Getting it so completely, utterly, totally fucking wrong

 

 

So that thing where "You don't know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don't."?

 

This is "I went to the Wharton School of Economics and slept thru the lecture on "The Great Depression: Wha'happen?"  

 

From the link:

"But the country began abandoning them when it created a federal income tax in 1913, the president says. Then, “in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression. And it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy,” Trump said in announcing his tariff plan last week.

Referring to Smoot-Hawley, he added, “They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone. It was gone. It was too late. Nothing could have been done — took years and years to get out of that depression.”

Getting the "Lesson of Hawley-Smoot" completely, totally fucking wrong and ass-backwards?

 

Y'think?

"Smoot-Hawley raised import tariffs by an average of 20% on thousands of goods, causing many top U.S. trading partners to retaliate. International cooperation on non-trade issues also declined, including on defense matters, helping clear the way for the rise of Hitler, Richardson said.

“There were some industries where they made profits,” Richardson said of Smoot-Hawley. “But overall, people in the U.S. and people around the world were losers.”

U.S. manufacturers saw foreign markets for their goods evaporate and output and consumer spending sank still further. Hawley lost the 1932 Oregon Republican primary in his district, and Smoot was defeated in November, as Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt trounced Hoover for the presidency."

Fuck me runnin'. If you wrote this as anything but "news" it would be dismissed as an improbable fiction. 

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF

Empire of Fools

Day 2 of Trump 2: Revenge Boogaloo! and Tubby the Stable Genetic Engineering Genius has determined that there are two and only two human genders...

...so by executive order the incredibly weird, complicated diversity of the human genome can…ummm...just stop being weird, diverse, and complicated and start being...ummm...what a bunch of ignorant bigoted MAGAts want it to be. 

 
Day Fucking 2. 

TWO. 

We’ve got something like another thousand days of stupid shit like just this.

At LEAST this stupid. 

Let's not even start on tariffs.

This, perhaps more than anything, more that the racism, more than the bigotry, more than the oligarchy, more than the hatred, more than all the other vile, shitty things that Republicans want and are, is what's so infuriating about my second go-around of MAGAt rule.

It's the stupid, stupid.

These people want - and what my own crowd didn't loathe and fear enough to show up to stop - incredibly simpleminded "solutions" to complex, difficult problems. 

They want, let's be blunt, stupid things.

No, tossing out immigrants of all varieties isn't going to "solve" anything. Not low wages. Not high prices. Not the increasing enshittification of American life.

Immigration, transgender people, "DEI", "wokeness" aren't the reasons America isn't Great for you and the other non-plutocrat Americans. 

Income inequality and poorly written tax codes and other laws, corporate greed and monopoly power, and regulatory capture are.

Immigrants aren't the reason your health care sucks; greedy insurance companies and greedy medical providers and wealthy people and corporations and poorly written laws and tax codes are.

Immigrants aren't the reasons your rent is so expensive; greedy landlords and NIMBY neighbors and poorly written zoning and development codes are.

Transgender people aren't the reason your kids are struggling; greedy college administrators and poorly written financial aid codes and corporate degree-gatekeeping are.

All these and more problems are extremely complex and difficult because We, the People, have allowed these problems to burrow deep within our already-flawed governmental systems. 

We've sat on our asses, most of us, fiddling with silly nonsense about Drag Queen Storytime and Bud Light ads whilst the wealthy and powerful whose primacy was written into the foundational documents regained all the power they'd lost (and more!) since the last time they shit the national bed in 1929.

The bottom line, as any Roman of the late Republic could warn you, is that you can have great disparity of wealth or a republic.

But not both.

And the simpleminded, in their search for a "simple" solution to this complex problem, have chosen the worst possible "simple" solution:

Just fucking elect the greedy fucking plutocrat and by inference all his greedy billionaire buddies.

Jesus wept.

I honestly don't have any idea how you fix this. There's even a saying: "You can't fix stupid." 

How do you show someone who doesn't believe that pouring literally billions of tons of things like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere can raise global climatic warmth? How do you convince someone who thinks that China pays tariffs on Chinese exports that something like "health insurance" is nothing but a greedy middleman that helps increase medical costs while adding nothing of value? How do you prove to someone who thinks the President dictates the price of eggs that supply problems related to avian flu are the reason for the high price of eggs?

"Solving" all these things would require incredible knowledge, hard work, and patience to understand, and incredible levels of effort to deal with, especially given that the people and organizations that profit from stuff like corporate and personal profits will fight like ten thousand devils against you.

Instead, well, how about going for the con man who tells you that trade wars are fun and easy to win? That your relationship problems are because uppity bitches? That your egg prices are because you have to press "one" for English?

Is that fucking stupid?

Of COURSE it is!

But it's simpler and easier that putting in the hard work of self-governance.

So here we are.

I have no idea where this will end up. And given my neurological problem, whether I'll even be alive to know.

But from here?

It doesn't look promising.

To be ruled by competent evil is appalling.

But to be ruled by stupid fools..?

Eve

 It's my first "post-divorce" Christmas Eve and it's...well, you can imagine.

At least I can enjoy the gifts the rural chucklefucks are now getting from their big win in November:

"Schools in 30 of Oregon’s 36 counties — and schools in other Western states — will receive less federal funding in 2025 after the U.S. House of Representatives failed to reauthorize a 24-year-old bill that typically pays up to $80 million a year for schools and roads in Oregon along with wildfire prevention and conservation work."

Merry Fucking Christmas, goobers. Y'done fucked yourselves. Happy New Year and I hope the tariffs bend you over, too, you ignorant bastards.

You handed them the goverment and now President Musk is gonna give you redhat rednecks a red-ass-whipping while First Lady Donnie Two-Scoops blabbers about Greenland and re-stealing the Panama Canal.

Are you surprised I'm not in a holly jolly mood?

I'm gonna get some rack and go see some nice shelter cats in the morning, then go cook Christmas dinner for Number 1 Son.

I sure as hell feel like 2024 could have gone better.

And why the hell can't you shitkickers get all jiggly about deporting THAT worthless goddamn immigrant back to Africa? Aren't you supposed to hate immigrant scum like him? Try and do SOMEthing right, K?

Honestly. This is the dumbest damn timeline.

Today in "Republican is the New Stupid": How do you say "Deportee" in Japanese?

Scott Lemieux at LG&M has a long-form piece on the disaster-to-come that will be the Trump47 deportationpalooza. This from Radley Balko:

"Trump approached the presidency like he ran his businesses — like a mob boss. He thought the Justice Department should have been his personal law firm, and has vowed to weaponize it against his opponents should he win again. It isn’t at all difficult to imagine how, once in place, this deportation force might be used to enforce Trump’s other authoritarian impulses and campaign promises, like infiltrating blue cities to “fight crime,’“ arrest homeless people, or to beat — and possibly shoot — people who stage protests against his policies.

Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economy. Inflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression.

Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support.

Trump and Miller aren’t going to deport 15 million people in four years. It just isn’t possible. But the important thing — the thing that ought to be immediately disqualifying — is that they plan to try"

Very much yes.

But - here's the Extra Stupid Special Sauce; you want to see an industrialized nation with what amounts to  a de-facto complete immigration ban?

Japan.

"The number of vacant houses in Japan has surged to a record high of nine million – more than enough for each person in New York City – as the east Asian country continues to struggle with its ever-declining population.

Abandoned houses are known in Japan as “akiya” – a term that usually refers to derelict residential homes tucked away in rural areas.

But more akiya are being seen in major cities, such as Tokyo and Kyoto, and that’s a problem for a government that’s already grappling with an aging population and an alarming fall in the number of children born each year.

“This is a symptom of Japan’s population decline,” said Jeffrey Hall, a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies in Chiba. “It’s not really a problem of building too many houses” but “a problem of not having enough people,” he said."

No matter what fucking Nick Fuentes - a Peak Republican Dumbfuck if ever breathed - "thinks" (if that's a valid term for the residual electrical impulses in his fat head), the American public, and American women in particular, aren't going to start popping out his sprogs enough to wash the dishes, wipe the asses, pick the crops, and clean the chicken carcasses.

Kids are fucking expensive! And hard, unpaid work! Remember the GOP mantra: "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em." Amirite? Well..?

Kiboshing divorce and abortion ain't gonna help, either.

The bottom line is that most large industrial nations see an overall decline in native resident births as the dearth of needs for farmhands and shop assistants become obvious and kids become, in effect, a luxury good, an indulgence.

The planned Operation Endlösung (look it up...) is fucked up for many reasons.

But, like so much of Trump47, the bottomless stupidity is one that is far too often left unsaid.

Again, I'm not nearly so arsed at being ruled by evil traitors.

It's the being ruled by these fucking dumbfucks that really stings.

Update 11/14: Bill Scher at Washington Monthly has a worthwhile long read: 

"Overall, immigration is good. You wouldn’t want to live in a country where nobody wanted to get in. Without a steady flow of incoming workers, businesses—particularly in specific sectors such as agriculture, meatpacking, and construction—would strain to find workers. Some companies would shutter, and others would provide clunkier service while increasing costs. Small-to-mid-size cities would lose population and revenue, forcing cuts in schools, police, and so on.

However, too much immigration in a short period causes acute disruptions. States and cities struggle to find sufficient lodging. Schools can’t handle sudden increases in students who need to learn English. As with just-right inflation, Goldilocks immigration policy engineers an amount that’s just right—relatively slow, steady, reliable, and predictable."

I've been banging this drum for literally decades.

"So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything will be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by Real (i.e. white) Americans who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.

As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your business when your neighbor's house is on fire."

Fuck but these people are so goddamn stupid it's astounding they remember to breathe. The problem is vast and involves dozens of polities and millions of people. Using "deport the brutes" to solve the problem is like trying to fix a pocketwatch with a hammer.

But watch these idiots do it.

This is fine

 So now any and every knucklehead Florida Man can prance around strapped?

"Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed into law a bill that lets people carry guns without a permit and without any training."

 Keep in mind I was under the hat. I fucking TAUGHT these knuckleheads how to use these weapons in ways that ensured they wouldn't shoot me or each other. I have some practical experience with people who have no firearms skills.

There is no.

No.

Practical, legal, social, or political need for every chucklefuck wander around with live rounds.

Mostly because one of the dumb fucks is sure as hell gonna have one under the hammer and it's gonna go through some other poor dumb bastard's brain housing group when said dumbass drops the hogleg out of her pocket or his carry bag.

Jesus wept.

I know the contemporary GQP is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but this is nonsensical on it's face. What the hell good will this do? Even in Wild West Dodge City you had to check your Peacemaker at ol' Wyatt's office. Even Delta Force locks their bang-sticks up unless they're going to or from the range.

Every time I think we've seen Peak Stupid from these people...

Gasbags

This is the Republican senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance:

Apparently this fucking cluck is out guarding his woodpile from the eeeevil Chinese spy balloon.

Also apparently either this nimrod doesn't - or he assumes his other wingnut constituents don't - know or care that the maximum effective range of his billybadass AR-15 knockoff is not 40,000+ feet but about, umm...1,500 yards. 

I don't really care so much that this nitwit is cosplaying some sort of Air Raid Warden. You be you, peckerhead.

What's irking is that there are a whole basketful of deplorables out there who eat this nonsense up.

It's the exact sort of thing that we had last week in the U.S. House where We the People got our tax dollars used to condemn "socialism".

Y'know what people like this chucklefuck also called "socialism"?

The 40-hour week.

Workplace safety regulations.

Pollution controls.

Old age pensions.

The G.I. Bill.

The New Deal.

Yeah. It's just that stupid.

As stupid as a faux hillbilly out guarding his woodpile from a balloon he couldn't do a goddamn thing to if he fired every round of 5.56 in Ohio.

Some things never change

I woke up this morning worried.

Mostly because my Bride's employer is talking about layoffs. Again. And since she's not just the only regular income at this point but - even more critically - our medical benefit provider that's a little scary.

So, like hanging, the possibility of sudden poverty concentrates my mind wonderfully.

That said, I can't help shaking my head at two fucking haven't-we-done-this-before irritating national news items.

The "big" news item is the now-traditional GQP woody over using the ridiculous "debt ceiling" gimmick to screw the rest of the country out of the New Deal.

I'll spare you my usual "now pay attention" lecture on the why of the New Deal. Suffice to say that the U.S. public, monstrous fool that it is, has no idea what the gutting of Medicare and Social Security would look like because it's been almost a century, but, hint...it looked like this:

You think we have a "homeless problem" now? Yeah...just wait for the New Hoovervilles. Maybe we can call them "McCarthy Manors" to bring the conversation up to date.

The fact that anyone not some sort of lunatic Republican (but I repeat myself) has to argue against the idea that the federal budget needs to be reduced by impoverishing and sickening regular people and not by raising the top marginal rate back to where it was in the Eisenhower Administration and mothballing a couple of carrier air groups just goes to show how utterly fucked our supposed national conversation about this whole business is.

No Republican should be able to even begin to make that nitwit argument without getting pied in the face. That they don't - that the "argument" is actually listened to for more than a nanosecond - tells me that we're pretty fucked already.

So there's that.

The other, national-but-sort-of-local thing is the ridiculous posturing over the murder-by-cop of the latest poor bastard to have been found guilty and executed for the crime of Driving While Black.

Specifically...that somehow what completely exonerates the entire history and existing society of the United States is that the murder cops were all Black themselves.

Okay, now I get that about 99.8% of the American public knows about history what a goat knows about calculus, but the entire notion of one group working for another group (and killing others in theor own group) is as old as...well, Rome, for one. 

Those Black coppers are no different from some Gallic foederatus carrying a sword for the legions against his Belgae or Suebi neighbor. In return for their own protection the foreign mercenaries can and will happily ruin and kill their own; it's one of those deeply human fucked-up things that people do.

This kind of ties in to the nonsense about "critical race theory" being some sort of commie propaganda instead of explaining exactly how - in a nation where a group of people were once defined as 3/5ths of a human because of their skin color - you can end up with that group of people as a largely dispossessed and disenfranchised target of the weight of social, economic, and political punishment but still used as foederati by their masters?

I'd like to think that the people pushing that bullshit know better and are just blowing smoke.

With these knuckleheads it's hard to tell.

And - since we're on this subject - can we just stop with the whole "let's take cops who already think like an occupying army and make them into some sort of Rambo-fantasy outfit designed to occupy fucking Fallujah" thing?

Beyond the stupid idea of WANTING soldier-cops the entire notion that somehow making more and more dangerously-soldierly cops is somehow "keeping us safe"...who fucking thinks that?

The copaganda We the People suck up every day makes it difficult to recognize that, as I said three years ago, these cops AREN'T some sort of "thin blue line" between us and anarchy.

WE are the line. We're, by and large, good citizens and good people. If we weren't no number of soldier-cops could hold us back short of nuking the place from space. 

The cops?

No.

Cops by and large don't "solve" crimes - clearance rates for most city police departments, in every crime category, are embarrassingly low - and they, in the current drive-by-policing-mode of most big departments, don't "prevent" crimes, either.

They largely do what they're designed to do; keep the smelly poor away from the nice white people who pay their salaries, and defend property.

And that's fine, if that's what you want, and many, possibly most Americans either do want that or don't care enough to make a fuss about it.

But that's how our country is, by and large. 

If we don't like it, we need to do the hard work to change it. If we don't want to do that, we should at least have the honesty to tell the poor and dark people who are going to take the pounding that it sucks to be them and then let them decide whether it's worth dying on their feet rather than living on their knees.

I know.

That's pretty bleak.

But I'm feeling pretty bleak this morning, so there it is.

Fifty Shades of White

Read this over at Yastreblyansky's place today. It's from a New York Times Cletus safari (so it's paywalled, hence the secondhand source) where one of the Cletuses explains why he's yearning so hard for The Return of Tubby:

"Just start putting things back on the right track. It makes me scratch my head that the country never did better than when Trump was president — never. You know what I mean? The gas prices were low. The border was under control. Everything was just great. And he got run out of town just because he sends mean tweets and has a big mouth. They’d rather elect a nice guy and have the country in the toilet"

I read that and my first (last, and only) thought was "Whatchoo talkin' about, Willis?"

I've been an adult civilian under a total of seven Presidents since I ETS'd back in '87; Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Cheney (okay, okay....Bush 2), Obama, Tubby, and now Biden.

During that time I'd call out three "big" events that shook the world, including my world:

2001 - the beginning of the Wars of Choice against the world's various political movements,

2008 - the Great Recession, and

2020 - The Plague Years.

And here's the thing about all that:

It made 

No

More

Than

The

Slightest

Scintilla

Of 

Difference

In my life.

I'm a middle-class straight white guy with a college education and a decent professional career. All that stuff? War, recession, disease?

Meh.

I was still in the Army Reserve in 2001, so I was a bit closer than 99.9% of the U.S. public to the wars, but I never deployed so I was never close enough. I don't have any war stories to tell.

My company was rocked a bit by the Recession, but stayed upright, so other than a bit of nervousness looking at my 401K I was fine. I don't have a horrific lost-my-house story to tell.

And I ran and hid from the Plague like everyone but the wingiest of the nuts, but successfully (so far), so I don't have any horrible 'Rona stories to tell.

Looking past the individual and local drama, ranging from divorce to hip replacements to job changes, overall? 

"Everything was just great"? 

"The country in the toilet"?

Get the fuck out, Cletus.

The United States in my adult life has rolled along - steadily growing meaner and harder, steadily less open, more plutocratic and unequal. Yes.

But somehow flipping wildly between "just great" and "the toilet"?

Fucking pull the other one, Cletus.

That this goober can even think, let alone say that, tells me that he's fucking delusional to the point of "beyond electroshock therapy".

Nothing has changed between 2016 and 2023 except we've lost a million or so - mostly of other Cletuses (Cletii?) - to the Plague. The rich are still rich or a bit richer. The poor are still poor. The U.S. is still a massive industrial nation where the vast bulk of us are desperately scrounging to make a fucking buck. The sun rises and sets. The smoke rises. The rain falls.

Obama. Trump. Biden.

The details of policy changed, sure. Obama helped some people get health insurance. Tubby handed stacks of cash to the fatcats. Biden got the fuck out of Afghanistan. 

Us cis het middle-class white guys?

We just rolled on.

And the fact that this clueless dingus thinks anything else?

Just reminds us that these people are the fucking boat anchor of the Republic. They believe nonsense, they're convinced of a bunch of idiocy that's not just untrue but monstrously, demonstrably untrue and in a crudely, stupidly, destructive way.

When chucklefucks like this can believe that the reason the majority of the voters in 2020 wanted to shitcan his Orange Julius Caesar because "he has a big mouth" and not because he was the worst Chief Executive since James Buchanan (at least) who helped kill hundreds of thousands of his own people?

There's no penetrating that degree of stupid.

Yet here we are, stuck with this mouthbreather and millions of his kin. 

I know I'm banging this drum and I'm sure you're tired of the noise.

But these people are the problem.

We've got lots of problems; climate change, vulture capitalism (and those two are twins - I'll circle back to that in a bit), political dysfunction (see above), nonalcoholic beer, MILF Manor...

The problem is these people.

If they really think that us straight middle class white guys have gone from "great" to "the toilet" in two years?

That means they're locked down tight into their darkness of lies and nonsense.

You can't run a democratic republic with that many people believing bullshit that stupid who will fight you rather than give that up.

But I'm not sure what else you can do.

Fools Rush In

 I see that the "news" is fulminating about the Senatorial GQP's hard no on setting up an "investigation" of the weird mysterious thing that happened at the Capitol on the 6th of January 2021.

 

 
Ummm...gee. That's too bad. 

Without our solons on the case how on earth will we ever get to the bottom of that mystery, Scoob? Imagine the difficulty of unraveling who might have stormed the seat of government in desperate hopes to change the result of an election they'd been told over and over by their beloved Dear Leader had been "stolen"? Who, on that day, had spent hours listening to Tubby and his minions roaring about how the "traitors" and "thieves" inside the building were going to make that theft official and that how if only brave patriotic Real Americans could somehow, someway, get between these rascals and that process perhaps their dream of an endless reign of Emperor Trumpolean could come true? Who might possibly, just possibly, have been goaded through their gullible rage and credulous stupidity by grifters and conmen into trying their own Orange Foolius Revolution?

Who were recorded on live footage, on thousands of their own cell phones, on Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram doing just that and boasting about it?

I can't possible imagine, and now, without that precious commission, We the People will be forever in the dark.

There are many reasons to despair of this fucked-in-the-head country of ours (hi, systemic racism, massive militarization, and climate change!), but letting Joe Fucking Manchin roll over and beg for doggie treats from Moscow Mitch "investigating" whether the sun rises in the east isn't one of them.

 No.

THIS is one of them;

"Yet a full 73 percent of Republicans pin “some” or “a great deal” of responsibility on “left-wing protesters trying to make Trump look bad,” even though both the FBI and Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have rejected the falsehood that leftist protesters were involved."

Now that's fucked-in-the-head. When you can see something with your own eyes, hear it with your own ears, and yet "not believe" it? What's that line about those who can make you believe absurdities..?

There are things that we can fix about the issues We the People face in the coming years.

This? This intransigent, dangerously belligerent stupidity of the people who have gone all in on the QANut Con?

Is not one of them.

There is no cure for Stupid.

It can only - and must - be utterly exterminated if this nation, as the nation it promised itself it would be, shall not perish from the Earth.

Make Idaho Great Again

 The rump polity that is Oregon's GQP has a brilliant new idea: secede from lib'rul commie hippie dope-smoking latte-sippin' Oregon and join the Real America of Idaho.

The plan, if you want to call "something that appeared to me in a vision after a long afternoon stting in the garage and huffing several spray-cans of Rust-Oleum" a "plan", is to take the unpaved portions of Oregon - effectively everything east of the Cascades and south of Eugene and spot-weld it onto Idaho. Oh, a couple of the more deserty bits of northern California are included, too.

Having lived with these people for thirty years now, I won't even try and argue about this. It would be like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat. Let me just point out a couple of teensy little issues with this cunning plan.

The parts of Oregon involved are the least populated and poorest parts of the state. At least one of them - I want to say Gilliam County, but it could be any one of the damn dryland parts - tried to dissolve itself some time back because it was so fucking poor it couldn't pay for stuff like courts and roads and tax assessors.

These places can't survive economically without the engine that is Portland and the Willamette Valley. Oh, and you'll notice that these teatards cut out Bend, too, that immigrant-infested Sanctuary City, so as to prevent even the tiniest hint of solvency from intruding on their White American Dream.

I don't know how Boise feels about this, but if I was an Idaho legislator, wingnut or not, I'd be terrified to see these gomers shambling up to my statehouse doors like so many walking brain-dead under a red MAGA ballcap. If they get their wish the whole fucking place would look Kyrgystan in a week or two.

The complaint that these rural chucklefucks have is that they have no voice now in Oregon. And they're right; the Oregon GOP has become so utterly toxic that it retains only a handful of seats in the lower house. The upper house Republicans have enough warm bodies to deny a quorum, which is their only hope of...well, not really "doing anything" but preventing the rest of the Oregon lege from doing anything, which is why every session now they run and hide. They have no "agenda". All they can do is try and fuck up the rest of the system.

And why is that?

Because back in the 90s - I've told you this before - a couple of fucksticks called Don McIntyre and Bill Sizemore formed something called "Oregon Taxpayers United".

Yep. They were the Original Oregon Tax-Revolters.

The managed to con Oregonians to passing something called Ballot Measure 5 in November 1990. It gutted the property tax system, saving Nonna and Poppy a couple of hundred bucks a year and Intel and Flav-R-Pac untold billions.

But they went beyond that.

The Oregon Republicans became teabaggers before there were teabaggers, and Trumpkins before there were Trumpkins. They went all-in on queer-bashing, immigrant-hate, plutocrat-fluffing, open-carry, sovereign-citizen nonsense before going utterly batshit for Trump. They made the Republican brand so utterly toxic that they managed to lose the fat suburban enclaves of Washington County.

When you're too insane to pander to a Beaverton car dealership owner? You're waaaayyyyy too insane.

Yet somehow, they managed it.

Now this is their desperation play; they hope to leave the fleshpots of Sodom and join the arid manly men of rural Idaho in a MAGAt paradise where men really ARE men (and not he-shes in logging drag), God is in His Heaven, and women are barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

You can see how that would appeal to a 21st Century Oregonian!

Anyway, this nonsense isn't going anywhere just for purely procedural reasons. But the mere fact that these nitwits actually want it tells you something about how utterly desperately looney these people are.

And, as I keep saying; a republic cannot function with this level of insanity. At about 30% of the population the pure noise generated by these crazies will drown out everything else.

We can be a republic.

Or we can be Republicans.

But given their current level of insanity we cannot be both.

Even in our own private Greater Idaho.

And speaking of election eve...

 ...here's the latest lunatic GOP goober who will soon be in position to inflict her looney gooberosity on the rest of us to the extent she can.

This isn't an accident or coincidence or happenstance. This IS the Republican Party. This is where these lunatics have been going since Reagan - as Charlie Pierce likes to say - fed them the monkey brains full of trickle-down and welfare queens and government is the problem prion disease. Trump is not the disease. He's the symptom.

And the nation is FULL of these goobers. And they vote. And they are convinced that tomorrow belongs to them and are perfectly happy to dynamite the entire foundations of liberal democracy to get it.

I do not know how you run a popular republic with this much crazy in it. But I think we're finding out during this Plague Year, and the answer is not a happy one.

Director of National Stupidity

Per Pierce:

"On Monday, Richard Grenell, acting director of the Office of National Intelligence and the U.S. ambassador to Germany, posted a photo of the Bill of Rights on Instagram with a title “Signed Permission Slip to Leave Your House.” Below the post, in the caption, Grenell wrote “Love this!” A reporter tweeted the post after its publishing saying: “Seems the top US intelligence chief ADNI ⁦@RichardGrenell⁩ isn’t a fan of the stay at home orders.” Grenell responded: “‘Seems’ Grenell is a fan of the Constitution to me.”

No.

No. No. No. No. No. Fucking no.

Just no.

Neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights constitute a "permission slip" for you to scream "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, or bear nuclear arms, you goddamn stupid fucking chucklefuck.

You don't get to use your "right" to endanger me.

That's why your Ferrari has to follow the speed limit and you can't just bust a cap into the air anytime you want to.

Jesus Fucking Christ. And you're the fucking DNI?

Seriously?

Based on this I'm betting you don't have the actual intelligence to open a jar of mayonnaise unaided, you fucking idiot. This isn't abortion or gun-grabbing or liberalism where you can show up and stand around in a bunch waving your metal dicks at, you numbskull. It's a fucking disease that kills people, you dope, and you get it from other people like...umm...numbskulls standing around in a bunch waving their metal dicks.

It's not so much that I'm furious that I'm being ruled by greedy, careless, plutocratic, God-pestering sonsofbitches.

I am.

But it's the fucking stupid that really chaps my ass.

Ceterum autem censeo GOPinem esse delendam.

World War Z

As we pause to contemplate the wreckage the GOP has created of the Constitutional framework set in place a couple of centuries ago, it's also worth noting that among other things the Fraudulency Adminstration has gifted We the People is a severely compromised ability to respond to epidemic disease.

"Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail. Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”

One of the most appalling parts of the GOP cult is it's insistence that, as Saint Ronald of Fantasyland said, "government is the problem".

But for a global pandemic there is no "market solution". Government IS the solution, to the extent that there can be a solution.

The current incipient panic and scaremongering - and, yes, I'm looking at you, Wilbur Ross and Mike Pompeo, you fucking idiots - about the Wuhan coronavirus is not warranted. So far the infection has proved relatively highly morbid (compared to, say, SARS) but with a mortality lower than even a typical influenza. There is really no need for any sort of massive mobilization in the United States.

Which is good, since the Trumpkins have been deconstructing the ability to massively mobilize to deal with a pandemic.

But.

Let's recall that the last pandemic started as a fairly minor flu season.

The initial wave of the 1918 "Spanish" flu passed through the United States in the spring of 1918. It was as bad as influenza got in those early-modern-medical days, but no worse.

Then in the autumn it returned to the U.S., and something in the virus had changed.

Flu typically kills the "vulnerable"; old people, very young people, people with compromised health or immune systems. The autumn flu of 1918, on the other hand, killed apparently healthy young adults. Millions of them. It ran around the globe doing the same. A third, less-lethal-but-still-pretty-lethal wave ran from the winter of 1918 to the spring of 1919 before finally petering out.

Could this sort of mutation occur to the Wuhan coronavirus?

Of course it could. We won't know until it happens, just like we had no idea that the 1918 flu season would turn lethal until it did.

I know it's easy to be fixated on the viciousness and racism and general Know-Nothingism of these idiots.

But it's important to recall that they ARE idiots, and as any good soldier knows, nothing can get you killed quicker than being stupid.

Those were the days, my friend...

"The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Try. Just try and imagine Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or Ann Coulter or Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump saying that today.

You can't, can you?

The "true conservative" of today is the radical reactionary of 1910, the Gilded Age plutocrat to whom the very idea of taxing unearned inherited wealth is horrific, and to even suggest to the unwashed masses that they should be the "master" of property and "control the mighty commercial forces" is worse than the worst collusion with hostile foreign powers.

Just your daily reminder that these people are your enemies. They are not "fellow citizens", they are not "Americans" in the sense that the ideals of this nation define citizenship. They are the ci-devant aristos, the allies and minions of the malefactors of great wealth. They see you as their cattle, their prey, and will gleefully use your stupidity, venality, racism, and more than anything else, your fear, to prey on you.

For the promise of this nation to be realized the GOP must be destroyed.

It's really that simple

Update 1/30: Paul Waldeman of the WaPo does a good job of explaining this:

"The real contested ground is the upper left or populist quadrant (29 percent of the electorate), where social conservatism meets economic liberalism...where there are persuadable voters — those who might choose either candidate — that’s where they’re mostly located. The battle for those votes will likely shape the race.

Democrats will go after them by arguing that Trump pulled a con on them in 2016, an argument that has the benefit of being perfectly true. Trump has been more eager to do the bidding of the wealthy and corporations than any president in modern times, and has run a spectacularly corrupt administration.

Trump’s strategy to hold on to them will be simple: race and immigration. He ran a campaign of xenophobia and hatred in 2016, tried unsuccessfully to do the same thing to save Republicans in 2018, and he’s going to do the same thing in 2020."

Here's the thing; that racism, xenophobia, and hate is a hell of a drug. The fascist parties of Europe have been using it to slam the economically populist parties successfully over the past decade.

A LOT of Americans are racist shitheels. The Trumpkins are counting on that, and I'm not convinced they're wrong.

Destroying the modern GOP is essential to the American Dream.

Doing it is going to be somewhere between "damned difficult" to "virtually impossible".

At ease, disease

So. Here's the thing.

I've spent some time in the sort of less-paved parts of the world we're talking about today.

And I'll be straight-up with you; the term I used to describe them was, typically, "Third World shitholes".

But.

At that time I was a paratroop sergeant, NOT Chief Executive of the world's largest superpower.

If you can't see the critical distinction there, you're a goddamn moron.

Or Donald Trump.

But I repeat myself.

Live Free or Die

Well, there you have it.

All I can say at this point is that if all those idiots who bayed about "Second Amendment Solutions" aren't storming Capitol Hill right now then they can just STFU forever after.

In a true democracy this would result in pitchforks and torches and the Swiss Guard dead at the gates of the Tuileries.

Which is another way of saying that we must destroy the GOP or bow before our New Plutocratic Masters.

"A Republic, if you can keep it"

We have not.

A tax measure that provides a road map to increased inequality in one of the already-most-unequal industrial democracies and shreds the social safety net woven in the depth of the Depression to prevent a hard turn to fascist or communist revolution, and that is "supported" by, at most, a quarter of the citizens of the affected polity (and that in the midst of a relentless, unashamedly vicious barrage of lies from the ruling party that suggests that at least a portion of that 25% would fall away if they understood how nakedly plutocratic this legislation is) is as close to the definition of "taxation without representation" as I can think of short of a genuine occupation government.

If our political system has devolved to the point where a coterie of neo-Gilded Age fantasists can impose their Sharia Law on three-quarters of the populace, then we have put a wrap on the American Experiment.

In a truly republican nation this would decorate Pennsylvania Avenue with a festive holiday display of heads on pikes.

It has not and will not.

And, as such, we have no one to blame for our failure to keep our own republic but ourselves.

Chronicle of a Grift Foretold

We are now less than three weeks away from the inauguration of His Fraudulency 2: Electric Trumpaloo, and the Congressional GOP is already doing what it does best - beavering away undermining whatever "good government"/progressive/antiplutocratic rules they can find.

And I'm perfectly confident predicting that we're going to see much, much more of this in the next four years. In fact, I'm absolutely slam-dunk, pure-D, dog-ass certain of it.

Why, you ask?

Because the thing to remember about the GOP as currently constituted is that it's not a "political party" in the "tradition of American political party" sense but a party in the "faction of the caudillo" or one-party state sort of party.

The GOP doesn't want to "govern" in the sense that a party in power in a republic wants to govern; it wants to RULE, in the way that the United Russia Party of Vladi Putin rules. It wants all the cakes and ale and graft and hippie-punching and Koch-sucking it can shoehorn into a swagbag, and it will get it though Hell bar the way.

The GOP also knows perfectly well that stoogeing for plutocracy and pimping for Christian theocrats and ignorant hillbillies isn't going to appeal to a majority of the citizens of the US, and that to continue to rule it will have to circumvent the norms and conventions and institutions that would otherwise expose it as a bought-and-paid-for tool of the Rich and Well-Born on economics and the Christopathic Nutbags and Racist Trash on social issues.

So whilst this might get walked back a trifle don't kid yourself; the reign of His Fraudulency and his Wingnut Congress will be characterized by just this sort of grifting and chicanery.

We are about to see a federal government riddled with open corruption - not the sly, business-as-usual, K-Street sort of corruption we've seen over most of the modern era but the open, hand-out, greasy sleaze corruption of the Gilded Age or of a Trump Casino - the like of which those of us living have never seen. You'd probably have to go all the way back to the pre-Progressive Era to find the sort of daylight-robbery kind of pay-for-play we're looking at coming at us.

It's not just because it's who they are. It's because this sort of grifting is the ONLY way that the GOP can continue the grift. The plutocrats don't give a shit about Second Amendment Rights - in fact, they'd just as soon disarm the dangerous crank-addled hillbillies. The Christopaths could give a shit about the estate tax, and the gunlickers don't care sweet goddamn about the carried-interest deduction. The GOP coalition is eight rabid rats in a sack, and the moment one rat gets the hint that one of the others is getting over on it the ass-biting will go nuclear.

My real fear is that these morons know so little of history that they will try and push the nation back into the Gilded Age while in their ignorance have no idea how close we came to some form of autocracy in the 1929-1932 period and how dangerous it will be to try and go there today.

The Ryans and McConnells and Trumps are too ignorant to know what a turbulent place the US was in the original Gilded Age, and too stupid to figure out that while the Homestead Strike and the Haymarket Riot were one-sided wins for the government back in the day the profusion of cheap semiautomatic and automatic weapons and simple, easy-to-construct mines ("IEDs") have made suppressing rebellions a mug's game for Western troops.

They may very well get their wish and then discover why the original John D. Rockefellers and Carnegies and their robber-baron ilk didn't push back that hard against the Welfare State back in the day.

They had seen the bodies hanging from the lampposts in St. Petersburg and Rome and knew better than to think that they were safe.

I have no doubt that the upcoming Trump Administration will make Dubya and his band of cronies look like MENSA for competence and the Salvation Army for probity, or that they will do their level best to push the GOP Back-to-the-Gilded-Age agenda as far towards reality as they can, and that both sickens and enrages me.

But what I fear the most is that this administration will tear down a LOT of the institutional and social barriers that have protected us here in El Norte from the sort of caudilloist corruption and nepotism that has been endemic in much of the rest of our hemisphere.

His Fraudulency 2 himself is a walking violation of the Emoluments Clause, and rather than gibbering in fear that he will invoke a constitutional crisis the rest of the wingnut monkeyhouse has been doing a Gingrich; trying to insist that breaking the norms and rules is really the New Norms and Rules and that doing to the federal government what Newt does to Callista on Friday night after a bottle of lambrusco and 100mg of Viagra is Just How It Works.

We Are So, So, So, SO Fucked.

They cry peace, peace, but there is no...what, what?

I've tried to avoid the toxic fever-swamp that is the GOP convention like I try to avoid bad beer, vegan barbeque, and sleeping with people crazier than I am. But it's really hard to keep out the sickly stench of the hate, paranoia, rage, and fear that seem to rise from off that seething heap of "conservative" pismires like stink off a fresh pile of park dogshit.

I have no sympathy for that niddering throng of past-their-sell-by-date-Eurocentric/Christopathic-morons. Largely because of their weapons-grade stupid rallying whimper:

Make America Great Again!

I hear that and I can't help thinking; seriously, people? Because we're living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape? WTF?

But then I pause for a moment and think about the sort of input we're exposed to in the present Information Age. Ed over at Gin and Tacos had a sort of paranoid-fear moment the other day:

"With the unbroken string of horrible, crazy shit that has cast a pall over the world in the last few months, and without the events in Dallas, in St. Paul, and (the first) Baton Rouge being fully digested and comprehended, there was no part of me able to even take in another story along the same lines. Throw in the major European/Asian terrorist attack of the week and I didn't just ignore the news on Sunday. I actively avoided it."

Yep. Especially if you're a news junkie. CNN and MSNBC and (of course) Fox "News" is full of this shit. If you take their "reportage" at face value you'd begin to believe that we really ARE living in the End of Days. Wars, rumors of wars, fire, murder, headchopping Muslims, cats and dogs living together...

But.

Stop. Think for a moment.

When was the last time your entire town or city was burned by an invading horde of horse nomads?

When was the last time your neighborhood was shadowed by a towering pyramid of the freshly-harvested skulls of your family, friends, and neighbors?

When you consider the sort of fucking ginormous catastrophes that litter human history – famines, plagues, folk-migrations, full-on civilization collapse – we really are living in pretty tranquil times.

That doesn't sell advertising minutes on CNN, though, so you'd never know it. But, really.

It kinda amazes me when I stop and think of CNN covering the Black Death, or the Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe. THAT would have been epic.

That frame for the story helps me keep my perspective.

That, and avoiding fucking CNN like I try to avoid bad beer, vegan barbeque, and sleeping with people crazier than I am.

Shut up and sit down

Seems to be what the Republican voters in the state of Nevada told their lunatic gun-licking teabagger Michele Fiore. She lost the House District 03 to someone named Tarkanian who, since he is a Republican, is reliably spineless on the whole business of well-regulating the fucking militia but is less full-blown, bull-goose looney about armed sedition.

One can hope.

Mind you, she came in a strong third, garnering nearly 20% of the GOP primary voters. Which pretty much confirms what I've always suspected; that there's about somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of U.S. "citizens" who have no real idea what constitutes a polity, have no concept of (or interest in) a civil compact with their fellow-citizens.

As I've mentioned here before, Fiore represents the very, very worst of the greedy, stupidly chuckleheaded notion that there IS no social contract, that "I built that", that the entire idea of collective responsibility or community is not just impractical but iniquitous.

Needless to say I'm pleased that even the Republican primary voters in Nevada were unwilling to go so far into that fever-swamp as Ms. Fiore wanted them to. While it is reprehensible that some of these jokers let her get as far as she did, apparently sending her to join the poop-flinging Freedom Caucus in D.C. was too much even for Republicans, even in Nevada.

Enjoy spending more time with the family, Michele. Don't forget to keep the ammo out of reach of the toddlers, now, hear..?