April 19, 2017

Further insanity, I need a damn straightjacket.

Maybe the last few days haven't been as batshit insane as some of the really nutty ones, or maybe as we approach 100 days of being locked in Arkham with these assholes, our standards for what constitutes true madness have shifted. Like if Charles Manson was your roommate, standing on a counter in Starbucks throwing poop at all the baristas wouldn't seem like that big a deal. On the other hand, having demoting Steve "Darth Wino" Bannon after a series of costly failures, perhaps the the Shart Administration has settled into a new normal of low-grade bumbling malice. So let's take a bit to laugh at these clowns as they wander around and crash into shit like so many bumper cars. Racist, hateful bumper cars.

Maybe you enjoyed a laugh over the weekend at the headlines about the Most Powerful Man on the Planet struggling to pull off the White House Easter Egg Roll (God love 'em, they got it done. The day after Easter, but nobody caught on fire, so it's probably making the 100 Days accomplishments list) or Alex Jones' own lawyer referring to him as a "performance artist" in a custody battle (and let's get an Underground Railroad going to get those kids away from that bellowing freak, by the way. You'd be better-adjusted if you were raised by a dead chinchilla and half-eaten package of watermelon Oreos than Alex Jones. Fuck.).

The last few days have been full of hilarious tales of GOP reps facing their constituents at town halls, defending the president's bi-hourly golf outings, or their "If you didn't want to die, you shouldn't have gotten sick before you made six million dollars" health care bill. They flailed and floundered, some insisted on digging themselves in even deeper holes, screeching about how their constituents don't actually pay their salaries (boy howdy that right there was a dumb fucking thing to say) or about how you wouldn't yell in church so don't yell at me, to which I say if my pastor was scheming to take away my health care I would absolutely yell at him in church, and by the way so would Jesus so shut your whore mouth, Congressman-for-now LaMalfa.

The news broke that Ivanka just so happened, WHAT A COINKYDINK to be granted a few trademarks in China on the I SWEAR, IT JUST HAPPENED, ISN'T THAT WEIRD very same day she had dinner with President Xi of China at her daddy's NO SERIOUSLY, THE TRUMP FAMILY IS USING THE ASSETS AND INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES TO NEGOTIATE PERSONALLY FAVORABLE FINANCIAL DEALS WITH CHINESE BUSINESSES AND NONE OF US WILL EVER SEE A NICKEL'S WORTH OF BENEFIT golf club, which, I am told, is not a newsworthy story at all.

Oh, and there's that little story where a white supremacist is suing the President for inciting him to violence at a campaign rally where he is in turn being sued for assaulting an African-American woman. (FUN FACT, this is not the only story about a white supremacist man assaulting a woman in the news today, isn't that neat?) Remember when that happened to President Obama? Or Bush? Or Clinton? Or Taft or Pierce of Harrison or Monroe or Frank Fucking Underwood? WELL SHIT, I DON'T REMEMBER THAT EITHER.

The most hilarious news of the day, possibly of all human history, came when the Failing New York Times issued a push notification to let the world know that when Orange Julius Caesar was bragging about sending "an armada" over to North Korea to intimidate them into giving up their nuclear program and instead devote themselves to composing song cycles praising the ratings of The Apprentice before that German fellah took over, the ships in question were in fact SAILING IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. Incompetence on that level, that easily-observable-to-the-entire-world level, is hard to comprehend. It's like the driver of an ice cream truck, instead of selling fudge pops to children, fills his freezer with rat corpses, drives into a playground swing set, and stands atop his vehicle screaming profanities until the authorities cart him away.

We learned that Dorito Mussolini joined the King of Saudi Arabia, (Where "Hey, should we let women drive cars?" qualifies as a major controversy) the President of Azerbaijan (Whose Veep is his fucking wife), the Borg Collective, Bill Cosby and the Red Skull as the handful of people so lacking in decency as to call up President Erdogan of Turkey to congratulate him on his disputed-by-international-election-monitors autocratic power grab, and probably asking him to write an article for Cosmo on 10 Easy Tips For Arresting Journalists While Not Looking Like a Jagoff For Having a Too-Long Necktie.

Toupee Fiasco's bumbling didn't stop there, as, in an interview with Fox (The official network of creepy old dudes who work in news in order to have access to blonde newscasters to harass) the COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE MIGHTIEST WAR MACHINE THE EARTH HAS EVER SEEN revealed that he thinks North Korea has been governed by the same man for untold decades, some sort of immortal super-leader who never ages but has made sure American Doesn't Win Anymore since 1776, probably. You sort of wind up hoping that that this dick-comparing-in-reverse posturing between Drumpf and Kim Jong Un winds up with the two of 'em getting in a hammer fight in the aisles of the Wal-Mart in Paducah, KY, don't you?

Things took a not funny/straight nasty turn later in the day when we learned that the Shart's little brownshirts in ICE had deported their first DREAMer. These fucks like to pretend they're focusing on "bad hombres," but any fool can see they're rounding up everybody they can track down, so they'll be able to have a nice fat deportation count to throw out to the "Build a Wall" crowd during the re-election campaign, since they won't be able to show them the high-paying jobs they promised. Steve King, the Iowa congressman who's been polishing his collection of Nazi memorabilia these last few weeks in anticipation of being named commandant of his very own concentration camp, tweeted a photograph of a beer to the deporters, because he's a terrible human being with a gas station urinal cake where most people have a heart. He's an extra-large pile of shit, because he sent a picture of a beer without actually intending to buy anyone an actual real-life beer.

Anyway, a bunch of polls have been released in the last few days, and they're all showing that the nation continues to absolutely hate the Giant Orange Baboon's Ass occupying the White House, even after he blew up a bunch of gravel in Syria, so what did he bother blowing all that Syrian gravel for, anyhow? Independents are abandoning him and even his base is starting to have doubts (just wait until those manufacturing jobs stubbornly refuse to return just cuz El Sharto keeps saying they will) and as I post this the results from the special election in the Georgia Sixth are rolling in, and you know everybody in the Shart House is well past pissing themselves, and have moved on to ordering sandwiches from Jimmy Johns, white meat chicken, chewing silently in their cold, piss-drenched chairs.

April 18, 2017

Running the government not like a business, but like a junior high clique.

Who would've imagined that Donald Trump's election would usher in an entirely new genre in political journalism?

Still, it seems we can't go 18 hours without a fresh entry in the Anonymously Sourced Inter-staff Hunger Games Pit Fight series between the various groups of advisors struggling for the affections of our Idiot Manchild President. It's like the Sweet Valley High books, only with atomic stakes.

Y'see, there are competing "power centers" in the White House, the press keeps breathlessly telling us. Like tweens fighting over seats at the popular kid's table in the cafeteria at lunchtime, they're constantly at war with one another over the handful of moments when the President's attention span can be focused on the fate of the nation, between golf games and flipping through the Victoria's Secret catalogue.

We have the "nationalists," led by festering rectal boil Steve Bannon, and the "New Yorkers," (or "Cucks," if you speak Micropenised Internet Rage Monster) led by Jared Kushner and an undisclosed number of the heads of the hydra that runs Goldman Sachs. Somewhere in the middle, Reince Priebus, a man who realized long ago that he's destined to be played in film version of this steaming mess by Brad Dourif and decided to lean into that, presents himself as the face of the Rational Republican Establishment while sweating through nine shirts a day hoping nobody notices his ability to competently deliver results stops at Tying His Shoes Like a Big Boy.

The chosen field of battle for this Battle of the Bastards is the media, of course. The Failing New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and Politico. This is probably the single most hilarious trope of the genre, as the leak-plagued administration sees the inevitable sentence: "This article is based on interviews with 8 White House Sources," or "12 White House Sources" or "74 White House Sources plus we put a tape recorder by Bannon's face when passed out drunk after reading that article where Donnie Darko said he barely knew him and he talked in his sleep about how Betsy DeVos likes to hunt the homeless for sport."

And so the rival camps snipe and peck at their frenemies in the press all day long. Rather than tending to their own responsibilities, aides follow the Boss around like a pack of Mean Girls, terrified of what the others would say behind their back if they're not in the room.

All this might be funny if Trump weren't so blank and so persuadable. Dorito Mussolini has no concrete beliefs, (Ok, that isn't quite fair. The racism, if nothing else, is deeply and honestly held. Can we ever forget him dismissing even the possibility of Judge Curiel's professional impartiality, repeating "He's a Mexican," over and over, as though it were the simplest truth in the world, like saying "Parks and Recreation didn't really hit its stride until Season 2?&quot and all these assholes attaching themselves to him like so many dickhead remoras view his term as an opportunity to wield the power of the American Presidency for a couple years without that pesky need to present their ideas to the American electorate. After this week of flip-flops, on some of his biggest and most consistent campaign "promises," from the whether NATO is the Blockbuster Video of international alliances to labeling China a currency manipulator to non-intervention in the Middle East, we now know for certain there's no pledge he won't jettison in the name of Winning or Respect or Please Daddy Why Did You Ship Me to Military School Don't You Love Me?

Now, it seems like only yesterday when the the white supremacist faction was buzzing the New Yorkers' houses, taunting "GLOBALISTS, COME OUT AND PLAYYYYYAYYYYYYYY", but all the news lately is how Bannon's stock has plummeted, and that's certainly cause for celebration, because Steve Bannon is bipedal tumor that somehow gained the faculty for speech, a man whose hatred is so acute and extreme he'd seem cartoonishly out of place as the villain in a Bond film, right? If the dude who's actively pursuing an apocalyptic conflict with an entire freaking religion, and brags about being a Leninist who wants to transform the "administrative state" into a giant robot that shoots a laser that deports anyone who speaks Spanish and erases any post-8th grade education from every single female brain loses the ear of the most powerful man in the world, that's a good thing, right?

What you notice after a minute though, is there's no Folks Who Understand What Their Job Is and Do It Really Well faction. Our President is notoriously skeptical of "experts," opting instead to believe that the only legitimate measure of a person's expertise is the size of his bank account. Moreover, there's been a concerted effort to lock anyone who's ever criticized the Big Orange Glob out of executive branch jobs, placing vindictiveness over competence, a trend felt with particular acuteness in the realm of foreign policy.

And thus, Jared Kushner, who carries himself with the arrogance of a man born on third base who doesn't believe he hit a triple, but that he hit a long single and then stole second and third off Yadier Molina, finds himself in possession of an ever-expanding "portfolio," which seems to mean that every time Dipshit discovers another task the executive branch is responsible for, he drops it on Jared's desk and says "Wouldja take care of this? I got golf." And Jared, like his father-in-law, is too arrogant to admit that he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and so we're left wondering whether we're better off being governed by Kushner's Paris Hilton or Bannon's Hitler's-Brain-Implanted-in-a-Cyborg-Gorilla.

Do you remember back during the campaign? When John Kasich's people told us that Donnie offered him not only the running mate slot, but all the powers of the Presidency? Kasich would be in charge of all domestic and foreign policy, while Drumpf himself would take on "making America Great Again," which is basically what he does now, wandering the countryside taking credit for every lemonade stand that opens as though he were personally responsible? We really should've paid more attention, because he was telling us how completely uninterested he was in actually doing the job he was running for.

And do you remember when he nominated Retired General James Mattis to head the defense department? In more normal times this would've been a major HELL NO warning sign on its own. We normally have civilian oversight of the military in this country, but amongst the Devoses and Pruitts and Mnuchins and Dr. Ben Carson repurposing HUD as a place to store grain, Mattis looked like he might be the closest thing to an adult in the room, and so we looked the other way as it took a special waiver from congress to install an only recently-retired general, a fellow nicknamed Mad Dog because of a quote about wearing human skin like a poncho, to a post traditionally occupied by someone inclined to check the military's impulses rather than boosting and enabling them.

And this is where the collision of the President's lack of conviction and his near-infinite persuadability becomes really dangerous.

With no disrespect meant to our military, they've been promising presidents quick, decisive, military victories for longer than I've been alive, and it's been quite awhile since they've delivered.

And now, perhaps for the first time in American history, they have an executive branch inclined to defer to their wishes without a moment's consideration given to the consequences of their actions. Trump himself has said he's given "his" military "total authorization," horrifyingly implying he's given the military permission to do whatever the hell they want to and don't interrupt his teevee time with the details. It hasn't taken long for the consequences to manifest: Airwars reports at least 1,782 civilian casualties from U.S. and coalition airstrikes JUST IN MARCH. While no American official is willing to publicly state the rules of engagement have changed, from the botched Yemen raid to the Mosul air strike that killed more than 200 civilians, to the recent strike in Syria which hit allies rather than enemies, it's clear the American military's priorities have shifted, and only an infant would believe that recklessly slaughtering civilians on such a massive scale comes without consequences.

This then, is the real danger of the Trump Presidency; a disconnected, uninterested chief executive, mindlessly farming out his every responsibility because he finds governing a tedious imposition on his cake-eating/pussy-grabbing/pocket-lining/golfing time. And without a stern civilian hand to guide them, the U.S. Military rampages across the globe, indiscriminately killing because killing is their job, and protecting the homeland from the inevitable terrorist strikes from the children of the war dead is someone else's.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, Kellyanne Conway roams the halls, writing Alternative Facts on the walls in her own feces, though no one knows what she's doing or if anyone's listening to her. Perhaps her plan is to simply continue drawing a paycheck for years after everyone assumed she was fired, finally burning the White House down in a fit of pique, believing Jeff Sessions stole her stapler

April 12, 2017

Another insane goddamn day

Well folks, while not quite up to standards of some of the more chaotic trips around the sun since the Marmalade Shartcannon took office, I hope everyone invested in fertilizer manufacturers, because today was another Bat Guano Nutty Day.

We all woke up and immediately checked in on that deleted scene from V FOR VENDETTA where the guy gets bloodied in the process of being dragged off an airplane by law enforcement for refusing to give up his seat when the airline wanted to give it to an employee on an overbooked flight after he'd already boarded.

Wait, what? That was real life? You're shitting me.

Anyhow, we all watched in awe as the brass at United took the, shall we say "novel" approach of blaming the dude they had the cops beat the shit out of for the ass-kicking they ordered to be administered to him.

In the background, maybe you saw some of the pieces that rounded up the responses to a PRIVATE FUCKING CORPORATION ENLISTING TAXPAYER FUNDED LAW ENFORCEMENT TO BEAT THE FUCK OUT A PRIVATE CITIZEN BECAUSE THEY APPARENTLY RESERVE THE LEGAL RIGHT TO TAKE BACK THE SEAT YOU PAID FOR AT ANY POINT PROBABLY UP TO AND INCLUDING THIRTY THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE ROCKIES HOW THE FUCK DID WE LET IT COME TO THIS from supporters of the man we all pay to golf and periodically sign executive orders, and, surprise surprise, THEY TOOK THE AIRLINE'S SIDE. We didn't know just how much hunger there was in this country for a strong, sadistic, authoritarian state, did we? In related news, I'm launching a kickstarter to fund a series of dominatrix parlors in the Rust Belt. HILLBILLY ELEGY PART TWO, BITCHES.

Of course the same little Shartkins are apparently flocking to Bill O'Reilly's show, actually BOOSTING his ratings in the midst of the revelations that Fox has settled a number of sexual harassment suits against an old man who very clearly has to pay for sex. I tell you, folks, the Deplorable economy offers a number of unique opportunities. It's like "Well, I'm looking for someone to redo the shingles on my roof, but I'm hoping to hire somebody reprehensible. Do you have any multiple rapists on staff?"

And we all had a laugh that the congressman who is famous for screaming YOU LIE at President Obama going home to a town hall where a bunch of his constituents screamed YOU LIE at him, which has a fun sense of comeuppance to it. This congressman likely has a name, but I don't give a flying fuck what it is.

We learned that the Shart may have bombed Syria (or at least some useless gravel in Syria, since the Syrian military launched strikes from the base we bombed less than 24 hours after we hit it, can't these people even blow up a stationary target without fucking it up?) because his daughter told him to, which is a totally normal thing that happens in all developed countries with strong constitutional democracies. OR IS IT? Maybe Ivanka will get equally upset at all the children who were killed in the recent Mosul air strike or the botched Yemen raid, and Dorito Mussolini will order a strike on the perpetrators, without realizing exactly what he's done until the sandtrap on the 8th hole at Marmalago gets an unplanned expansion.

The President's Loyal Huntin' Dawg Beauregard, our Yokel General, was all over the news again today. A couple of days back, he made it clear that he didn't want our Justice Department focusin' on no civil rights, and today he ordered them to instead focus all available energies on punishing brown-skinned people for the high crime of not being white. Much was made of how his prepared remarks used the word "filth" to describe his preferred targets, but how he declined to actually call them "filth" in the delivering of the speech. Because that's the state of the immigration debate in American today, right? Whether or not we call our fellow human beings "filth." Anyhow, Sessions got a good sturdy taint punt today when a federal judge struck down Texas' super-racist voter ID law just for being ridiculously super-racist. Because we still have to argue about poll taxes. In the United States of America. In the 21st century. Sleep tight. By the end of the day, Ol' Beauregard was assurin' the press that the cawngruss would mos' happily make Americuhns pay for that big 'ol border wall, because...well, because there's no reading test to run for the Senate in Alabama, I guess. After giving his last interview, Sessions returned to chewin' on an old shoe by the fireplace.

Rex Tillerson, who is our Secretary of State because he's a rich guy who...(shit, man, I need Mad Libs to finish that sentence because I've never found one halfway compelling reason this Oil Stooge was made our top diplomat) made some headlines by wondering aloud "Why should U.S. taxpayers be interested in Ukraine?" I'll tell ya, Rex, there are a lot of reasons American taxpayers don't want to see the world on fire, at the very least we should understand that we can't sell PAUL BLART: MALL COP DVDs to residents of a war-torn wasteland. (This was probably the moment the day tipped officially into madness for me. Just one year ago, a mind-bogglingly asinine statement like this from our chief diplomat would've been headline news, a major international scandal. Today, you probably didn't even notice it. It was on page twelve. You did the crossword, read your Garfield, and moved on.)

And then ALONG CAME SPICEY. Sean Spicer rode into the White House Press Room on a steam shovel and declared "today I will dig myself into the deepest hole in human history, and before the sun sets not even Jules Verne will be able to find me," and Sweet Christ did he deliver. The lead spokesman for the President of the greatest nation on Earth stood in front of the assembled media of the world and engaged in some light Holocaust denial ON FUCKING PASSOVER and for a minute we were all like "Of course he did, this is just what life is like now," but after a second we realized this was crazy shit even by our ever-plummeting standards. And poor Spicey squirmed and shifted, issuing clarifications that got edited every eleven seconds (no, I mean Hitler didn't kill his own people, he just killed Jews, NO WAIT, I mean he didn't gas innocent people NO WAIT I mean he gassed innocent people he just didn't drop gas on them, he invited them to HOLOCAUST CENTERS and we all have to thank him for introducing "Holocaust Center" to the culture lexicon, right?). And we all laughed until he issued an apology which is what any normal human being would do immediately, without hesitation, if they FUCKING DENIED THE HOLOCAUST ON PASSOVER.

Just when the madness was starting to take over, right when you're thinking about how you'd look with half a pound of pickled beets stapled to your face, WaPo breaks the story that the FBI obtained a FISA warrant to surveil Carter Page, a foreign policy advisor to Toupee Fiasco's (That one's not mine, but it's good, isn't it?) campaign. And then you noticed that WAIT HOLD ON WHAT DID YOU FUCKING SAY? A lot of wacky terms have been thrown around over the last few months, like "emoluments" and "Defending World Champion Chicago Cubs," but this is what the poet would call a Big Fucking Deal. You have to demonstrate to a FISA court that there is PROBABLE FUCKING CAUSE to believe that a dude is acting as a FUCKING AGENT OF A FOREIGN FUCKING POWER to get one of these things. And Carter Page, he of the Steele Dossier, he who was cultivated as an unwitting asset by Russian intelligence not so long ago, passed the test. Drip drip.

Before you even finished that article, you got your CNN push notification (God bless this era in which our news outlets compete to scoop one another with stories that undermine the Clowncar Full of Assholes that governs us) for the story showing that Devin "Pigfucker" Nunes essentially made his whole bullshit story up, between the fucking of various pigs. The CNN story featured a few quotes from Sebastian Gorka, which is surprising since his face melted off during the climax of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

By the end of the day, Bill O'Reilly announced that he was going on a vacation for a spell, which was totally planned all along and has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that so many advertisers have ditched him that he has to shorten his show and broadcast ads from companies that convert your MP3 files into 8-track tapes and offer to take care of your pets after you've been raptured. Anyway, Bill O'Reilly's gonna go somewhere quiet and focus on just sexually harassing Bill O'Reilly for awhile, know what I mean?

And then SCROTUS made some surprisingly negative comments about Steve Bannon in an interview, downplaying his role in the campaign and suggesting he might not be around much longer. My Shart House sources tell me that upon hearing this news, Bannon shrieked and expelled ink on several aides through previously-undisclosed orifices.

Meanwhile there was a special election in Kansas' Fourth Congressional District to fill the seat vacated by Mike Pompeo, who left it to join the Dick Tracy rogue's gallery known as our President's cabinet. Despite being one of the safest GOP seats in the country, the Democratic candidate threatened to pull off an upset. How red is this district? Before Pompeo won the seat, Kansas' Fourth was represented for seven terms by a VHS copy of BEDTIME FOR BONZO (look it up). Anyhow, the republican won, but by a shockingly low margin, and folks, if a Berniecrat can get within 8 of getting a house seat in Wichita, KS, where it's illegal to make eye contact with a member of the opposite sex without a permission slip signed by at least 9 apostles, then we need to pour money into the upcoming special elections in Montana and Georgia, and the midterms are gonna be Little Bighorn 2.0.

There's more. There's really more. They're still engaged in a dick-measuring contest with North Korea, and trying to pass some version of their Let's All Murder the Poor, excuse me "Health Care" bill, and they're even fucking up the Easter Egg Roll (google it, seriously) but I am now tired, you're on your own.

In the end...shit be cray, folks. Shit be cray.

This post was brought to you by Big Earl's Holocaust Center and Water Park! Come on down to Big Earl's for all your Holocaust needs! Ten dollars off with specially marked Pepsi cans.

April 9, 2017

Good 'ol Lindsey Graham

See MTP?

Oh wow. Lindsey is thirsty! BLOODTHIRSTY.

Let's break down what's going on here real quick.

The good Senator Graham (R-Arlington) is doing what basically everyone on the GOP side of aisle is doing these days; he's trying to manipulate the Idiot Manchild President into doing what he wants. (When asking "And what does he want?" of Lindsey Graham, know that the answer usually comes down to either "a mint julep" or "the wholesale slaughter of as many dark-skinned human beings as possible as quickly as possible.&quot Of course, he's doing it on The Shoz, because everyone knows appearing on the teevee is a surer bet to reach SCROTUS than having a face to face meeting. But Mamma Graham didn't raise no stupid children, so pay attention to exactly HOW he's goading Most Powerful Full-Diapered Toddler in the World. "They're laughing at ya, Donnie! 'Allahu Akbar' actually means 'You have tiny hands and also your daughter will never ever fuck you, smalldick,' are you gonna let them get away with that?

So what scares ya more, that this is how one of our senior legislators is trying to influence the discussion? Or that it has a well-above-average chance of working?


http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/328018-graham-assad-is-telling-trump-f-you-for-using-the-us-bombed

April 8, 2017

Sooooo...

So let me get this straight.

Our Idiot Manchild President, who liked to brag that he'd be too smart to tell the enemy when and where he was deploying military assets...told the enemy exactly when and where he was deploying military assets.

As a result, 60 million bucks worth of missiles were launched at an evacuated base, doing so little damage that the Syrian Air Force was able to launch strikes from it less than 24 hours later.

Oh, but we did manage to murder four more children. In the name of saving children. We didn't manage to limit Assad's military capacity in any significant way, but did kill some kids.

Yeah, this is about his domestic scandals and his approval rating. (and of course feeling like a Big Tuff Boy in Grownup Pants) Hey, what're the lives of four children when your favorables are in the shitter, right?

April 7, 2017

What a fucking day

Oh wow.

Shit be cray, people. Shit be cray.

Today's news was like if a Tom Clancy novel fucked the notebook where Hunter S. Thompson kept the ideas he thought were "too weird" on top of a big stack of Frank Miller comics. Not the good ones, the recent, shitty, super-racist ones.

We started with news of Devin "Pigfucker" Nunes recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Word is, he was forced out by Paul Ryan and the Shart House, not for being a stooge, but for being an exceptionally shitty stooge. Like so many of the shitbags caught up in this mess, he got caught in a number of easily disproven lies, apparently used by a handful of morons in the executive branch to "leak" information...back to the executive branch. Don't look at me brother, figuring out why these people do the things we do is like hosting trivia night in Arkham Asylum.

Anyhow, Nunes released a feeble little statement blaming "left wing activists" or somesuch nonsense, which fell apart about thirteen seconds later when it was revealed he was under investigation by the ethics office (the same one the House GOP tried to drown quietly in the outhouse out back while nobody was looking, remember that?) for revealing classified information, for the TOTAL BULLSHIT REASON that...he appears to have revealed classified information. Devin Nunes was not built for high-stakes politics, friends. He was built solely for the fucking of pigs.

And we celebrated Nunes' downfall for a hot ten minutes before we realized he was just going to be replaced with stooges who wouldn't be so obvious/stupid about being stooges, i.e. are less likely to call dumbfuck press conferences where they entrap themselves for no discernible reason beyond incurable idiocy. The new chair of the investigating committee is some doorknob who said some shit about how watching a Mexican Soap Opera is basically the same thing as collaborating with a hostile foreign power to influence the American Presidential election, I don't remember his name, look it up your own damn self. (He will be assisted in his abuse of power by Trey Gowdy Doody, he of the Hundred Years War, excuse me, the Benghazi investigation. I would love to rewarded similarly for a history of failure. In that scenario, my 0-for-the-entire-fucking-season in little league would land me a multi-million dollar contract with the Yankees.)

Meanwhile the Senate went Nuclear, which, calm down, doesn't mean what you were hoping it did. There was much hemming and hawing about the ugliness of partisan politics by men and women who spent the day facilitating the ugliness of partisan politics. In the left-wing media, there was a masochistic joy in trudging up past quotes from Deathlord of All Tortises Mitch McConnell as proof of his hypocrisy. As if hypocrisy bothers Mitch McConnell one bit.

Let me tell y'all something very important about Mitch McConnell: he doesn't give a shit about anything but winning. He will gleefully tell you on Monday that eating sandwiches is sinful, and then when you catch him eating a big fat fucking reuben on Tuesday, he will laugh in your face as you triumphantly point out his hypocrisy. Laugh in your face, kick you in the junk, steal your wallet, use your money to take your mom out to dinner* and fuck her in your childhood bed, and it won't bother him one tiny little bit because his job isn't "being consistent," his job is "winning" and he won this one and yeah, fuck him, but it sucks and now we just have to send his terrapin ass back to the minority for the rest of his life so he can flail helplessly on his back while we replace Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy with Rachel Maddow maybe Sarah Silverman.

*Where he orders another sandwich because fuck you that's why.

In the background there's another wave of stories about Shart House infighting. People are screaming "CUCK" at each other, Bannon's down, demoted from the National Security Council, and Kushner's up, apparently single-handedly responsible for 87% of the executive branch's duties. Why does a kid whose resume reads "got daddy's money when daddy went to jail, bought a newspaper and wrecked it" get so much responsibility? Well, because our idiot president has mad respect for the dude who gets to do the one thing he's ever wanted that he can't do, (NUDGE NUDGE FUCK HIS DAUGHTER) and therefore he's in charge of China and peace in the Middle East and reforming the government and Veterans affairs and The Vending Machines in the West Wing Don't Have Zagnuts Can We Get Some Fucking Zagnuts in There Jared and god knows what else.

And we maybe breathe a sigh of relief that Bannon's role in the administration is diminishing because this is a man who boos the ending of Schindler's List, but then you realize that the GODDAMN PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED GODDAMN STATES is only swinging from white supremacy to nepotism, and you wonder why he doesn't think, "Hey, maybe try somebody with some relevant experience?" And you know that once Kushner makes a mess of everything, Il Douche is just gonna turn to Gordon Ramsey or that One Girl Who Yells at Baristas in Chicago to run the government for him.

And at this point in the day, you're getting a bit overwhelmed, so maybe you don't notice that the Yokel, I mean "Attorney" General, our President's Loyal Huntin' Dawg Beauregard, has decided to take himself a long leisurely look at all them police abuse settlements arrived at under those colored folks who previously held his office. To Ol' Beauregard, decades of rampant police abuse? Why, that ain't nuthin' atawl, an' if an unarmed black fellah gets shot every couple weeks or so in Baltimore, well, that's jus' the price of law and orduh, don' ya see, and honestly, what's one more or less black fellah, am I right?

By now, the madness has started to settle in. You're seriously thinking rubbing cake frosting all over your otherwise naked body and running around downtown throwing poop and screaming. Maybe you catch a few human interest stories. About Rachel Dolezal going to South Africa to talk about "racial transitioning." About a shocking number of iPhone users desiring a sexual relationship with Siri. About somebody making beer that tastes like Cap'n Crunch. (All of this really happened, I swear to you.)

And in the background you start to see more and more stories about Dorito Mussolini thinking about maybe starting a War of His Very Own in Syria.

And we learn that the Shart Administration is trying to force twitter to reveal (ahem, UNMASK HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH OH GOD THE IRONY) of an anonymous user who has been criticizing them, which is a not-at-all-terrifying police state move, oh wait. And we find our the CIA was sounding alarm bells on the Russian interference/possible collaboration LAST SUMMER but somehow James Comey only thought the American people needed to know that Anthony Weiner's personal laptop may've contained the name, location, favorite color and Most Embarrassing High School Moment of every undercover agent in the world. And we even had a quick laugh at Spraytan Zartan bragging about having had the best first thirteen weeks in human history...eleven weeks into his term.

And then things were quiet for a couple hours.

And then the missiles started flying.

Without seeking authorization from congress, without consulting allies, without a strong/competent state department to give advice, without civilian leadership in the defense department, without a single voice in the executive branch any rational human being would consider qualified to weigh in on a decision so large, a military strike on a foreign government backed by Iran and Russia was ordered and executed.

And nobody seems to know what, precisely, is going on, what the long-term plan might be (SPOILERZ, there totally isn't one.). McCain and Graham are jubilant of course, nothing delights that duo quite so much as other people's children dying. Some folks are talking about regime change, but it doesn't seem like anybody thought making those kind of decisions was important before pushing the button.

There's a lot we don't know right now. If there were significant civilian casualties (a distressingly irrelevant factor to the military under the Shart Administration), if more strikes are coming, if there were Russian nationals on the base we hit. What happens next. And yes, in the background you wonder how much of the decision was made to distract the American populace from domestic scandals...nearly every president of my lifetime has played that card.

I confess I'm worried. Our President, as we've learned, doesn't know Shit about Shit, doesn't know what he doesn't know, doesn't care that he doesn't know, and, importantly, is infinitely persuadable. He blindly followed Bannon into the travel ban debacle, and Ryan into the health care clusterfuck. Why? Because he doesn't know Shit about Shit, and anybody who kisses his ass and tells him what a Big Boy With Big Strong Hands he is can, we have seen time and again, manipulate him into doing whatever they want him to do.

And when it comes to war? Wow. Bannon's an apocalyptic lunatic. Tillerson is hopelessly out of his depth. Mattis seems well-intentioned enough, but don't forget that there is a reason why we don't put generals in charge of the defense department, and Mattis needed a waiver to be confirmed in the first place. Priebus is sniveling toady with no stature on this turf. Kushner also doesn't know shit about shit, and early indications are that the brass is manipulating him, and like his father-in-law I don't credit him with the brains to understand he's being manipulated. The institutional GOP defers to McCain and Graham on matters of war, and again those two sprinkle the blood of young men on their breakfast cereal whenever the opportunity presents itself. And Pence of course is a hairshirt-wearing religious fanatic who'll play the role of Crusader with a crazed grin on his face.

Basically we have a bunch of malicious fools making these decisions. I wish I could find a way to laugh at all this, but I can't. Heaven help us all.

March 27, 2017

Friday's magnificent debacle

And you may find yourself
On the floor of the House
With your horrible bill
And your horrible press
And you may say to yourself
Well
How did I get here?


Golly, it seems like only yesterday when the Republican Party finished writing their thank you cards to Comey and Putin and gleefully proclaimed they'd have an Obamacare repeal bill waiting on the Marmalade Shartcannon's desk right after his sparsely-attended inauguration.

Before moving on, let's take a moment to just celebrate the demise of the Hey We'll Never Find the Next Steinbeck or Dickens Unless We Explode a Giant Poverty Bomb Act, excuse me, the AHCA. It was a shit bill written by shit people, it would have killed thousands and hurt millions and its demise is worth celebrating so hard that it's a goddamn miracle I stayed sober long enough to write this.

Moreover the massive nationwide pushback from the Resistance has been a huge factor in the AHCA's failure, so let's double-fist that celebration. Viva la US, we fucked these assholes up good, didn't we?

Anyway.

It's difficult to state all the ways this is bad for the Shart and the GOP.
Wait, did I say "difficult?" I mean "gut-bustingly hilarious and fun for the whole family." Let's state them.

Obviously the best part is Mr. Shart of the Deal himself...couldn't get the deal done! In his entire presidency, he has been called on to make exactly one deal. One. And he fucked it up like a champ. Remember Spicey and Ryan and Kellyanne earlier in the week? All doe-eyed, reverently calling him "The Closer?" Well, KYRA SEDGWICK IS THE CLOSER, YOU FUCKS, AND YOUR BOY AIN'T SHIT. He is 0-for-1 at making deals as President. If he had a dime for every deal he's closed, he would have ZERO DIMES. He has closed as many deals as I have won fistfights with Mike Tyson. He is batting below the Mendoza line at presidential deal-making. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA.

The damage to his central brand is incalculable and frankly, mightily goddamn funny. It runs a bit deeper though. Biggest takeaway is that the feral dingos of the Freedom Caucus aren't afraid of him, or Ryan, at all. They will continue to sit in their filth-encrusted cave in the corner of the House floor, gnawing on rat carcasses, demanding that everyone else in the country give them everything want OR ELSE, and periodically screaming CUCK at any passerby who wanders too close. They're safe in districts gerrymandered to include more firearms than human beings, and they'll merrily keep fucking things up for everybody else until the fucking sun dies. Fortunately, they've never been smart enough to realize their fanaticism does more harm than good to their goals, and Friday, god love 'em, they saved Obamacare. Somebody toss Mark Meadows some fresh roadkill; he earned it.

Meanwhile, the more rational members of the GOP House team (and yes, I use that word cautiously) are starting to be very afraid Il Douche, sure...they're afraid he'll drag their whole party down in the midterms. It's no coincidence the first centrists to jump ship came from districts Hilldawg won last November. It doesn't take a genius to see the writing on the wall; he's got a 37% approval rating, the bill has 17%, neither of those numbers are going up. A historically unpopular president pursuing an unpopular agenda with a massive scandal hanging over his head like a balloon being slowly inflated with raw sewage? It's becoming apparent that you don't wanna stand next to that guy.

If the center starts earnestly and consistently running away from him, and the far right continues to dig in and demand total capitulation, it may be functionally impossible for this administration to accomplish anything bigger than letting coal companies dump sludge into our drinking water.

One extra amusing sidebar to all of this; when you literally wrote a book about your negotiating style, any dumbfuck who can read can learn how you're going to behave in a negotiation and counter accordingly. Now, that doesn't cover quite everybody in the GOP caucus, but fortunately Grinning Turdweasel Rand Paul was happy to lead a seminar in the Shart's tactics (yes, this really happened, there are photos.)

In the end, Shart Garfunkel decided to employ the tried-and-true threaten-to-walk-away technique. This is actually a fantastic example of why Running Government Like a Business is a dipshit idea and how he doesn't understand one fucking thing about the job he has. See, maybe in the world of business you can walk away. There's always another gaudy skyscraper or shitty wine to splash your name across, right? Cool. But you don't get another congress. You fucked this up, you totally sold your most important partners out...and when you show up for work on Monday, these are still the only motherfuckers you have to work with to get anything done. You didn't just poison the well, you fucked Paul Ryan's mom in the well, then you shit on her, and THEN you poisoned it, probably with that weird hair growth drug you take. The message you just sent to congress is "The minute things look rough, I'm cutting you loose and using my Klansman Sidekick's website to blame you for everything." And he'll do it if he doesn't get what he wants in THREE WEEKS. That's how long he'll fight before he completely gives up.

And we're TWO MONTHS IN.

And then there's Speaker Ryan.

God, how am I gonna get through a few paragraphs about Paul Ryan's role in this clusterfuck without laughing myself to death? Pray for me.

Paul Ryan, who found himself carrying the mantle of Great Conservative Intellectual because...fuck, I never have figured that one out...maybe he's the guy who volunteers to keep score when Republicans go bowling? Maybe he wipes the drool off Louie Gohmert's chin?

Anyway, tasked with the admittedly-impossible goal of crafting a bill that could pass the Community Theatre Production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest known as the House Republican Caucus, he huddled in a back room with a handful of like minded Bond villains and a box of crayons, and emerged a week later with...the worst bill anyone could have imagined. The Batman Versus Superman: Dawn of Justice of healthcare legislation, a hot smelly mess that, in its zeal to do a little bit to please everyone, instead made the whole world recoil in horror and disgust. Stealing health insurance from millions of Americans only to pass the savings directly to people with multiple butlers, how the fuck did he think people would respond? Insufficiently cruel for the far right, too murderous for anyone with a human soul. To this day, I have yet to see a single assessment of the AHCA, right, left, or center, that praised it. Even the bill's backers failed to mount anything more rousing than "This is as good as we can get." He planted his flag in what he honestly evaluated to be the sensible middle, when any fool could have told him he'd crafted a monstrosity that could only crash and burn while dragging anyone who backed it down along with it.

Anyhow, he drops this turd in the middle of the table, tells everybody it's a delicious black forest torte made by the finest chef in all the land, and demands everybody dig in. The Shart, who knows fuckall about health care and cares even less, hungry for a win especially if sticks it to that black guy who made everybody laugh at him at the Correspondent's Dinner a few years back, says "that's very nice work Paul, let's do your bill." And from that moment on, the whole thing and everybody associated it was good and righteously fucked. Like, Ned-Beatty-in-Deliverance fucked. The CBO score dropped, public opinion bottomed out, and anyone with a brain in their head would've run away screaming but not the Intellectual Leader of Conservatism and the Greatest Businessman Alive! No, faced with an angry charging bear, they chose to run towards it brandishing two fistfuls of raw hamburger. And my God, it has been pure joy to watch.

Let's also laugh at the entirely unnecessary timetable he set up that played such a large part in this debacle. Paulie Boy, y'see, got a little micro-hard-on for the idea of getting his repeal vote on the seventh anniversary of the day Barack Obama signed the ACA into law. So enraptured was he by the vision of such a delicious symbolic victory that he didn't work to get his bill RIGHT, he didn't work got make his bill POPULAR, he just tried to get it done QUICKLY. And so he scheduled two different floor votes without first finding out whether or not he had the votes to pass his bill which is Speakership 101, bro. Count first, call the cameras in later. The whole world watched you fuck up your life's work on CSPAN because you're a trigger-happy idiot. And there was never any need for it. It's like you woke up, rolled out of bed, bashed yourself in the face with a brick a few times for no reason, and then went about your day. And you walked away with a heapin' helpin' of JACK SHIT for your trouble.

This, more than anything, means the GOP simply can't govern. Give them the White House and both halves of the Legislature, and they Just. Can't. Govern. To their base, they've just said "We can't fulfill the loudest promise we've spent seven years making over and over." To the country they've said "Well, we tried like hell to kill a whole bunch of you, and only our own blistering incompetence saved you."

And the idea now is to move on to "tax reform," i.e. "Giving as much money to our donors as we can figure out how to get away with." Good luck with that. Don't forget, we have a year of the Shart's taxes now, and every plan you propose leads to somebody working out how much money he's scheming to save himself. Especially since he's jonesing to do away with the alternative minimum tax.

Besides, you aren't moving on to tax reform. You're moving on to more shit on the Russia scandal. Sorry.

And of course there's all the finger pointing and blame throwing and grudge building. We've already seen Ryan's PAC vow to cut off funding for members who bucked him, and Bannon wants a "Shit List" and everybody's threatening everybody else with primary challenges. Underneath all this don't forget it's the House that holds the power of impeachment.

And yes, the executive branch can still do a lot to fuck with the ACA. Expect them to do so, and for that to change the terms of this debate heading into the midterms.

But for today, let's just have a good sturdy laugh at these fuckwads.

TL;DR: The worst people in the world just experienced a massive failure of their own making and it is fucking hilarious.