Monday, December 31, 2018

Baghdad Cafe

The architects of the latest, enduring Iraq War--neocons and their allies--have had plenty of time to refine their recipe for Middle East peace. Therefore, I thought we might drop them off on a road outside Baghdad and let them fend for themselves, fixing any minor troubles that remain.

They should prosper in the circumstances they created. But, I am a compassionate and understanding man, so I thought we would stake them to a little cafe--maybe Feith's, or Wolfowitz's or Rumsfeld's, by name. I wish them well and will recommend them to anyone traveling there.

Americans in Paris

The time has come to employ the Nazi analogy. Everybody says you are screwed if you do but I don't care. No rational, national observer can doubt that it would mean nothing to Donald Trump if he got millions of people killed. Hell, George Bush got millions of people killed, destroyed the world economy, and he still thinks history will remember him well.

Behind the scenes, economic voodoo and racist and eugenic attitudes prevail. Trump's most enduring and apparently effective close adviser, his resident racist Stephen Miller, is a professional troll and a wealthy young parasite. These "principles" of economic atrocity--parasitism--and racial oppression, exclusion and indecency inspire fanatical devotion. 

No matter that they are observably false, treasonous, inconsistent with our actual laws and traditions, and unsustainable. Hate is presupposed. Resentment is a given. The practitioners of Republican politics have a grudge. How can they have a grudge? Where is our Versailles? There it is, out in the open, an enormous insult and crippling, post-war conclusion.

The Civil War left a huge wound from which the United States has never recovered. I can't in some compelling way argue this view into acceptance, syllogistically or by dialectic, but Reconstruction is our Versailles, the injury and abominable insult requiring retribution. Witness it in the loathsome, reptilian, treasonous spectacle of Mitch McConnell. 

Mitch's distortions of reality have an underlying, unifying drive and cohesion--projection. Mitch accuses others, typically Democrats, of doing what he does. He gets reelected because he is sticking it to the Yankees. He is a purified vehicle of southern revenge--the homespun, folksy, but cunning guy having it over on and outwitting the smart people.

We were all at Versailles in spirit but ours is deeper, more chronic and enduring. American southerners--the older generation, anyway--will die before they will abandon their racism and resentment, vital components of their psyches. Republicans gave their party over to these insane, destructive individuals. It is now the party of the Confederacy.

No Other Niche

In diversity there is stability. Even Republicans know this. They know it about the stock portfolios they aspire to live off of--Republican nirvana. Still, they don’t care.

Republicans want there to be only one viable niche left—theirs. That is the imaginary niche of apex predators a generation or two removed from actually having to hunt.

They inhabit a restaurant where they are served endlessly for doing nothing. Productivity only soils the hands of losers. Republicans underpay, exploit and revile them.

Working niches are no longer viable. Therefore, none of it is viable. That is the Republican myth--that neverending exploitation, of people and resources, is sustainable.

Not that they really believe it. There is no "long run" for them. Religious conservatives hope for the end times. Rich capitalists think or hope they can weather anything. 

Saturday, December 29, 2018

None Dare Call It Treason

Trey Gowdy and Robert Goodlatte are worried about Hillary Clinton’s email irregularities.

The 2000 presidential election was stolen and decided in a disgraceful, partisan Supreme Court ruling. That election’s negative mandate didn’t keep a Republican administration from using a national tragedy to implement a laundry list of bad Republican ideas, including destructive tax cuts, deregulation and deprofessionalizing the federal bureaucracy. They lied and cajoled us into starting wars which have resulted in over a million deaths and squandered trillions of dollars. They rendered America’s respect for international standards of justice meaningless.

But Gowdy and Goodlatte are worried about those emails. 

Similarly, we are looking at another presidential election stolen by Republicans in 2016 and another negative mandate. Unfair tax cuts have again been enacted and justified by lies. Sinister, illegal, racist policies have been promoted against the will of the people but mostly halted by the courts. Crooks and scoundrels occupy many high, including cabinet-level, positions. Other important jobs remain unfilled and their duties neglected. Budgets are irresponsibly and punitively slashed. The weakening of the civil service, begun by Republican ideologues under Reagan, runs rampant.

Gowdy and Goodlatte, partisan hacks, hucksters and shills, don’t care. 

Donald Trump’s entire career turns out to have been rooted in fraud and illegality. His administration is rooted in fraud and illegality. Paul Manafort’s inability to conceive of the possibility of accountability is instructive. He can’t stop lying even when he is certain to be caught. Other Trump associates have done the same and some are under indictment. The president systematically undermines the nation's laws and encourages illegal behavior. He incites citizens to violence and racial, religious and ethnic resentment. He refuses to condemn racist behavior when it occurs. 

God riddance, Gowdy and Goodlatte. You are scumbags who will not be missed. 

Huge Shocker

Here's a huge shocker. Republicans are turning out to be criminals. Criminals and suckers. Suckers need criminals and criminals need suckers. They are co-dependent.

Among the suckers some are circumstantial. They believed the lies that Republicans stand for fiscal responsibility, righteous living, patriotism and everything good and decent.

Those people might be able to be saved but it won't be easy. Decades of denial won't be easily overcome.

Friday, December 28, 2018

Making Adultery Great Again

Catholics who voted for Trump must be thrilled with his choice for ambassadress to the Vatican. She spread her legs for Newt and—voilĂ !—she’s qualified to represent America and American Catholics before the pontiff. Newt himself is waddling around there and, no doubt, feasting his ass off at the finest restaurants in and around Rome.

Callista taped a nice Christmas greeting. To me, her appointment is an astonishing insult to Catholics but I will trust that the Trump voters among them knew what they were doing and that they rejoice at the wonderful humanitarian policies Trump is implementing and the Christian charity, humility and good works he evidences every day.

It testifies to the great American economy and to the honor and generosity of its citizens that we can afford to pour pasta down the throat of Newt Gingrich. Callista, too! They must be making invaluable contributions to intercultural and culinary understanding and furthering the principles of chastity, decency, and care for the poor.

And, thank God, Newt is finally too hideously fat, ugly and out-of-shape to pursue another affair. Or, so we assume. How many would that be? I lost count.

Trump's Wa-Wa

Little Donnie Trump wants his wa-wa. Donnie is throwing a huge tantrum over his wa-wa. But Donnie is super rich and a racist running a country so this isn't just any wa-wa. And it isn't just any tantrum.

Donnie is lashing out in every direction, as oblivious to the results as any spoiled child. His world is himself. For fuck's sake, somebody find a viable pacifier. The wail is hard to bear. And he's dangerous.

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

No Exit

There are so many layers in the Republican house of lies even its creators can't find their way out. We are stuck in there with them, not buying the bullshit but subjected to its effects.

They are the lying versions of alcoholics, nearing the end of a forty-year bender. Like any addict they have ripped off everyone while spiraling downward. Will it end in death or the gutter?

Not only for them, is the point. We are all going down. But how far? Will we and ours be wrecked forever or still able to function and recover? Call your Republican representatives today.

Ask them what they have in store for us now that their leader and example of patriotism and virtue, Trump, is in charge. Ask them how he represents their standards of democracy and decency.

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

A Geneology of Immorality

Southern Baptists sold their souls to Satan over African slavery. They forced black people to carry the burden of that sinfulness, which you can do, under the rules of Satanism. 

Republicans then mortgaged their souls as well, second-hand, to Southern Baptists to get electoral victories, political power and wealth. Those short-term goals were realized. 

Satan is now calling in the debt and sowing hatred, confusion, divisiveness and violence everywhere through his agents and underlings, Republicans and social conservatives. 

People can no longer tell good from evil. Evil masquerades as righteousness and those calling themselves followers of Christ prey on his children. Satan is having his way in America.

Monday, December 24, 2018

The Circle is Unbroken

I have accused Republicans of circular reasoning, employing the term broadly to describe arguing not TO conclusions but FROM them--using conclusions as a starting point. For example, the likelihood a Republican "think tank" will announce that tax cuts for the rich are bad policy is about nothing.

Therefore, what they do isn't reasoning but providing a rationalized home for various primal drives--like competitive urges, greed, lust, a need for domination, and sadism. What I haven't asserted is that I think everybody does this but they do. NOBODY engages in strictly logical, unbiased and non-prejudicial thinking.

Because people aren't capable of comprehending the universe, or even some part of it, in its totality--its true breadth and depth--they achieve a deeper understanding by narrowing their field-of-vision, a highly biased and prejudicial activity--choosing what to drill down and focus on. It's subjective as hell.

What separates people is the qualitative cast of their choices and, unfortunately, it appears that the sickest, most immature and fearful people are those most compelled to assert their subjective views because they are so fucked-up and fragile. Decent, more secure people can withstand uncertainty and suspend judgment.

Secure conditions make messed up people nuts because fear is a given for them. The justifications are a given--under every rock and in every dark place, nook and cranial cavity. This is projection. Everyone does it, but what do they project? Good people need to be especially vigilant in times of relative peace and security.

That's when the crazies come out of the woodwork. They aren't comfortable in the absence of conflict, competition and suffering, so they create it. Their current host in America is the Republican Party. They can't conceive of a world without conflict, enmity, fear and despair. "Merry Christmas" to them.

Republicans represent the real war on Christmas. They represent the opposite of everything Christmas means--love and sanity and a generous and welcoming heart to the entire world and all of creation. 

Friday, December 21, 2018

Let’s Get Real

We all know what’s going on with Donald Trump. He likes to be the center of attention. Who’s the center of attention at Christmas? Some loser who got crucified.

Donald likes leaders who didn’t get crucified. Granted, the so-called “savior” was said to have risen from the dead. Big deal. Donald survived a bunch of bankruptcies.

No doubt, the “resurrection” is nothing but fake news. It reeks of sentiment and liberal hype—more propaganda from the left. America already has its savior in Mr.Trump.

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Sappy Holidays

America's sentimentalism about Christmas was more endurable when we weren't such murdering thugs and rapacious pigs. Now it is just really disgusting.

Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Free Stuff

At Christmas, we witness the true perversion of American culture. The real message of Christmas is about the bond between God and His creation--that creation is a reflection of God. Therefore, when Americans shit upon creation, thinking it theirs to exploit and abuse, they shit on God.

Don't worry, God can take it. But we can't. Americans were gifted an entire continent of unexploited natural resources, which they despoiled, then turning to other peoples and places whose resources were also obviously intended for us, we being the chosen people by virtue of the implications of that initial gift, divine right and fiat.

The myth of the resourceful, independent, self-reliant American--subduer of wilderness, civilizer of savages and tamer of beasts--belies the truth of the addiction to free stuff. Watch now as we scramble in a competition, unto death, to acquire and cling to as much free stuff as possible.

Merry Christmas, America.

Paul Ryan: An Incredible Fraud

People like Paul Ryan are plucked out of obscurity by rich corporatists and their political henchmen once identified as appropriately submissive, unscrupulous, meretricious and mendacious. Thereafter, the sky is the limit.

Ryan, however, has reached his own ass ceiling. A faithful servant, he is bowing out, as good a slave of greed as might be found in the kingdom. As a degraded ass-kisser and shill to corporate interests, he is possibly unparalleled.

His kind are usually not allowed to rise above the level of a suck-up. Waist high, he has reached his top tier of attainment, leaving fittingly with a huge butt-smooch of a tax cut for his wealthy friends. Farewell, you fraud.

How to Cook Wolves

The Wall Street brand of wolf is known to be incredibly tough, its fibers probably requiring a good soak in an acidic marinade before being blasted with the fires of the grill. Robert Mueller might have found the recipe, firstly identifying the crooks. Some sit in the acid solution as we speak, awaiting the purifying flames. 

DefCon Trump

I’m declaring “DefCon Trump” reflecting a crisis of impending American self-annihilation.

Are We “Great Again” Yet?

A status report on Trump’s hokum indicates the promises that his business acumen would translate (abracadabra!) into an American revival (hocus-pocus) are already failed and flaming wreckage. By hook or (gong!) crook, his time on this particular stage (trap door) must end.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Privilege for Everyone

I know I rail, spit and spout about privilege. For me, though, privilege doesn't need to be exclusive. I love privilege. 

I want everyone to have it. There's some Christmas spirit for you! What I reject is exclusion. Call it the "Santa Prescription."

Find fault with that, I dare you. Conservatives are surging up from their La-Z-Boys, anyway, their faces reddening in anger. 

"We can't afford it!" Oh, yes we can. It's them we can't afford. 

Monday, December 17, 2018

Huge Hissy Fight

Wow. American conservatives, representing dignity, restraint, cultural continuity, reverence for ritual and decorum, and fine tailoring in the face of the casual revival, are having a huge hissy fight. The founders and poobahs of the recently defunct Weekly Standard, who deemed Sarah Palin a great "second" for an aging potential president, are in it with Trump and Steve King, the current standard bearers for Republican intellectual attainment and responsible, sober, professional and competent representative government.

I won't relate the actual verbiage (you can find it online) but it is a real testament to America’s ruling class and their behavioral ideals in its rhetorical finesse. To an outsider, it's confusing because the Weekly Standard boys seem to me to have encouraged voters to support their brand of imbecility forever and even after it failed in practice. How can they complain when the same voters shift to a new brand of boneheadedness? It's enough to make you wonder if the ”principles” they carry on about incessantly aren't just a lot of hooey and a smokescreen for an enormous power grab. But, what do I know.

Hate, Actually

I worry there isn't enough hate to go around in the world, keeping it in balance and promoting human welfare. It was Judas, after all, who gave Christ the opportunity to realize His destiny. Without evil, there is no goodness. Goodness wouldn't mean anything without evil. It wouldn't exist without evil. 

Praise God, all I have to do is turn on the nightly news and there is an abundance of evil on view, enough to keep us all in anticipation of the kind of transformative experience Christ encountered on the cross. Yes, if we are fortunate enough, we might even die, from want of healthcare or whatever, ending our suspense.

Persecution and enmity are everywhere in the air this Christmas season. Nativism, bigotry and nationalism thrive and flourish. Innocent people, seeking asylum like Mary and Joseph, are spat upon—rejoice, be grateful, and sing songs and hymns of praise to the Lord. We may all see Him soon, the way it is going.

Extraordinary Rendering

I think the Khashoggi murder involved a mistranslation. The Saudis were very familiar with the American practice of "extraordinary rendition," having helped and participated to an unknown degree. It's an odd, legalistic use of the word "rendition" involving the Bush administration's habit of employing euphemisms and obscure terms to rebrand their crimes as acceptable practices. 

Consider this: the US and others talk about Islam as though it is a monolithic thing, assuming or asserting that the actions of fringe elements reflect on the entire religion. Similarly, Arab and Islamic cultures might look on certain western, Christian cultures, including Nazi Germany, as representative of European, Christian values. Viewing us the way we view them turns us into Nazis and possible terrorists.

The Saudis no doubt inferred from their observations of American and western practices that it was absolutely fine, acceptable and de rigueur to kill people, cut them up into pieces and possibly "render" them by boiling or immersing them in acids--a simple misunderstanding. How should the Saudis know that the standards we carry on about don't apply to us? It is admittedly very confusing.

From Russia With Predictable Intent

Shocking! The Russians are meddling in our democracy. 

Let's begin by noting that this is a given, that countries will try to bring other countries in line with what they perceive to be their interests, however unwisely, short-sightedly and inconsistently with their professed values and intentions--except for America!

America would never do that.

Then let's note that the Russians didn't storm those virtual walls and reduce them to rubble with vast expenditures of money and unusually aggressive tactics. Republicans did that for them, firstly undoing safeguards that were there to ensure the airwaves, public property, were used responsibly. Then Republicans refused to regulate new kinds of businesses, like Facebook. They always refuse to do anything at the expense of corporate profits. 

Then let's note that the Russians are doing exactly what Fox News has been doing openly for years--undermining elections, promulgating lies and sowing the seeds of division, animosity and polarization. Americans have supported that. Americans reward that.

Don't blame Russia. They didn't accomplish anything in notably forceful, evil ways. They didn't spend huge amounts of money by NSA standards. We gave our security away. And they are lightweights at destroying our democracy in comparison with Fox News

Sunday, December 16, 2018

Oh, Glorious Day! Die, Americans!

Again Americans are threatened with the loss of their health insurance, and thereby affordable, appropriate healthcare--and by Texas Republicans, of all people! These jihadis, a judge and an attorney general, are thrilled to declare the ACA unconstitutional, the AG tweeting excitedly in glorious victory.

Death to America!

The judge, appointed by Bush, is another hideous hack, true believer and incompetent with the usual array of Republican fixations and obsessions but it all comes down to cutting taxes on the rich and screwing everyone else. It is so extreme they would rather put a match to the money than spend it on average citizens.

This they did very effectively in the Middle East, where trillions have gone up in smoke. They begrudge lesser people everything--jobs, voting rights and even life itself. Out of respect and decency, I ask only that they kill us without the gloating and celebration. Is it so much to ask? We are still citizens, after all.

Thursday, December 13, 2018

All About Eve

I believe the greatest flaw of humanity might be taking things for granted. That's what Eve did in the Garden of Eden. She lost perspective and got obsessed with the one thing she was told she couldn't have. The moral is if you take things for granted you lose them forever.

Fast forward to now. Americans, the luckiest people in the history of humanity, compulsively drill holes in their own boat and wonder why it sinks as a crew of pirates, mutineers and traitors--Republicans--navigate us off a cliff, drunk on greed. We take a lot for granted.

We will lose it forever, and all for nothing.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Broke It

Last night I made a point of trying to fall asleep in a peaceful state instead of worrying myself sick about the Republican destruction of America and their attempts to spread greed and irresponsible living around the world. 

It worked! I fell asleep quickly, slept well and had interesting dreams of the days when lunatics and assholes didn't run everything. But then I woke up, sad as hell, remembering the mess we're in. You can't win with these people.

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

The Liar in Winter

Things are looking bad for Trump and Trump, a vain man, is looking bad--old, haggard, stooped and spent. His eyes are vacant and his jaws seem ready to unhinge and fly away with him, Donald dangling below like flying monkey-prey. He strikes out and struggles to maintain his power. 

His world is ending. Hairy, hoary, bloated and boastful, Donald still thinks only of himself. He tries to keep control out of habit and instinct, maybe fearing his successor will be a tyrant as well or expose him as a loser, exacting justice for his crimes. Republicans fear justice more than anything.

Kanye for Chief of Staff

Trump should promote racial diversity in his administration and make Kanye his Chief of Staff. Already the executive branch is a reality show and guaranteed the good ratings any respectable trainwreck gets. Forget about running the country--a hopeless aim with Donald as president. 

Opt for a better spectacle. We'll get a better spectacle with Kanye. Kim will certainly stir things up and maybe have a rivalry with Melania. It should be entertaining as hell and Americans only seem to care about not being bored. To hell with living responsibly. To hell with the future.

Oh, My God! The Emails!

Republicans have bankrupted the government, nearly destroyed the world economy, started endless, cowardly wars in the service of commerce killing over a million people, eviscerated the American middle class and reduced farmers to fodder. Still, Hillary Clinton's emails make them crazy with a zeal for investigations and prosecutions.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

John Kelly Heads for the Door

There's no way to make a dignified exit spattered and covered with the effluvia of Donald Trump's intestines but let's watch John Kelly try. Like Pence his constipated countenance seems to mask or reveal an attempt to make up for their master's excesses. 

Trump, however, is such a regenerative shit-bomb there is no escaping unsullied and for this association his underlings will be remembered forever. They were Trump's hacks and lackeys. Give them a twelve-step program but, for God's sake, get them out of there. 

Antics Roadshow

We have to begin with the obvious, that Donald Trump isn't even trying to do his job and should be fired. I, however, think Trump is especially egregious when he is away from Washington, the further the more so. 

Credit this to cowardice. Donald gets nervous and acts up even more when out of a comforting, secure, womb-like environment, ideally owned by him. He's a strange kind of control freak. It explains his penchant for attacking anyone at a pin-drop.

Fear-aggression, it is called, and Donald is full of it. Try that on for comfort, America. Your president is the worst person you could have chosen for the job. Ask yourselves, why? Why the fuck would we put this hopeless goon in charge?

Trump acts as though he's escaped from parental supervision when he's off somewhere. Daddy will ride to the rescue when he screws up. Who's going to ride in now? We all are, cleaning up another Republican catastrophe.

Trump is Toast

Donald is going down, one way or another. Make ready the lifeboats. I doubt that Donald's pride will allow him to abandon ship without scuttling something. Bigger will be better, to show the world what a nice dick he has after all. That's all that matters. 

Friday, December 7, 2018

You Could Be a Roux

Like a lot of people I've been thinking more about death lately--both my own and death in general--because of the influence of Donald Trump. I'm trying to get comfortable with the idea of cremation but it seems awfully arid to me and dehydrating--not my style.

I'm more of a cream sauce kind of guy. Maybe I could be made into that somehow. Or a roux. No, I think I will opt for natural burial, like a Trappist monk, with a pine box, a hole in the ground and nothing more. These are strange thoughts but Donald will do that to you. 

Perverse Mueller Outcome

We all know Donald Trump declares bankruptcy when he's in too deep and heads for the hills reinventing himself along the way. He could do that now and blame it on the Democrats for insidiously interfering with his presidency, returning to his life of private crime. But then he loses his immunity from prosecution.

Perversely, I think Mueller might keep Trump in office. Trump needs the protection. 

Rogue Species Threatens Planet

A rogue species, Homo Sapiens, is threatening the Earth with imminent destruction. When asked about this the titular head and representative of the world’s most powerful political entity, the United States of America, said “fuck you” and called the interviewer a “flaming loser” and threatened her with investigation and prosecution by the Department of Justice and other entities assumed to be under his control.

The representative then commented on her ass and tits and asked her to accompany him to a hotel owned by him and bragged about his greatness and immense wealth. When further pressed about planetary annihilation he said he would be dead anyway and that his heirs and family would have enough money to save themselves and who gave a shit about a bunch of bugs, beasts, birds and poor people anyway.

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Dying is for Losers

Donald Trump, always the center of his own attention, paid his disrespects to former president Bush (41) at his funeral, scowling his way through it and failing to utter the Apostle's Creed. He forgets how Bush helped him by raising up the Atwaterites and assorted College Republicans in preparation for the end-times in our country.

No Atwater, no Newt Gingrich. No abhorrent slimefest and national dissolution. No moral bankruptcy. No endless wars. No Great Recession. No government insolvency. No outrageous polarization and bureaucratic meltdown. Deprofessionalizing everything is a Republican trademark. It frees up the free market for enhanced exploitation. 

Without the Bushes there would be no President Donald Trump. Honor your roots, Don-Boy. The Bushes, with their arrogance, exaltation of obliviousness and win-at-all-costs political tactics paved the way for your hideous candidacy and rule of incompetence and ruin. Bushes embraced their depravity and mass murdering with some decorum.

Where's your decorum, Donald? Don't worry, there's no problem being a self-centered, self-serving schmuck and flaming dirigible of incompetence while appearing gracious. For that pioneering insight we credit Reagan and the Bushes, fuming their way into into the hearts of hordes of budding American sociopaths, a precedent for Donald.

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

What Child is This?

Watch Donald Trump walk off the stage... Yes, it happened again somewhere, our impetuous, impulsive, pretender president failing to meet the most minimal standards of propriety, decency and respect. At what age is he arrested? 

A contest should be held for the best answer to that. There are layers of it, I believe, but nothing exceeding, overcoming or surpassing adolescence. Is he regressing? We keep asking unanswerable questions about Trump in our fear and frustration. 

Some genius chose Pence as Trump's running mate and evangelical sidekick, ensuring a horrific end to fantasies of removing Trump from office and, I hope, the unincarcerated share of the population. HE belongs in jail, not those he threatens.

Juvenile detention. Reform school. Walk off the national stage, big boy! We'll take care of Pence, with our Democratic Congress. Impeach his ass. Fire his ass and hold his ass to the fire. Besiege him with gays, heathen, immigrants and apostates.

Normalcy? Who aspires to that these days? A rebirth of our nation is needed, this Christmas season, starting by expelling all the money lenders and smarmy-mouthed hypocrites, parading their self-righteousness, from the temple of democracy.

In the Spirit of Donald Trump...

I blame Trump for the death of Anthony Bourdain. For me, Bourdain represented the love of authenticity. Trump represents the ascendency of sham everything--celebrating shit. 

As American culture penetrates to every corner authenticity is threatened with extinction. I don't think Bourdain could take it. Trump is the elevation and reverence of garbage.

Fuck Trump. Screw Trump and banish Trump. Drive Trump into exile and bury him on a golf course when he dies, stuck under a sand trap and entombed in tartan and gaudy plaid. 

Golfing is Donald's virtual thing, an aimless romp in an artificial environment of a lunar level of unreality. I'll take Bourdain. May he rest in peace and Trump be forever reviled.

The New Usual

Republicans in Wisconsin are employing an old and favored tactic of their party, sabotage, in a new way pioneered in North Carolina—salting the fields of democracy. Elections, fair play and the will of the people no longer matter.

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

China Syndrome

Donald Trump is trying to put the blame for the sinking American middle class on China or anyone but the real culprits, Republican politicians and their wealthy patrons who have, for forty years, done everything to screw working people and enrich themselves.

Americans can fix this by undoing evil Republican legislation and deregulation, beginning with Trump's own tax cuts. Rich people like Trump don't like to be told what to do. They don't want to be responsible for anything. But it's their fault. Don't blame China.

Monday, December 3, 2018

George H. W. Bush and the Roots of Sociopathic Rule

To understand Bush “41” watch the movie Boogie Man. There you will see how Lee Atwater got Bush elected. You will see the link between evangelical Christians and American old-money mobilized. You will see how those groups are united in the assumptions of privilege—one by believing in their innate, unmerited salvation, the other their inborn superiority and excellence. They were arbitrarily, irrevocably and unjustifiably endowed.

By this they are instilled with a lack of circumspection and conscience. How they behave doesn’t matter, the issue having been decided definitively by higher authority. Evangelicals can't imagine that they are wrong in their beliefs. God tells them they are right. Blue bloods like the Bushes also can't imagine that they aren’t infinitely deserving, existentially correct and incapable of materially significant error, by fate and cultural conditioning.

Not that this is ever consciously doubted or questioned. That’s the point. It leads to Trump, in whom the quality of action is so severed from reality behaving horribly is a good thing. Trump’s depravity and incompetence are signs. He was in some way chosen. He has never soiled his hands with work but his soul was blackened with corruption from birth. Let’s remember the real role George H. W. Bush played in the destruction of America.

And that, before we even begin to consider his son.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Gateway to Hate

Trump and the Republican Party, his opportunistically chosen vehicle of ambition, are now the gateway to hate for millions of Americans. Their message rings out this holiday season: hate has a home here.

Trump Presidency Gas Bags Its Way to Calamity

Donald Trump’s blimped-out administration is going all Hindenburg. Oh, the humanity!

Saturday, December 1, 2018

The Man with the Bag

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

Friday, November 30, 2018

Sariah Law

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

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

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Trump and the Cherry Tree

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Eyes on Trump

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, November 26, 2018

Raiders of the Lost Can of Worms

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mercilessly Ugly and Irresponsible

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

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

Friday, November 23, 2018

The One True Church of Trump

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

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

We welcome him for that.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Your Order Has Shipped!

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

Trump and the Unknown Unknown

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

Monday, November 19, 2018

House of Turds

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

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

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

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

Sunday, November 18, 2018

You Might Never Wake Up

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

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

I Am at Peace

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

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Someone to Gloat Over Me . . .

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

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

Friday, November 16, 2018

The New Gelded Age

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

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

The level of degradation is just so extreme.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Trumpolini and the Midterm Meltdown

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

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

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

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

Sunday, November 11, 2018

The Peoples Temple of Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

God help us anyway.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

Inherit the Whine

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, November 9, 2018

I Had a Dream

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Prepare Yourselves

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

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

Election Disaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, November 4, 2018

Bridge Over Troubled WaWa

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, November 3, 2018

The Rapture is Upon Us

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, October 26, 2018

Assholes to Ashes

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Only the Good Die at All

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

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

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

The City of God

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

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

I will witness to that. 

Monday, October 22, 2018

He Stoops to Conquer

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, October 15, 2018

Terrifying Stuff

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

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

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Suspend Everything

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

We become more implicated. 

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

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

We must take a stand.

Sunday, October 7, 2018

Living in the CSA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, October 4, 2018

America is Suffering

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

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

Answerable Only to God, If Anyone

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

And why not?

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

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

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Almost Gone!

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

Fail and Flail

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

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

Sunday, September 30, 2018

Raw Kavanaugh

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

Friday, September 28, 2018

The Horror Show Continues

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday, September 27, 2018

The Great Pout

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

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

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


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

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Entrepreneurship as the New Salvation

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

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

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

The Troll Army Has Some Trouble

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, September 24, 2018

Deconstructing Reconstruction: The Nihilist Assault Group

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

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

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

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

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

State of Nature (lite)

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Professional Racist

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

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

I Hope for Jesus

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

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

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

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

A Report on the Wrecking Crew: Mission Accomplished

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

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

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

Sunday, September 2, 2018

Heroes of the Devolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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