which the Presidency of Barak Obama has completely unhinged a certain proportion of the public has always amazed me. Here's a guy who is pretty much a 1950's Eisenhower Republican or, at least, has governed as such...and, yet, I have heard from friends whose relatives, or acquaintances, or casual correspondents hate Obama, hatehatehate him with a passionate intensity.

It's not like I don't understand "passionate hatred" for politicians; I've loathed a few myself.

But Obama? Obama?

I can't imagine a more perfectly innocuous corporate suit, whether it's his personal style or his governing. He's...well, he's kind of a suit.

And yet, I read people saying they HATE Obama so much (or Clinton, another perfect corporate suit) that even though they admit, or even insist, that Trump is, indeed, a dangerously mendacious fool that they will vote for him when he receives the GOP nomination. I find this literally incomprehensible; it's like saying "Well, the food at that Korean joint was pretty awful, so instead let's just stay home tonight and eat a big ol' bag of camel shit."

Obviously most of these sorts of people don't admit that Trump is an unhinged looney. They say he's a "truth-teller" or not hidebound by "political correctness", as if lying was some sort of version of saying unsayable truth.

But he clearly is, and their kidding themselves is patently ridiculous.

And herein lies the most incredible aspect of this election.

If you had tried; if you had carefully, deliberately, painstakingly crafted the most perfectly disastrous sort of human being to be placed in a position of immense power I cannot imagine crafting someone more catastrophic than Donald Trump. He's like one of those the wartime caricatures of Hitler, or Tojo, or Mussolini; an embodiment of everything utterly incompetent put in charge of a Great Power.

It doesn't matter WHO his opponent is, outside of zombie Iosef Stalin or Satan or another equally gross cartoon villain. There's just no reason any sane person would vote for Donald Trump for President if the alternative wasn't a bloody-handed mass murderer.

So this November will of interest to me only in what it will reveal about my "fellow citizens".

The percentage of the general public who will vote for this scumbag is directly proportionate to the percentage who are utterly unfit to be citizens of a self-governing republic. They are sheep who would vote to make the wolf their king because they are afraid and he is "strong". They are the slaves who would vote to make the slavedriver their king because they want to hate the Others and he is "honest" enough to say so out loud.

And I very much fear, that in the words of Mr. Paine, that I am infidel enough "...as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils..."

This is why I don't write about U.S. politics anymore.

Because we have Pierce.

And, as usual, he sticks the landing:

"If the elite political press is going to treat fiction as fact as long as the fiction is delivered in a compelling, dramatic manner, then the country truly is lost. If Carly Fiorina is adjudged to be the winner of a debate simply because of how "crisply" she delivered lies about Planned Parenthood, or how "forcefully" she responded to a cartoon like Donald Trump, or how "sharply" she presented her nonsense about reining in Vladimir Putin with "aggressive military maneuvers" on his borders, then there is a problem in the political process that is metastasizing by the hour. Ronald Reagan was the index patient for that problem. They truly are his children now."

This is one of the two parties we have allowed ourselves. This is the face of a third of our "fellow citizens". This is the "conservative" party. This is what somewhere between a quarter and a third of the U.S. public wants.

We really are so, so, so, so fucked.

The Only Post I Will Ever Write About the 2016 Election

Because...ugh. The thought of the next year and a half makes me want to drink a case of Natty Light and binge-watch reruns of Charmed.

It's going to be epically awful watching and listening to the "news" media try to pretend that there's an actual choice between a bunch of right-centerist corporatist candidates...and a monkeyhouse full of shit-flinging Gilded Age neoimperial theocratic nutbars.

Look. I absolutely hate the fucking idea of voting for Hillary Clinton and the wholly-owned-subsidiary wing of the Democratic Party.

But what's the alternative?

Seriously. Not the "look what an upstanding liberal Ralph Nader is!" alternative, but a real alternative to letting the Imperial legion of lunatic Tenthers, guns-and-God-bothering Womb Raiders get their mitts on the levers of power.

Will Clinton pretend that we're not heating up the planet with our exhaust fumes? Look for imaginary booga-booga terrorists under the bed (well, she might in Libya, but, still...)? Hand over the national checkbook to Goldman Sachs? Gut unions, attempt to destroy Medicaid and Social Security, fellate Bible-bangers, toss minorities of all flavors under the white, male, Christopath bus?

No.

Would I love to see another FDR in the White House, another Congress like the one that rammed through the New Deal on Capitol Hill?

Sure. But that ain't gonna happen.

So there's really only one hope; pull that Democratic lever and work inside the Party to push it leftwards. And there's nothing other than that to say.

Because outside the walls there is only fire, and madness in the dark.