Gavin none of it

Nob Hill Dreamboat is on course to go down on his own ship. Don’t think about that sentence too deeply. He said it himself: “The 69 individuals who went down.” In that case, it was a very nice medical adventure to Imperial County, during one of the early provincial outbreaks proving, to anybody thinking critcally about the reported infection rates, that Covid-19 was already endemic in North America. The Governor in this space, the State of California, has made it a point of pride to establish proof points showing that much is being done and what’s being done is doing something besides having a discreet evening out at the French Laundry.

I like Gavin, and I always love a Gabbin. I’ll still probably vote to recall him. By this point, I’m not motivated by any particular thing he’s been doing or not doing, but by the recognition that the threat of recall has apparently been the only force holding him accountable over the past year and a half when his instinct was to make an unrecognizable mess of the state’s economy for others to clean up afterwards, when “we” were out of “lockdown” and “quarantine.”

I don’t give a fuck if Larry Elder gets elected. I’ll probably vote for somebody else, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t even have a particular interest in who Larry Elder is. He yells on the radio for a living, it seems. I think I’d rather listen to a Gavin Gabbin, but this isn’t a snap election to decide who covers Michael State’s shifts this week. I’d probably rather have Kevin Faulconer clashing with the Democratic legislative supermajorities in Sacramento on day one, since he’s a rare case who’s both powerful and sensible, but again, it doesn’t matter. There’s no first-mover advantage to voting for or against any of these characters. Statewide elections in California are aggregations of tens of millions of votes. They aren’t a movie starring you, the brave individual elector who casts straight Democratic tickets every year because MSNBC and your dipshit rich liberal peers all said so.

Liberals never get this. It’s like they’re constitutionally incapable. I did not throw my vote away by voting for Jill Stein. Come on. My voyage on the overly spacious decks of the Stein Steamer did nothing, in practical terms, to erase Her three million vote margin over Him in California, or to swing any of the famous Midwestern swing states where the Democratic Party ceded elder outreach to cubicle drones in St. Petersburg. Most of us know more about Hill’s family life than we do about Dr. Jill’s. For very embarrassing reasons, this is officially proclaimed as an endorsement, not an indictment, of Her. Some additional light housekeeping I must do, As A Man, is to clean up my filthy bachelor pad and stop hoarding paper trash for a sense of control over my own life, but in the current instance to note that we’re using “Dr. Jill” to refer to the medicine woman, not to the educatrix.

Liberals will never get this, either. Their passive-aggressive hypocrisy over this kind of honorific bullshit to pull rank on their enemies pisses ordinary voters the hell off. They repeatedly lose voters who would otherwise be sympathetic to their messages. Voters don’t need to know the specifics, like who the hell Jill Stein is, to get an overpowering taste of the flavor. Dat’s da kine they’re passing: smarmalade. Dat’s always da kine, yeah?

For all its braying about civic duty and protecting your right to vote, the Democratic Party can’t conceive of anybody who votes based on an independent critical assessment of personal interests or values, not as a form of worship. Values voters are like Bigfoot, of course: everybody has stories but nobody has pictures. All the same, let’s stipulate as a guiding value a desire for robust, reliable scientific evidence to guide public health. We’ve all been lectured that Democrats believe in Science. *Randy Newman Enjoying Coke Voice* We fucking LOVE it! We’ve been lectured, too, about how dangerous it is to listen to claims about the state of the art of the science–Do you have other sources that make more sense?–from random people a guy we know who knows another guy found on Facebook or whatever.

No, we must listen to Dr. Fauci. Excuse me? Who the fuck does he think he is? Who does ANYBODY think he is? That motherfucker told us diarrhea ships were safe in plaguetime and masks don’t work. He’s a spook. That’s right. Fuck the “intelligence community.” The stupidity community isn’t that dumb. We like to be cautious around the slippery, to take things slow, if we may.

We’re beating the dead horse again. We’re reheating yesterday’s dinner for Nigel St. Nigel. The loose, malleable, chameleonic, arbitrary nature of who the hell is “us,” a group I’ve been presenting as everybody from myself to the Democratic Party to the whole country, is as relevant as ever. The Democratic habit of using what Mencius Moldbug clamed Bertrand Russell would have called “nostrisms” is endangering the career of yet another of its prominent elected officials. They just can’t help themselves. Constantly presuming to speak on behalf of a whole country after decades of complaints over this obnoxious habit is no way to dispel a reputation of elitism, smugness, and arrogance.

Like, could you actually shut the fuck up and listen for once? Maybe ordinary Americans have good reasons to want to keep going to Applebee’s, and in any event, it might be a good idea not to smear them as homicidal maniacs for enjoying one of America’s most popular chain restaurants. Yeah, it’s a bit overpriced and salty, but fucken A, no politician with any damn sense thinks it’s a good idea to make fun of voters for eating there and then act like the French Laundry scandal was exaggerated for partisan advantage.

It isn’t even just that Applebee’s is a cultural totem, although Brahmin snark artists have done their best to demonize it into one. Much of it is just workaday voters enjoying a night out at Applebee’s, or at any other restaurant where people with a bit of disposible income can afford a decent meal out, and resent the party of America’s gourmands suddenly declaring that the restaurants are closed, then sneaking a governor who’d trashed the restaurant scene for everybody else into a private party at a fancy-pants Napa resort restaurant where the bill for one could cover a dozen or more at Applebee’s. The thinking doesn’t have to be conspiratorial. It can just be, oh, come the fuck on, man, things were hard enough for us already, and now you want us to suffer the consequences of your failure to control a viral disease outbreak.

The inescapable question of who’s “us” may be best answered as something political types should make sure they’ve confirmed before they speak about it in public. The poor prevailing quality of mainstream political thought in the United States today exacerbates this arrogance and idiocy. The Republicans’ huge advantage here is their appeal to balls-to-the-wall jocks, hustlers, and religious nutjobs. The postmodern Democratic Party’s appeal is to pissant nerds who whine for the mods every time they get called out for playing dirty. If they were more in touch with the country, they’d be consciously aware that America hates a loser.

What has me back up on this bullshit about “us” is a recent viral tweet tritely relitigating the tired point that the government could have just “paid everybody to stay home for eight weeks.” “We” could just pay for “everybody in Thailand” to have an elephant, too. The original line was about every Thai having a servant. The premise here is a generous one: I’m free to be me and you are too.

This discredits the hell out of the Democratic Party, and by extension the broad left as it’s generally understood. Who, exactly, is included in “everybody” for our fun springtime cottagecore minute? Do some of us keep home grocery stores? Home medical offices catering exclusively to those living in our own homes? Home Home Depots?

It’s absurd. “Essential workers,” who have (quite fully) earned extensive attention for not being able to stay home, famously had to go to work while everybody stayed home. There’s people, and then there’s workers.

But enough about the Democratic Party.

This style of argumentation has a powerful discrediting effect on the broad Western left, from the hard center to the hard fringes. It springs forth from a stunning casual, thoughtless ignorance. It’s muddled to shit. “We” could be anybody from the whole wide world down to the Independent Republic of Oneself. It can change from minute to minute.

The thot leaders propagating these memes barely know what they’re including and excluding from minute to minute. The menacing but loose talk about “lockdown” and “quarantine” may be the worst of it.

The penal implications of “lockdown” have spread to the schools as the institutional cultures and operatons of American schools have become more penal, and into various other workplaces in tandem with the proliferation of mass shooters, seemingly more often than not known to the FBI at the time of their rampages. Need anything from the Philippines? Just heading over for a minute to pen a journal about how much I hate the VTA; be right back.

Similarly but more so, “quarantine” always had a very specific, narrow meaning prior to all this bullshit. It was a hard, official, externally enforced physical segregation from others for a set period to limit the spread of contagious illnesses. It was NOT a year-plus of mostly sitting around the house, doing some work, hanging out, doing awl dissandat, ordering some UberEats.

This kind of sloppy thinking and loose talk drives everybody nuts. It’s truly hard to stay sane in the midst of it. I spent way the hell too much time reading about it and listening to it, taking it seriously as a fnord for me to heed, when really, for the most part, it was a bunch of hall monitor twerps barking at everybody else and carrying limp little sticks.

Democrats keep getting themselves into trouble because they associate themselves with this bizarre, crazymaking bullshit. The wise move is to disavow all of it, to decisively, credibly split from the entire puritan caste system that has been hardening in supposedly liberal communities for the past few decades and markedly intensified under their Covid regimes. Every time they associate themselves with this garbage or advocate for it or try to enforce it, they open the door for Republicans to demonstrate that they, unlike the #resistance, #resist the urge to treat the servant poor as ritually unclean, if that’s even how they naturally think. It’s surprisingly important to realize that most of the opposition to this Brahmin Safety Bear hysteria comes from people who do their grocery shopping in person. They know, on some level, that Democratic governments do jack shit to get the poor out of flophouse crowding and squalor, just like their own Republican local governments. Project Roomkey, for example, is a belated half-measure, its facilities run in a rather patronizing, meddlesome manner, marginally aleviating the poverty and squalor that good liberals do their damnedest to sweep away and ignore while their home equity rockets up to the same unimaginable heights that drive rents out of their own servants’ reach.

Gavin Newsom infuriates conservatives, as they proudly think of themselves, by ridng around in front off them on his hgh horse. Again, the terminology is baffling; conservatism, as they practice it, has turned into a mashup of provincial elite political reaction, battles to defend outrageous privileges (think, groping subminimum-wage waitresses and withholding tips if they won’t pull down their masks for a full facial), and frank liberalism. It’s conservatism that drives officials to order the closure of multiple whole classes of public congregate facilities in the interest of public health; it’s liberal to allow the continued normal brick-and-mortar operation of, as Fr. Jonah Lynch had the sloppiness to publish without a fucking Oxford Comma, “the theatre, the church and the brothel.” He’s no Cardinal Dolan in substance, but I keep trying to look up “Fr. Jonah Lunch.” By any name, he’ll agree: the internet is majestic, hear,, On Line.

It’s always the ones who belong in public ministry that they yank over some harmless trifle. I know, I should stop talking about politics, for my own mental health and the community’s. That’s what’s good about California’s recall provision, though. If Andrew Cuomo were the governor here, he’d no longer be our governor. He’d have been out on the curb with last week’s trash months ago.

In my estimation, Gavin is a mediocre governor. John Cox would have been wildly worse because he’s insane. I’m not voting for a freak with a talk radio cadence who brings a grown grizzly bear out of a trailer on a chain to spout dangerous nonsense about water policy during a severe drought. One of the things I trust Newsom to do right is steward the Russian River about as well as any official could in a period of extreme overallocation.

The problem is how he’s handled the Rona. He’s too far out there with the nanny state restrictions on public life. He decreed a social curfew for a while, which mercifully went unenforced, as far as I know. The same schoolmarm mindset behind San Francisco’s regressive sin tax on sweetened prepared drinks is behnd the idea that the state should order its subjects not to visit their friends or lovers at night. Like, what the fuck, bruh.

That isn’t all of it. The problem with Newsom’s mindset is deeper and more complicated than his being a rich kid with almost Trumpian domestic style. He’s still getting shit on over the French Laundry scandal, but I’ve been disinterested in that from the start; it provoked a healthy backlash against the public health restrictions in the backwards interior, holding him accountable to my satisfaction and helping force officials to level up the public health regime to allow more ordinary people to lead more normal day-to-day lives.

What troubles me is his involvement in recovery culture. He’s apparently a sincere devotee, grateful for helping him confront his demons of alcoholism and anger. I don’t begrudge him these blessings one bit. I’m happy for anybody who’s able to get out of a hellish rut through the discipline and fellowship of recovery groups. But recovery cuture is a horrible model for public policy. The internal cultures of some recovery programs are unhealthy. Many of them have boundary problems towards their own members, sometimes to the point of effectively holding members hostage. This is especially true of programs that treat court referrals; these usually veer into outright cult abuse under color of penal authority.

This is not a culture that should be tolerated when it gets pushy with nonmembers. No. YOU do not boss Me around about what I eat or drink or watch or how much I exercise. Come up with a coherent argument for why I should follow your advice for my own improvement or leave me alone. I’m not a fucking alcoholic just because I /Most Southernly Lubricated Congressional Voice/ have a little libations with lunch. James Clyburn himself sounds like a mere lush. Remember: You aren’t an alcoholic; you don’t go to meetings. These are the #TeshTips to draw a federal salary and top-tier benefits #BigBandStyle. I’ve always figured that cat gets too much poon to need porn. Fellas. Is it gay to advise against long-term manbuns on account of traction alopecia and then spin a One Direction record? Fellas. Am I gay?

There’s no need to care about everything. There’s no need to answer every question. There’s no need even to ask. By God’s grace we’ll find a way to get bi.

My ex says Gavin blows up her gaydar. Gay af, she told me. Whatever. Sexuality isn’t fully malleable, but it’s malleable. That’s why the CIA funds the porn tubes. It’s government qat all up in Djibouti, updated for the electronic age. It’s at once sedative and refreshing to hear about a client state that still knows how to send one group of semiemployable surplus young men out in trucks to distribute a mild sedative chaw to its remaining shabaab, as a chill pill, as a quiet afternoon delight, As A Treat. Water is a limiting factor for the series of tubes, too. Electricity? As they say in parts better unknown but all too close for those who engage over the ether, it depends on the load. Are we dooing it inside or outside?

In a word, this is postmodernism. It’s a liability for the Democrats. Many constituents wisely prefer to keep their lives merely modern, to take advantage of advanced conveniences but continue to have real social calls, to have real sex with real people. They’re wise to refuse to move their entire lives online on government command.

The failure of American authorities to publish consistent, coherent guidance on mask use is inextricable from the sorry state of sex education in the United States. They aren’t diapers for the face; they’re condoms for the face. The analogy isn’t exact, but it’s close enough. It works.

Their repeated fuckups on masks are enough to permanently destroy their credibility about all health measures among a significant minority of Americans. Why are they making us live our lives online? What’s really in the vaccines? Frankly, these are reasonable questions, and our officials have not satisfactorily answered them. These are the same officials led by “the country’s top infectious disease expert,” Anthony Fauci, the same guy who bullshitted the country about this disease and then bragged in a New York Times interview about his campaign of medical bullshit. It’s completely unreasonable to trust Fauci or anyone appealing to his authority. My own reason for being so adamantly pro-mask and consistently wearing masks in crowded areas is commonsense medical wisdom dating back into Medieval Times. It’s a culture, and it’s a costume. I mean, I don’t want people coughing and sneezing all over each other, especially now. It has nothing to do with whatever the hell that New York serial liar is honking at us on the boob tube today.

The Republican Party is a horror show in most regards, but it’s often been more reasonable about public health restrictions than the Democratic Party over the past year and a half. That’s worth a lot. It’s worth more than it should be. Maybe they’re just different flavors of dogshit. It may suck, but I’m voting for one of the flavors regardless.

I take no pleasure in saying this, but Gavin needs to go.

Up the Hershey Highway again

If Jimmy Carter had nominated Rachel Levine for a cabinet office, Joe Biden would have spent the month fuming, verbatim, about “the trannies.” I don’t see why he isn’t talking like that in private this month, assuming he’s verbal (and that’s assuming a lot!) That’s exactly the crudity of thought that got Levine nominated in the first place.”C’mon, man, I’ve got a Negress, a bunch a’ other broads, a faggot, and a transvestite! Gimme a break, Jack!”

There’s no political strategy to Levine’s nomination. There’s a narrow technical argument to be made that it shores up the support or enthusiasm of cultural liberals, but that’s a risky strategy. Trans rights are politically fraught, to say the least, in case anyone was puzzled by the spate of mishaps at “gender reveal” parties (#TeshTips: The noun, possibly mentioned in the Bible, is “revelation”), and voters who find ladyboy idpol inspiring are all Blue No Matter Who cult freaks. “How can we alienate the most swing voters by pandering to the narrowest, most marginal, most controversial part of our coalition?” It’s certainly a question Democrats ask, and yes, I wish I meant that sarcastically.

Biden, or Harris, nominated Levine for even coarser, seedier reasons. It’s an inept, offensive gambit to keep the coalition’s unruly leftists in line. Geez Louise, Jack, we gotcha your he-she, Mack! Voting against the presidency responsible for this nightmare would be bigotry. Huh. Am I allowed to be bigoted against a person because I’ve personally met shit and had a bad personal experience with shit? What I’m saying is, I refused to darken that freak’s exam room a second time back when she was still Richard. I have higher priorities than what the nomination to high federal office of the worst physician who has ever examined me means for trans rights or representation in government. That’s a case of whoa, she should NOT be in medicine, and she needs to be banished down out of medicine, not up into a position of official authority over it.

We hear a great deal these days about “qualifications,” always in a bogus credentialist sense meant to subvert the plain, expressly narrow constitutional qualifications for office. Rachel Levine is old enough and American enough for an assistant cabinet post. So am I, and I’m more fit. I’d consider the office a burden requiring me to live up to great, solemn duties of public trust. Levine is trying to get herself Peter Principled, and I know she never meant to have one, up out of an equivalent state-level position in which she got hundreds of medically fragile constituents killed just last calendar year. What assholes who bitch about the “qualified” versus the “unqualified” mean by the former is 1) having jumped through professional hoops, in a manner prioritizing outcome over process if there’s any conflict between the two, and 2) being politically agreeable. The honorable thing for them to do would be to focus on political agreeability, which is their actual aim, and shut up about “qualifications” as a synonum for fitness for office, since they’d never tolerate a callous freak like Levine if they actually cared about fitness. I don’t expect them to do anything of the sort, of course. They’re thoroughly dishonorable.

What I don’t entirely understand is why Tom Wolf, who seems overly idealistic but sensible, ever elevated that freakish dipshit to appointed statewide office. For all I know it may have been blackmail. Damned if I can say blackmail of whom, but hot diggity, Denny, we can take the plausibility of this one straight to the mat, way down low. Is #FOOTBALL also heterosexual, like wrestling? I ran cross country in high school, back when I still lived in Pennsylvania. The first mile was always easier.

#WeAre! #TooSoon! Wolf was probably just being a bleeding heart. It’s also all too plausible that he was prevailed upon to remove Levine from full-time clinical duties at Hershey. There’s always a benefit to removing a case of that extremity from medical practice. Elevation to a directorship of public health is a terrible way to do it, but it doesn’t eliminate what Mainers call the relative benefits. Instead of practicing medicine all the time, she was practicing medicine some of the time, or maybe just instructing unfortunate medical students, and spending the rest of the time either fucking off for a living or telling other doctors what to do.

In a more functional society, public office would have served Levine, and crucially the public, as a veal pen. Fatten up, moo a little bit, just don’t wander out here and bother us while we’re trying to work. Instead she meddled catastrophically in the Covid response and got constituent’s her mother’s age killed en masse in nursing homes. Did she leave her mother in the home? Hell no. She got Mom the hell out of that dump to save her life.

But that’s just one bad officer holding one office in one state out of fifty and one commonwealth out of four. Between the states and the territories, there were dozens of people the Biden Administration could have chosen over Levine from exactly the equivalent offices. There were hundreds upon hundreds of state cabinet officers they could have chosen.

Levine was Wolf’s problem. She’s not a problem I’d want to have, but I haven’t voted in Pennsylvania in over a decade. Now she’s up for confirmation to a federal cabinet office. Goddammit she is my problem after all. Son of a bitch. Why in all hell did they have to No Peter Priciple her into HHS?

Oh yeah. Shit. They have to keep the voters they’re ratfucking in line to reward them for committing serial abuse. Don’t dwell on how we’re betraying you every bit as badly as you feared when you voted for us; think about the diversity of our cabinet, trannies and all.

I don’t think it’ll work. It’s a perfect setup for a whopping Bradley Effect in 2022 and 2024. Levine is arguably the most fucked up person they could have elevated out of an organization that has also recently harbored Our Lord Joseph, His Servants Gerald and Graham, a child psychiatrist who was caught with child pornography on his office computer as part of his unapproved “study,” and another psychiatrist who got his card yanked by the medical board for marrying his patient. Don’t worry; the only one who summarily fired was the Boer spook, and he promptly washed up on the shores of the Beltway.

Seriously, nobody’s gonna fucking vote for that shit if they keep refusing to deliver. Levine will be either irrelevant or notorious. They expect to bully and shame us all into keeping both Democratic caucuses in the majority and Kamala Harris in the White House. Let’s face it: Biden isn’t even the president now lmao. He’s the titular president, and he pipes up with suggestions from time to time. Harris can obviously run circles around that skull full of cream of wheat. Of course, they’re gonna all be like, hey, look! A faggot! A tranny! A colored gal! I paraphrase. Ordinary voters will be disgusted that they all had to be dragged out of the uncanny valley. NPR caters to the hardly overpowering faction of well-to-do voters who can stand to listen to woke idpol shit. It catches some downwardly mobile ascribed bougies and some social climbers, too, but if the economy doesn’t turn around come the midterms–and I mean the whole real economy, including everything involving money, like healthcare and schooling–they’ll lose the last of their patience and help hose the Democratic Party off the Hill.

Joe Biden is a bigoted asshole who decided to start bringing freaks and phonies into his orbit for use as tokens, in the disgraceful hope of distracting the public from his rotten misgovernment. He’d still be fuming about forced bussing if that were still where he saw the clout. It’s considered unfit for polite company these days, so he doesn’t. It’s off-brand for a man of “empathy” and “decency,” i.e., still what he believes as a reactive thug who challenges other men to fistfights for asking him policy questions and feels up their wives. He still says the same kind of shit on hot mics that he was saying on the Senate Floor before I was born, just sometimes with less coherence.

He isn’t plainspoken; he’s a foultempered bigot, always on the lookout for a chance to punch down. He’s still racist as hell. That’s how he got to spend eight years as the lieutenant for a fellow white supremacist, the man whose office he now holds, if he’s able to hold anything for ten seconds. Joe Biden is Richard Nixon, but less gracious, less liberal, and less intelligent.

That’s the fucking thing. All a politician has to do to convince our retarded Washington press corps that he’s “working-class” is use some shit-tier folksy syntax. Those are supposed to be some of the keenest political minds in a country of over three hundred million, and all it takes to hoodwink them is to very crudely play against type. Tricky Dick, who was painfully aware of his own modest blue-collar upbringing, made a point of speaking in full, coherent, grammatically correct sentences. LBJ, the Texas-bred graduate of a normal school, took the same approach. Sonny Bush, a legacy Yalie and legacy president from the summering set, headfaked a nation of goobers with strings of downhome gibberish: food on your family, power to power the power of the generating plants, other shit the scrambled likes of which he definitively did not say in private. Trump, too, was less lucid in public than in private, although it takes true oratorical skill, including mental organization, to say some of the outrageous things he said and loop back onto topic from ridiculous streams of consciousness. Our presidents have been good Toastmasters, crummy Toastmasters, great Toastmasters, horrible Toastmasters. Woodrow Wilson’s PhD was neither from MIT nor from a crummy college. Yes, Virginia, there were racists in New Jersey back then, too.

Biden is granted “working-class” and “blue-collar” street cred for making utterances ranging from the rude to the abusive to the belligerent in a moderately rough Mid-Atlantic accent. It works because he does it for other worse-than-useless mandarins. It isn’t for the working class; it’s for affluent and rich twerps who have never socialized with anyone from the working class. Some of the most urbane people I’ve ever known come from genuinely working-class upbringings. One of them is the son of a Pittsburgh steelworker. Inweaved in the Extensive, whose parents owned “a goddamn steel mill” (a different one, I’d hope), had the son of a shop steward for the mail carrier’s local in Scranton editing his term papers. This wasn’t the smart leading the dumb so much as the exasperated brilliant trying to teach the intelligent to write English as well as they spoke it.

Any of them are enough to convince me that Funny Uncle Joe’s shtick is lame. He’s a salesman’s son who’s spent his career trying to convince idiots that he’s somehow not a lawyer by using obnoxiously meaningless sales talk sprinkled with half-coherent legalese. He was never blue-collar, and his father was never blue-collar. It’s some bullshit his handlers helped him make up, same as the “decency” and “empathy” of a dotard too senile to reliably walk in the right direction for twenty yards who was going to “hit the ground running” upon his inauguration.

None of this horseshit points to anything he’s ever actually done, other than being buddies with some Amtrak conductors. He’s a total phony.

We’re entirely right to resent First State Skull Pudding and everyone around him with a passion. They’re fully qualified for public office. So is the morbidly obese Plymouth-Whitemarsh community trust retard I once met, the one who told me about how he’d chat up the teenyboppers guarding the pool at his apartment complex: “So I go up to them, and I say, hey, sweetheart. What’s your name? Where do you live?” We’re absolutely right to resent anyone who confuses qualification for office with fitness as a way to buffalo ideological opponents out of the way. That retard wasn’t fit to be undersecretary of health, either. To his credit, though, he never tried to practice medicine.

Yes, Rachel Levine is qualified for cabinet appointment. She’s a US citizen of constitutionally sufficient age who has not been adjudicated liable to ask the lifeguard where she lives. Actually, that’s exactly how clumsy Levine was when he examined me. By the way, she looked worse as a man. You /sagest Dril voice/ do not gotta hand it to Kenneth Fitzhugh for murdering his wife, or for being normal, but you do for looking all right. Charles Cullen was never sexy enough for an Indiana license, either.

Again, that does not mean Levine has any business anywhere near public office. Do they even fucking vet these assholes? Gee, let’s check with her last employer and, well, shucks, that isn’t what we were hoping to find. Instead, Jen Psaki is up there smugly noting that Janet Yellen is a woman, not a crook. For God’s sake Stephanie Lazarus is a Jewess, too, but I don’t think many of us would be complaining about her conflicts of interest if she were appointed director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Also she’s killed fewer people.

That’s the quality of leadership that gets coughed up in our meritocracy. No, not Steph; it’s a miracle she didn’t make RHD in time to investigate herself. And not the creepy silver foxes or the fat retard, either. I mean the rest of them. They’re awful. Meritocracy that slow guy’s ass, and mine, too. They do not merit our respect. They merit our scorn and fury.

A December to Remember, if we’re still around to remember it

There is no refined or delicate way to put this. Americans will get killed for reporting or trying to break up Christmas and New Year parties this month. 

It’s a recklessly nasty thing to do in the best of times. This year, it’s a death wish. We’ve been through so much this year. We’ve been asked, nagged, begged, screamed at, and ordered to make sacrifice after sacrifice while officials flout the rules the same week they promulgate them and our medical system melts down across the board. We’re pitted against each other, the genuinely sickened and frightened in league with resentful health nuts against those who insist on continuing to live their lives while they still have lives to live. It’s a barrel full of crabs, the ambitious clawing back at the resentful for clawing them back from their bolt for freedom. It’s Shawshank Redemption for hectoring stool pigeon trustees who send terrorized blockmates to the canteen to do their shopping. 

Bent but traceable through lines run back from this discord, through the English Civil War to the DIY Puritan Transportation and the Norfolk Company, and back from there, if more fuzzily, to Medieval peasant revolts. Wat Tyler’s ghost beholds our antics and smirks. It’s an old feud. No matter our modern technological innovations and postmodern decadence, we embrace tradition. 

It can be confusing. It can feel incoherent. The shrieking about how it’s an unscionable infringement of inalienable godgiven brithight liberty to have to put on a mask to go into Whole Foods during a respiratory pandemic currently coinciding with flu season comes overwhelmingly from a batshit crazy combination of establishmentarian zealots who want the government to dictate strangers’ sex lives and generally secular property owners who want the police to beat their homeless neighbors to death in the interest of neighborhood “character” (real estate values). Both off these coalition partners skew affluent. 

Watching the American Revolution from the Motherland, Samuel Johnson asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” Gee. That sounds oddly familiar. It’s the same question. Can you believe it, Rodriguez? Fly all the way to Johanesburg and you still can’t get away from it. 

Thomas Jefferson proclaimed a rather different agrarian ideal for his constituents from the one he lived as a planter in Monticello. That’s a deal where a rich guy has whip-wielding thugs force other people to do the planting. It should go without saying, but surprisingly few Americans are aware of these small details, on which not only lawyers but soldiers and armory raiders dwell. As upcountry praxis, rather than Piedmont ideal, Jeffersonian agrarian virtue spread across the new country, over mountainous swathes too broken, remote and nonarable for largeholders to bother infesting for conversion into estates, then over the prairies under the Homestead Act, which was basically Honest Abe and the crew telling the vulgarians of the industrial trusts to restrain themselves and be grateful to monopolize minerals, metallurgy, and the railroads. Only in some instances did this model degenerate into Jacksonian coarseness.

Still, Tocqueville made America, the whole of it, sound like one huge sprawling village of the insufferably smug. Government services were meager to nonexistent; taxes, less so. But what else should we have expected of a federal government whose first CEO personally led a cavalry raiding party overland across Pennsylvania for the sole purpose of shaking down frontier crackers for excise taxes on homemade hard liquor? “We haven’t the funds to pay our war debts.” Shit, George, with that spread you’ve got down by the river, maybe it’s because you have the money. The immediate civic upshot of this thievery, in the decades before the granges universally came to the conviction that the railroads were somehow a worse racket than the Erie Canal even though there were so many more of them and they operated all year in almost all weather, was the consensus that neighbors were responsible for neighbors, every man his brother’s keeper, but in ways requiring countless formally chartered voluntary organizations, and somehow yet allowing deep poverty to fester throughout the land in spite of whatever the hell these organizations and their ostentatiously busy members thought they were doing.

Kinda cucked.

As Lincoln rued would be excruciating but morally necessary and inevitable, the blood drawn by the slavedriver’s lash was repaid with the bullet and the bayonet, in pastures and wheatfields and forests and (I’m always driving up Pryor Road like an incorrigible wanker to look at the trees on my way to the perimeter of Camp David for more fucking trees) peach orchards where, in our decadent postmodern times, a tourist might quietly whistle Ashokan Farewell on a leisurely midday stroll, think sucked to be here back then lol, and drive over to the General Pickett Buffet. I probably still have the punchcard for the chef’s dozen somewhere.

By the way, that place sucked ass. So did employment in the Catoctin Furnaces. The ironmasters in Cornwall looked down on their grunts for being filthy peasants. The sun came out once a year, when they cleaned the furnaces. Everybody went blind for the week. Down the hill, the construction of the Union Canal was notoriously micksploitative. The same crowd drove the 1863 draft riots in New York. Fiddle dee fuggen dee, m’love; oil beef hooked to doy fur some bloody Yankee race shite, Huizenga.

Break out the lonesome fiddle, Kenneth. Ply me a poignant tune on me telly.

Really, the Yankee Puritans lost the plot the day they left Appomattox. Lincoln was a railroad lawyer before he was an uncomfortable but resolute wartime president. His son Robert became a railroad lawyer, railroad executive, and golfer. Yankee and Rebel junior officers preemptively made nice with each other over graduation week, in unctuous farewell letters cluttering college archives. Sometimes I wonder whether they let in the coeds soon enough or too soon; one would hope for a moderating influence on the boys, a let’s fuck the parietal rules and fuck each other kind of deal, but they were exactly the shitty high-middlebrow Victorian broads who always married the overwrought messy he-bitches of the age.

Reconstruction failed. The old Union turned ever more into a Hamiltonian industrial dystopia. Jeffersonian virtue retreated into the deeper hills of West Virginia, of all incredible places. eventually taking a stand against the railroad and mining trusts, their backs pushed to the wall, pushing through now their only way out. Their descendants still do railroad sit-ins, or more accurately sit-ons, with whatever outside allies wish to join them, and you love to see it, or maybe you don’t so much if you voted Bye, Don.

As we noted near the start, this shit gets incoherent and confused. We don’t discuss this all too recent unpleasantness, but Po Whitey hated his masters passionately enough to take up arms with black slaves as One Community Under Bacon and later joined integrated trade unions in the Jim Crow South which we absolutely do not mention. Shanda fur die Yankim. Hush, child. George Wallace addressed black lawyers as Mister in his court and raised black teachers’ salaries in tandem with whites’. Bitterly racist downhome Cajuns? “We like Uncle Bernie!” It isn’t something the Jews say much in Greenwich. Funny, that. Is this some kind of money thing? Is this some communist class warfare?

It’s Russia, Rachel. The crackers and the honkies and the hunkies and how the hell did the Nigerians in Atlanta start voting for this shit over You Ain’t Black are all in it for the gold-plated Kim Philby treason, not the trade and industrial policy, which was never anything an Atlanta cardiologist ever wanted, so maybe the Nigerians really are trying to become white (they’re already White), although with the all the micks and wops on the force in New York City it’s a miracle there’s a soul left in Nassau County who isn’t colored.

Gimme a break; for once I’m just listening to NPR While I Poast,, not chronicling it. Fucking gimme one, Stossel.

*****

I don’t know what I was trying to say, other than what I just said. If Monty Robinson’s mutual cousin with Todd Palin bore Kwesi Millington a bastard, that would be the wrong kind of Afro-Indian for the vice presidency, and God have mercy on me for writing about shit I heard about the worst possible Canadians on NPR again. No, I don’t mean the Mounties, and I don’t mean Sweet Melissa bringing me coffee in deathbed, either; that I learn by reading. Is Fundamental. It is to study.

Come to think of it, if any of us can figure out why I did, the Palins are worth another quick review. The village idiot knocked up a union oilpatch tradesman’s kid, but Grandma was America’s Milf Governor, and none of it sat well with equally affluent families whose median ages were floating into the fifties while their babies pushed thirty, these precious brats all in graduate school under whatever duress it took to keep them on the straight and narrow path. Why couldn’t that stupid slut get an abortion? For crying out loud she was still eligible for dependent’s benefits under Obamacare when she did it again! A brat in elementary school, a second at the breast, nobody to keep her out of trouble when she got into trouble except for however many dozens of siblings and cousins who’d been changing diapers since they were ten and fighting over who got to hold the latest baby since they were five and could probably borrow airfare from the community chest if it came to it and would definitely be game to do some babysitting in Phoenix instead of the Mat-Su Valley for a change, and only a judgmental asshole from the Salvation Army or the Republican Caucus Sarah always helped the Democrats sandbag, or maybe Walt Monegan because he’s still upset about having to let what’s-his-name the alkie Trooper be Safety Bear, would care that you’re trading food stamps for a ticket to Sky Harbor and Xanny for the flight Outside, if you can cash me dare, Rollins, because there’s no shame in taking a trip to give your fiftieth cousin a break from your sixtieth and seventieth; but I mean, Jesus Christ, who the hell let the mother of such a woman run for the vice presidency when there are so many qualified professionals like Kamala Harris, girlbosses who stayed in school.

This is subsidiarity. No, not that fucking Canuck bitch; Sweet Melissa would at least have the domestic graciousness to bring me coffee in deathbed, and I should hope we would flee for protection to better death penalty abolitionists than that goddamned Anglo-Quebecker when we have Nob Hill Dreamboat holding the dual offices of the governorship and Napa Valley Job Creator Customer in Chief. Gavin said it himself, in a Gabbin: We’re decisions, not conditions. I’d certainly like to imagine we are, but Kamala’s are terrible because she’s been living in a bad one her whole career.

Against the odds, which the goods famously are in Klondike Country–it took me just as forever to find a California girl to tell me “Buddy you aren’t my boyfriend,” but the produce is better AND cheaper, and the drive over to her doublewide isn’t on roads covered in snow, drunks, and moose–I know where I’m headed, even though I’m taking my thots for another walk. It’s an Amtrak conductor who told a group of us, “The fifteen-year-old and the sixteen-year-old fight over who gets to hold the baby. It’s great.” He meant it. He spoke with 100% Napoleonic sincerity.

Yes, I’m aware that it’s usually Republican shitbaggers leading the charge to defund publicly chartered common carriers and cast the dedicated, competent workers running them out into gig app destitution or whatever the hell else they can find for themselves, but once again, that wasn’t Sarah Palin’s scene as governor. In rough terms, she was a center-right mayor, a center-left governor, a politically unclassifiable candidate for the vice presidency–hockey mom subsidiarity, Howard Jarvis-ass whining about taxes because it’s expensive to be a hockey mom, Northern Exposure Annie Get Your Gun shtick, walk-the-talk pro-life grandstanding mashed up with the usual persecution complex grievances-, and most recently a mostly hard-right cable television personality.

Whatever all she is, You Betcha is a vigorous free thinker. She’s a freer thinker than Mocha Haole. So is our thicc moist boi, the Oaf of Office. This is where we must unfortunately look again at liberlism and what fresh horrors have become of it. We can be confident that it is wack, not good, but what is it all about? Wot is ANY of that all about? To judge from recent commentary, it’s largely about what we’ve just as erroneously taken to calling conservatism. John Bolton and George W. Bush are statesmen of great character now. It’s because they don’t yell. John Bolton has always been notoriously abrasive and foultempered, but he only yells about, like, how he has perfect policy and everybody else’s is trash, not how Anna Wintour is lame or Pete Buttigieg is an Alfred E. Newman tryhard.

The Democratic rank and file need to vote for Joe Biden because a growing list of Republican grandees say they’re voting for Joe Biden. We need a Democrat to take back the White House. Huh? Why doesn’t that mean that Biden is the Republican candidate? The most bloodthirsty Beltway demons are upset with Trump for challenging core Republican policies and then getting distracted again: grasping junior lanyards, chiefs and deputy chiefs from all the spook nests, House Voice creeps on NPR, Taylorist armchair generals who tell actual generals to shut up about how they need workable plans for rear-echelon operations to win foreign wars. Trump wins entire states with margins of victory totaling fractions of his share of antiwar registered Democrats who would gladly vote for Bernie Sanders, too.

We’re rubes for questioning this Alice-in-Wonderland freak show. It’s now normative to insist that Vladimir Putin, who has little to say about domestic affairs in the United States and not a huge amount to say about US foreign policy, is orchestrating wholesale mind control of the American people out of a few cube farms full of junior intelligence operatives doing chatroom and comment thread work in English (after a fashion) all day, in contrast to the horde of ever more aggressive US intelligence operatives and assets who openly, forwardly tell private citizens what to believe but would never, ever try to brainwash anybody by catfishing as everyday housewives concerned about the direction the country is headed.

The Bircher wackjobs pushing this nonsense are, among other things, the same class of scolds who clutch their pearls at the trashy, low-class dysfunction of the Palin clan, often while enjoying their expensive upper-downer regimens much less than the Palins enjoy their grab bags of whatever they thought looked good at the liquor store on their way to pick up their latest pick-me-up from Levi’s one buddy who just finished another shake-and-bake home batch. “Oh, but you’ll get into trouble with drugs. You’ll have trouble focusing at school and work.” Fair points, but I never see Sutter Home trying to produce LESS Chardonnay.

“Drug use will keep you from getting into a good school and landing a good job.” Ah, it’s great to be back on the bullshit again. You mean low class. Everything the Brahmins ridicule about the Palins is something they look down on as low-class: starting a big family young; teen pregnancy; carrying a teen pregnancy to term; conceiving and bearing children out of wedlock; police calls over domestic disputes; middling educational attainment, always miscategorized as low as possible to imply idiocy and unemployability; clumsy, explicit nepotism, as opposed to the smooth, implicit kind, which Rod Blagojevich also neglected; an interest in state fairs; police employment; DUI; Beef with the Chief because he refused to give one’s drunk-driving in-law trooper a prized costumed PR post at the State Fair; unionized trade work; snowmobiles; pickup trucks; low-key statehouse bipartisanship; unabashedly having fun at politics; open, rambunctious religiosity; enthusiastic free-association riffs on Mama Grizzly and the Sourdoughs as political oratory.

A number of these things are statitically class-neutral or upper-middle-class. It doesn’t matter; we’re journeying through Wonderland, and it ain’t the one where the Blue Line ends. On second thot, that sounds like it might be misconstrued. Specifically, we aren’t at the one where we’ll be forced to get Charlie off. #CHAHLEE!

There’s a very deep, very broad resentment at play here. Brahmins resent the Palins for freely, boldly living their lives, and especially for suffering no discernible socioeconomic consequences. Those who stray are to be punished. It is their cosmic destiny. Don’t even dare say it’s a result of bad public policy. The policy we have is the only policy we can have.

These objections are the same ones that got Colonial authorities upset about settlers running away to live with Indians. I don’t mean this racially; the same people would have exactly the same ugly reaction to the Palins if they were undeniably white. They and their below-average children are a rebuke of us and a threat to our above-average children. Their refusal to miserably jump through hoops all their lives negates OUR dutiful payment of OUR dues.

“Liberals” would be less upset with them if they were blatant three-sigma fuckups. They’d have no problem with the Palins if they had a life expectancy of 35 and a lifestyle of cycling between the drunk tank and a home life of eating instant noodles for dinner under a sheet of plywood in an unheated ditch. This is about the degree of concern they show for the homeless in general.

What rankles them is that the Palins are a reasonably normal and well-adjusted family who showed up on the national stage affluent, uneducated (they expect law degrees), and expecting their first grandchild in their forties. The discovery that the voting public can pass credentialed, polished candidates over for promotion in favor of a loud, proudly uncredentialed and unconventional woman with a blue-collar husband and a happily pregnant minor daughter scared them. It still does. It reminds them that their own bosses will hurl them to the curb like so much trash if they step out of line, or even if they just lose the superhuman energy so many of them need to meet their quotas.

They hate being upstaged and outranked by a family of breeders whose heads of household at the time they became famous were a non-civil service salaried public employee and a trade unionist. It makes their beloved Democratic Party look like it doesn’t care about unions or their members, and it in fact is an aggressive unionbusting organization. This is not a circle they wish to square for skeptical voters.

When they say that Barack Obama is smarter or more eloquent (no, Joe, not articulate!) than Sarah Palin, what they mean is that he’s more urbane and makes more of a show of being educated. It’s like if I wrote in Cory Lerios for president because I prefer Pablo Cruise deep cuts to Justin Bieber. What he actually says is routinely as vacuous as it comes, or cunningly evil, or both and more: the Flint water supply is fine because he “drank” it (took a tiny sip from a glass whose source was and is untraceable), there’s no reason for NBA players not to go back to work, “we tortured some folks”–he actually said that, verbatim, in public–, I had to drone them, but I did it all cool and conflicted and Eichmann-like.

Obama is heinous. Palin runs hot and cold, unmodulated, rather like Trump. As I keep saying, here and everywhere else I think to mention it, this is the safe style of politics. It’s truth in advertising, a shock to voters, not the chronic numbing, soporific effect of the smooth scumbags who usually float themselves to the top. Obama is the leech injecting its paralytic agent into its host, to feed on it until it is killed.

Idpol was notoriously a primary factor in Obama’s career, and he tacitly encouraged it every bit as energetically as he rued it in his public denunciations, but I’m not sure I can decide from week to week how important it was to his career. The Palins got jack shit worth of idpol points for being Alaska Native (or American Indian, as Sarah looks to be more than Elizabeth Warren). Jesse Jackson lost Obama’s base to Michael Dukakis and Poppy Bush. Message: I Don’t Care If You Ain’t Black. Joan Didion’s extended dispatch from the trail makes Jackson sound like a predecessor not to Obama but to Ross Perot, Bernie, and the Other Dr. Jill. No, the elector may not have a little Rainbow Coalition, as a treat, unless he first has a little Massachusetts governor, as a vegetable. Obama’s elections were greatly aided by his running against two loose cannons representing the unpopular party of an open dipshit two-term incumbent during an abrupt economic crash, then against a fake-wholesome Dudley Do Right Mormon and his openly contemptuous hangdog starve-the-beast Wisconsin wackjob lieutenant.

There’s a serviceable argument that the only thing the Democrats had to do not to lose in 2008 and 2012 was hold off on what they did in 2016. It’s barely a variation on why America elected an Afro-Indian Canuck broad to the vice presidency this time. The competition said it all. The Oaf of Office refused to act like an adult for an afternoon during a once-in-a-century public health crisis. Mike Pence didn’t even try to pretend that he didn’t consider his constituents filthy little piggies at the debate. These were the only fucking things these guys had to do for a shot at reelection.

Four years beyond the retirement of a half-black childhood expatriate weirdo from the presidency, the country elected as its next veep a hella weird half-black teen expatriate turned highest-ranking Wilson-Deukmejian Republican holding elected office in California. We still have to drown in NPR cringe about that creep, because NPR, and additional racist cringe about how Gavin grabbed a beaner to replace the bindi negress in the Senate, but not so much about how the replacement just happened to have ratfucked Bernie in the primaries as the California Secretary of State, but this isn’t necessarily anyone who couldn’t have been elevated to such unacceptable height while white (like Mike the Greek lol). The racebaiting helped, but it was a lily-gilding operation.

I think. I hold too many thots.

What the Brahmins actually demand of their officials is devotion to the polite fiction that merit matters. Again, pay attention to who does NOT get idpol points for being a kike or whatever. Would I have voted for Bernie Sanders AND Loretta Sanchez a third time? Of course. Is that diversity? No. Why? Because the same radio scolds are giving the same celebratory homilies as ever. Besides, Bernie is antisemitic because something or other about Israel, which is all Jews, but really because they would never, ever, ever say that about a self-loathing Jew. The psychology is elegant, not elaborate.

Here’s the deal. You can’t spend your thirties doing fuck-all on pirated electricity in a travel trailer and maybe some shitty hippie carpentry and then just show up in the mayor’s office because you convinced enough voters that your platform made sense. You can’t run for the presidency on the stipulation that we aren’t comfortable here because we aren’t from here but we’ll start to become more comfortable through the healing of withdrawing from the fruitless overseas bloodbaaths we started with the pashtunwallah on the orders of the Baltimore Walrus. Mr. Bolton is a statesman!

No. You need to pay your dues, and not to whatever low-class bullshit was repping Todd Palin against BP. You need credentials. You need qualifications.

It certainly helps to be colored, like Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg. A Maltese is an Italian who’s an Arab, but also an Englishman. *Defiantly Scottish Mark Knopfler Voice* That little faggot. As Yogi Berra pointed out, only in America could a Jew be elected mayor of Dublin. The fork in the road worked either way because he lived in Montclair. There are of course other islands that are equally controversial to call America, m’love, yeah? Upsetting the ancestors and not even offering them any King’s rolls, yeah? That’s why we move to the mainland to start our political careers, yeah? Back in da neighbor islands da police chief puts on a lei to peddle influence true his wife da prosecutor, who also dresses like dat too even doe she’s Portuguese, and dat’s white, not wetback or some kine.

This is why our politicians swoop in from states their fellow haole idiotically assume to be free of all public corruption and win election by telling them, look, folks: You can trust me. I’m from Chicago.

Our idea of diversity is always some wooden cipher who turns out on examination to be blood-curdlingly cold. Dad translated Gramsci into English, so let’s talk all smooth and then wreck the Canadian bread market and get schoolchildren killed by shutting off streetlights to save the city a few bucks on its electric bill, but let’s be all gay and Midwestern about it. Alex Padilla: now is that guy a beaner or what? Uh, dawg, I get that you’re trying to get surplus elites to bark at each other from the veal pen like they’re resegregating Compton, but did you have to find somebody who, now that more of us are looking into his record, turns out to be another slimy crook?

It’s the Yugoslavian crackup, but as farce. Some of the more anxious types, like Michael Grasso, are worried sick that the rising tide of Brahmin idpol will provoke truly dire communal violence. They have a reasonable point, but my gut read is that it’s a sideshow to the actual vectors–moronic but resonant white supremacist Facebook memes, #BackTheBlue Punisher merch, the hypervigilant paranoia of the Karen ethnic minority on NextDoor–i.e., insufferably obnoxious, a serious political and civic problem, but ultimately inert in the streets. If cops were just like, hey, stop calling us just because some guy is taking a walk in your neighborhood, that shit would become REALLY inert.

It’s more hypocrisy. Becky may well have a BLM sign in her yard. In this house we believe in tolerance, lov–hey, get your skell ass off my lawn before I call 911! Zooming out to the structural elements of the fractal, although we really ought to stop using that videochat horseshit and go meet out friends in the park or something, we see Kammy again. Of course we do. The criminal undesirable can have a little prosecutor of color, as a treat.

Many on the right are aware of this. It’s an awfully easy script to flip on the libs. Donald Trump might have carried California if he hadn’t convinced so many kids in San Berdoo and Solano that he was out to deport their family and friends. Or maybe the Republican-identifying Wilson-Deukmejian Republicans would have voted for their girl and kept this here shit as blue as Monterey Bay. This is the quality of analysis I bring to the table, and I live here. Then again, look at what we all have before us,,, too Anal Eyes.

*****

Something of this nature is inevitable when only one side correctly reads the other for deep libidinal urges. This whole thing is about sex and death. The right wing, as we’re lately construing it for half-coherent reasons, is the only one that openly figures we might as well have some first. We’re riffing ever more elaborately on the little-discussed undertones of 2016 as a fight between a warm, gregarious libertine and a frigid, bitter prude. That was another good reason to claim my stateroom on the Stein Steamer and see if anyone else wanted to grab a berth: a ticket of two apparently well-adjusted adults talking about grown-up subjects in ways that made sense, instead of a vicious scold scorned diagonally opposite a he-scold church hug dork who was all like, oh no, a man should not be in the same room as a woman, lest he become lustful and cause scandal (yeah, like the raging horndog you allowed to hire you as his lieutenant when he was already known to shamelessly walk in on teenyboppers in the girls’ dressing room).

It’s what we call a political realignment. It didn’t make hella sense in the nineties, when Tipper Gore was whining about rap lyrics and the Big Dog was throwing Joycelyn Elders under the bus for encouraging young women to *Tom Lehrer Scoutmaster Voice* be prepared, as part of his vain effort to win over a Republican caucus full of serial divorcees and perverts. It doesn’t make sense today, with #MeToo veering into neurotic, avoidant paranoia about all awkward sexual interactions being assault at the same times as characters such as Soulja Boy get record labels and nightclub airtime for their songs of the celibate and the alt-right workshops the notion that it isn’t rape because she secretly wants it.

This nasty scene wouldn’t happen to feature some cringe racial tropes, would it? Oh sweet innocent baby child it fucking does. The left–again, as we’re construing this ridiculous shit–crashes into raging upset about the often dark poor trashing its property values by recreating in “its” neighborhoods, has another partially overlapping segment of the poor do its driving and shopping, and bit by bit decrees the poor, servant class and surplus underclass alike, as ritually impure.

Out in the provinces, loud and proud Republicans get their own damn groceries, chatting amicably with the cashier at checkout. They hear about this caste system, and the polite fiction that it is liberal. They smirk, knowingly: another crop of libs begging to be owned.

Things invert. It is now conservative to have casual sex. This sounds like nonsense, St. Robert Bruce Ford soberly partaking of the venerable rock, but if liberalism stands opposed to liberties of interpersonal physical intimacy in these times of contagion, and sex is obviously one such liberty, what else CAN casual sex be but conservative?

It’s baffling, but it’s coherent enough for American politics. This isn’t that fucking wizard shit. The lower orders of our ruling class cherish a series of fantasy novels about the white moderate. Hear me out: the Bartlet Administration, but everybody dresses up like an absolute dork and flies around on a broom. Huh. That sounds dreadful; let’s write up the contract and pay out the advance right here. By all means, be sure to perpetuate an ambiguously enslaved underclass in this storyline but communicate that the exploitation of this underclass for the support of the overclass on its multidemensional antigravity CIA brooms is only modestly problematic to those who examine these things too closely.

It’s normcore, but it’s normcore for batshit insane idiots who are without a doubt exploring the Spectrum. Many such cases! Let’s be sure to ridicule conservatives for their religiosity while we’re at it, and of course make fun of them for their oopsie babies.

That’s the thing. One couple’s–one community’s–career-ending unplanned pregnancy is another’s spontaneous family formation, one child born in the world to carry on. How can this be a bad thing?

Of course, the devil is in the details, and so when the ideals of family values subsidiarity fail in practice they often fail hard, and transitively so. Their failure fails families. George W. Bush probably said it, too, or Dan Quayle, but it’s true.

On the other hand, when it works, it works beautifully. That’s who Bristol Palin did for her family. She could’ve picked smarter, but the kids will probably be all right. There’s no need to stress about getting the kid into the right preschool.

Glorious Nation of Bougiekistan is intersectionally horrified by this alternative model because it sets an uncomfortably bad example. It raises the specter of being outnumbered by a horde of dysgenic zealots; let us be sure, then, to denounce the white ones and be tactful about what brown can do for you, too, on demographics. The booj are scared to death that their own precious brats will go native with low-class breeders. It’ll wreck their college and career prospects. It will dilute family fortunes and family standings.

This helps explain the intramural controversy over socialism in the Democratic Party. The PMC normie centrist wing very much does not want free money going to low-class losers who will waste it on bullshit like raising their low-class loser kids; these precious, scarce funds are to be stewarded for the education of the worthy elect (and the military). The broad left wing–Trump-curious blue-collar types, service sector workers (an actual working class the lib normies dare not contemplate because its existence would trash their prejudices), ruined surplus elites bitter that they got such a raw deal–damn well want the free money. If it’s good enough for Bezos, it’s good enough for us. The fuck is the problem with giving everybody two grand? The rich may not give a shit to get it, but the middling and the poor will be grateful because they need it. Do we really gotta means-test this shit again? Aging MSNBC tiger parents aren’t all like, please, means-test my Social Security check and reduce it if I exceed the eligibility threshold.

It’s always somebody else who must be strangled with the red tape. The neighbors can have a suitably little Castilleja School, capped at an enrollment of 415, as a treat. I don’t know if any of you wanted to be apprised of Palo Alto again; I didn’t particularly, but Palo Alto reached out to me by yard sign on my way to Christmas Tree Lane. It’s like the new father of the pride eating the last schmuck’s cubs, but for good down-to-earth public school supporters who love them some Walter Hays and can’t stand the rich bitches half a mile up Embarcadero.

The difference between this obnoxious horseshit and the means-testing of welfare is the difference between a bitchfest about the neighborhood quality of life (the worst people making the best arguments about street trees and traffic for the worst reasons) and government massacre by determination of ineligibility. We’re dealing here with politically hyperengaged property owners who are convinced, existentially and libidinally, that their survival depends on the Darwinian murder of the unfit. Mind you, they’re good woke liberals, so they insist on decimation by bureaucracy. It must be bloodless and deniable. There’s no way they could have known that their beloved elected officials would get their poorer constituents sickened and killed by insisting on proof of eligibility for public benefits. Yeah, no way except for their frequent, adamant refusal to provide for universal public benefits. Are we really expecting a single mother who’s desperately trying to piece a living together from minimum wage jobs to afford a lawyer or an accountant to dispute denials? Or are we secretly, subconsciously satisfied–even relieved–that this regime we support by always voting for weasels who enact it keeps her off-balance, precarious, and indigent?

These conditions make her a better servant, yes?

The Population Bomb guy’s only child is a nonprofit lawyer turned dog groomer or some other bullshit like that. Yeah, I guess I’m really one to talk, but that’s what a community gets for setting up a runaway real estate boom instead of an annual per capita sovereign wealth dividend for its legal residents.

The loud and proud right looks at the deracinated, barren, low-key eliminationist eugenics of America’s SuperZip freak zones and wonders, quite reasonably, whether the locals ever get any action. They hire proxies for their wars, just as they do for their grocery runs, and they sure don’t act like they get laid. They practice and insist on propagating a quasicelibate form of toxic eliminationist eugenics. Since that’s what the libs are already doing, what the hell is wrong with a socially exuberant, sexually active, fertile expression of fascism? That’s toxic, too. It veers into martial genocide, babysnatching, and rape. It yields performative horseshit like gender reveal parties (excuse me, children, I believe you mean revelations) and T-shirts with unfortunate gross discussions of how daddy splooged in mommy as passive-aggressive territorial patrol against the homo tranny shit and whatever.

I’m not saying it’s good. I’m saying it’s already here, it’s morally comparable to liberal one child policy eugenics and the associated overwrought hygienic protocols (see Palo Alto, obviously), and it gets a fool some ass. Hence President Trump. That, and trade and industrial policy and not being a prissy squeamish bitch around the hardhats.

We’ve been over Trump’s role here again and again. It’s predictable enough that the Donald takes the lead from time to time on cutting the damn check while Third Way shitbirds and their nominal enemies on the Republican right throw fits about procedure and fiscal discipline and other crap they suddenly stop believing when Lockheed-Martin shows up for another feeding.

*****

The relatively reasonable aspect of the respectable center’s objections to the healthy sexuality and familial abundance of clans like the Palins is that little people following their example won’t be able to afford to raise the spawn they so recklessly conceived. Back when the respectable center racialized this scolding campaign in the nineties under the auspices of welfare reform, welfare-to-work, and similar nerd-ass policy followups to Reagan’s Cadillac welfare queen slur, Toni Morrison made the ridiculous offer, in the first and second persons, to raise young black single mothers’ babies while they go to medical school and become neurosurgeons. I come up with grandiose cringe plans when I’m hypomanic, too. She was on to something, though. Our first black president and his wife could afford to hire the village to raise their child.

In many ways, government really is just the name we give the things we choose to do together. Contemplate it and shudder. Dat subsidiarity, tho. Who will be there to help the single mother raise her children, or the young, unprepared, unwed couple theirs?

Call me old-fashioned, but I keep thinking about ad hoc combinations of union pay and benefits, local friends and family, and government assistance. Gee, these are exactly the things our shitbag centrist rulers keep denying us! It’s impractical to expect these things of society and unreasonable to demand them of the government, but huh, whaddaya fuggen know, the same politicians who chide their constituents to be more reasonable about these things and wait in patience for incremental progress towards them (it’s called progressivism now) always find a way to oppose these same things when they come up for a vote. When push comes to shove, it is our lot to live deracinated, indigent lives doing on-call servant work for a pittance, scattered to the winds from hometowns our rulers have decided to gut and rebuild for their own private use (gentrification) or strip and abandon in full (the Rust Belt).

The hell is “voting against their own interests” supposed to mean when this is the agenda voters try to defeat at the polls? Voting for Trump the populist is coherent. Voting for Trump the liberal or Trump the leftist is coherent. It’s a longshot, it’s a Hail Mary pass (in this house we pray not for football, a vulgarity of the earth, but to St. Richard Russell, an aerobat, for support from the skies), but it’s coherent. Remember the lesser of two evils? Silverado Trail remembers! Where else would I go to be forcibly bathed in cope for grabbing my spot on the Stein Steamer, a voyage towards the affirmatively good, even though I easily preferred Trump to Clinton but didn’t see the point to voting for the dumbass who thot he’d keep the cartel drugs out with a wall when we were still, like, a decade away from ranked-choice presidential voting? Okay, yeah, Mark West or anywhere from Blossom Hill to the Marina and on over the bridge to some shit like Novato (but maybe not the poor part of town down on the frontage road between the freeway and the slough, out by the airport); that shit would work, too, because this state is right fucked.

It’s just as coherent for the affluent to vote for the Democrats’ predatory agenda because it works to their socioeconomic benefit, short-term and if they’re as lucky as they hope also long-term. Good liberals that they are, I guess we just have to keep listening to their psychotic rationalizations about how their voting habits are altruistic, or else retreat from civic life into Benedict Option escapism. The Amish get ass like they’re Mormon, you know. No, I mean one wife in American Dork–I mean, goodness–maybe two if you’re discreet, not some Colorado City bullshit where you have your private police force run surplus young men out of town because you fancy their sisters, which sounds different from the rest of America more than it is diffferent. In a still far from ideal society, grown-ass adults indulging in the faddish fixation on Hamilton would admit that they’re dipshits with bad taste in art, not act like they’re doing civics by soundtrack. Still, notice that they get the absurdly fresh groceries, delivered, by government when they can’t by courier.

Don’t blame me for using that language. I learned it from Dave Freeman. That unfortunately fits into the puzzle, too. KQED is now encouraging its listeners to donate by the end off the year so they can get a tax break for keeping their money in California. Slushing money to other rich people is charity now, but in high circles it always has been. The cope we’re using here is the ridiculous assumption that California’s net contributions to the federal treasury are paying for Mitch McConnell’s necrotic ass, not for the merest creature comforts for piss-poor dying Kentuckians out in the trailer park hollows who got that way by trying to work for a living or collecting much smaller government checks. McDowell County is about a tenth black these days, but it’s pointless to think about actual highland demographics and their implications on the left coast campaign to #StayWoke. We’re just trying to maintain #BlackLivesMatter as the archipelago of yard signs it should be. Swear to God, we’re just trying to kill off the honky-ass West Virginians, who have to be the whole population. Oh, the Black Belt is a net recipient of federal funds? Huh. Surely we aren’t trying to kill poor negroes from our 99.5% nonblack neighborhoods, through policy.

*****

How, as our Parkhomenkometer flatlines at its hard upper mechanical limit, could Bernie would have won?

Duh: by appealing to poors out in the provinces who maybe hold crudely retrograde racial views or maybe have dear friends who are black or maybe have both. We like Uncle Bernie! The Ragin’ Cajun doesn’t, but he isn’t one to work for a living. As we discussed above, that ain’t a check you get from the gubbyment by /extremely Guyland voice/ filling out forms, standing in line, and waiting here, for the Pennsylvania you never found.

Yeah, Bernie wears his mask. He isn’t a scold about it, though. He and Jane shooed a group of volunteers back out on the sidewalk early in the Rona, but they were Jewish grandparently about about it, not assholes. No, no, wash yaw hands befaw you come in faw dinna! Okay, you ready faw some bawsht? The other thing is, he’s trying to keep Americans alive, not starve the poor to death.

Many Americans are just trying to side with life this winter, not death, even in this death cult. They want a spiritually, socially, physically meaningful life.

TSA throughput numbers are credible, but what Anthony Fauci says about them is not. No, I’ve been lying to the American people about the herd immunity threshold for their own good. What nuclear reactor explosion? Why the hell are the Swedes saying it’s our radiation. How awful it is that some of them flew to see family this Christmas, as slightly fewer but still many did for Thanksgiving, in these times when travel means looming death but it’s also something we could all catch in the supermarket and the authorities are doing approximately jack shit to mitigate it. How dare they try to live their lives while they still have lives to live? They should be content that “we” are, as ordered, simply having a virtual Christmastime.

The drive to the airport is still the most dangerous part. That’s why I try to take the train.

Decency

Mike Mersky assaulted me for using profanity in a school hallway. He bumrushed me up against a wall in front of dozens of other students for two or three syllables of unmemorably light Heavy Seven. You pricked your finger and then fingered your prick? Use some lotion next time! 

If I’d had a set of fucking balls I would have gone to the police and probably had him fired within the week. It’s fine to squirm around courtside and bark moves at the lady ballers, but the safe way to act like Bobby Knight is to be Robert Montgomery Knight, and Mersky wasn’t it. He wasn’t even a Benjamin Montgomery Robinson; that was no union gig he had with us. My problem was that I was being low-key community blackmailed over mental and behavioral health moments that were more innocuous than the Mike Move but seedier.

I’ll still swear, to this day, that Mike Mersky assaulted me in his capacity as a school principal, to wit, the immediate successor of Headmaster Dick Johnson. That was why we needed to watch our language around the Day School. It would have been scandalous of us to address one another as the man in charge of all thirteen grades at our school. 

Mersky wasn’t any coarser than Lieutenant Tittytorque, but he was worse. Lieutenant Tittytorque forcefeeding me Jim Beam, slamming four times as much Jimmy himself, and then grabbing my nipples to tune in WWVA was 100% voluntary association, just as Tocqueville wanted it. None of that was ever a good idea, but that beefy freak did not hold authority in loco parentis. When the principal is acting like that, or God help us all the school cop, it’s past time to nip that shit in the bud. 

It hit me this evening, as I walked out on Joe Biden’s unseemly victory speech celebrating the recording of the Electoral College’s statehouse voting conventions to pick up an order of dim sum: Mike Mersky is Joe Biden is Mike Mersky. They’re the same fucking bastard. They’re the same coarse, insufferably greasy middlebrow Mid-Atlantic piece of shit. They talk the same, they strut the same, they bark abuse the same. 

I have no reason to believe that Mersky is a sex pest or a pervert–worth mentioning, obviously, because Funny Uncle Joe is overtly both–but otherwise they’re the same dangerous, disgusting thing. Mersky loved to say, “I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you.” Yeah, that’s what I expect you to be, you cunt. You run this fucking school. Malarkey, we might call it. Man alive, Corn Pop, I’m gonna brain ya with this chain, Jack. 

First State Skull Pudding has the permanent, total privilege to utter threats and fighting words at close range in front of witnesses and news cameras, grope, assault, and forcibly rape where Mike Mersky does not because Joe is two or three quanta farther up and out. When teachers do that it’s a contigent privilege, innit, Denny. Put me in Coach! I mean, put Coach in me! I mean, gimme some cash, Coach! You’re ready to pay! In ways it’s surprising that Denny Dundiddly went down for what Denny Dundiddily dun, but he was after an ex-Speaker with a personal fortune in the mere mid-seven figures. What stands out about so many other sexually compromised guys above him–Clinton, Trump–can be accused on the record of forcible rape and suffer no consequences. Nothing ever happens to them. The Big Dog got deposed, I think. Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, pudding his pop where it didn’t belong, there to pound more than just cake, got off Scot free for decades. Men who are known to have traveled abroad on a custom private jet with a convicted serial molester and his barely teenage sex slaves are allowed to do whatever the hell they fancy, and in their public lives, no less. Joe gets to put his hands wherever he damn well pleases. 

Nothing happens to these creeps. Nothing ever happens. 

Here’s the mindbending part. 

My parents both found Mike Mersky sleazy, shifty, and abrasive. I have never told them about what he did to me, because I always assumed they’d blame me and don’t want any unpleasantness over that bullshit. They didn’t need to hear a thing about his being physically aggressive or menacing for them to dislike him for chronically being a greasy prick. 

What do they tihnk of Joe Biden, then? He’s restoring decency to American politics. He’s restoring the rule of law. He’s a unifier, not a divider. Whatever he did for the banks, it wasn’t as bad as Trump. Whatever he did to make life hell on the vulnerable poor in neighborhoods he flooded with jackbooted cops enforcing newly draconian laws, it wasn’t as bad as Trump. Whatever horrible things he’s trying to od to this day, he is in no way as bad as Trump. 

It’s so dispiriting to hear people who always distrusted a shady sleazeball rally around Joe Biden, of all ghouls, because he’s a man of decency. How could he be a rapist, a molester, a groper, a white supremacist bigot, a fascist, an armchair jailhouse slaver, a superintendent of mass debt peonage, or even a dementing weirdo? For fuck’s sake it’s because he’s proven to be all of these awful things. Yes, he’s that bad.

I’ve heard “decency” more this fall than I heard it over the five or ten years prior. In tandem with the full-blast firehose of idpol the centrist elements of the chattering classes have been blasting on us since the election, they keep repeating that Joe’s decent, a man of decency. Audio and video of him from THIS CALENDAR YEAR show him lashing out with terrible indecency: Go vote for someone else then; you’re full of shit, a horse’s ass; meet me outside; you ain’t black. If the average A-List figure were carrying on like that, it would be all over the news all the time. Look at how they react to Trump. Instead they just flat-out make shit up about Biden’s character and repeat it ad nauseam.  

The idpol this fall is like nothing I’ve ever witnessed. I expect some gross idpol from the MSM, and certainly from the hopeless veal pen inmates who kiss up to PC Principal from the inept margins of academia, but the Celebration of Diversity they’re throwing in observance of the current interregnum is a world of its own. NPR has had days with multiple items about who of what communal identity has been nominated for what. Meanwhile, the Biden transition team’s nomination process has crashed on launch, disintegrating into a rubble field of corruption and dysfunction. 

What’s happening here, as has been happening across so much of mainstream American life, is that words mean everything and actions mean jack fucking shit. We saw this in a bad way in the pathetic dispute, still under litigation in some quarters, over Trump’s Pussy Comment. The real problem with this publicly accused rapist and unannounced girls’ dressing room visitor is the time he bragged about his louche sex life to a giggling Billy Bush. One of the least credible forms of self-incriminating testimony imaginable is a salacious locker room story for a trust fund dipshit with a celebrity gossip show. There’s no positive, intrinsic reason to believe that any of it is true. Trump habitually lies about all sorts of things to make himself sound successful and brash. 

Even if it’s all true, the troubling thing about the public reaction to Storytime with Billy Bush (again, how are these characters real people?) fixated on the pussy part. Very little agonizing effort was expended denouncing him for bragging that he “moved on them like a bitch” or his explicit claim that he did not ask permission or look for any expression of comfort or consent. What these hysterics feel so deeply about (as he said) is that the future president used common street slang to brag about his promiscuous sexual habits. He used the same word the vast majority of American adults use for the vulva and the vagina when they talk about sex in private.

The pussyhatters’ thinking is more confused yet. Few of them object to the general coarsening of public life with loud sexual language and imagery, which is unmistakable in many places. Genuinely conservative religious voters who sincerely want talk about sex to stay tactful and private quietly facepalmed when they heard that naughty tape from the Republican nominee for the presidency. Pussyhatters skew the other way, ridiculing the religious right for being prudish and repressed (about most of the avowedly conservative “values voters” in this country they have an unfortunately good point).

What they find so objectionable is that Trump, specifically, used that word. It gets even dumber (does it ever not?), because very few of these hysterical performative feminists objected to Trump’s ostentatious public coarseness when he was peddling it as a celebrity developer and television cosplay executive. The pushback against Trump’s obnoxious antics in the eighties was marginal and ineffectual. The pushback against The Apprentice was EXTREMELY marginal. It was impotent. I was around normies all the time. The only people who even tacitly or tangentially criticized “reality” television were a handful of lefty eccentrics and conservative Benedict Option types.

Then Trump ran for the presidency. He ridiculed politics as self-serious bullshit, humiliated Jeb!, insulted the full slate of movement conservatives on the debate stage, and stood up against immigration and for a reinvigorated industrial policy. All of a sudden he was unconscionably coarse and dangerous. Tens of millions of diehard Democrats who were basically okay with however nasty he was on TV as an apolitical celebrity, including quite a few who enjoyed it, were appalled that he dared speak ill of hard-right ghouls who should have been choked out by furious constituents the first time they workshopped their evil schemes as members of the school board.

This is what centrism gets us. The runup to the election was saturated with deafening campaigns to rehabilitate the very worst Republicans the moment they tested the waters as Trump critics. It’s surreal.

There’s no actual principle to this shit. It’s gone with the wind by the time W. and the gang get rehabilitated. God knows we’re still entangled to death in the desert, but Trump sometimes expresses a keen interest in winding down the desert wars and bringing our boys and girls home for good. Of course the bloodless chickenshit nerds who got us into that ruinous bloodbath in the first place hate him.

The deep story behind the pussyhatting outrage, the movement conservative-Third Way neoliberal alliance’s annoyance over Trump’s distracted wanderings through fleetingly but impressively coherent interests in left populism, the neoconservative objections to his sporadic desire to bring the troops home, and the constant lectures from the Intelligence Community (which did not exist as a formal public concept prior to his 2016 campaign) is that Trump is out of his lane and out of line for expressing political opinions. Nobody gave HIM permission to speak! Nobody gave HIM permission to run for office!

This is why so many people complain that Trump is declasse and his base is exclusively the white working class. The elite and subelite factions so upset by his presidency are uncomfortable with working-class agitation of any kind (because it threatens their wealth, privilege, and power) and hurt that other educated and moneyed people have in-your-face dogshit reactionary politics, not the usual “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” centrist moral evasion or mild-mannered movement conservative politics amenable to centrist Democrats (because that means they have class peers who will never go to the dance with them). Biden’s nomination and election are a soul balm for these insufferable nerds. His victory over Bernie and that whole rabble of downwardly-mobile class traitors and the unwashed generationally poor is soothing lotion for their bunghole.

This is what they mean by decency. They love Biden because his election restores the sacred reservation of high office for careerists who pay their dues (payable out of the US Treasury) and toe the centrist bipartisan line. It resubordinates the rabble to their centrally-approved political betters. It’s easy for them to ignore Delaware Brain Dribble’s repeated foultempered outbursts, expressions of deepseated bigotry, condescending contempt for the acute needs of ordinary Americans, and episodic overt senility because they’re brainwashed and insane. It’s easy for them to become and remain convinced he’s better than Trump: less of an asshole, not an asshole, less of a rapist, not a rapist, I mean, gosh, really, there’s nothing wrong with him for being physical sometimes, he’s just a stutterer who puts his foot in his mouth.

They object to Trump for being too human for politics: too passionate too emotional, too vulgar. His off-color comments are retroactively problematic because he had the nerve to intrude, agitate the undesirables (i.e., the poor crackers they insist are the full extent of his base), and make the lanyards and professional chatterers look like exactly the joyless dorks they are. Never mind that he spent his whole career prior to 2016 bragging about dicking bimbos; one is shocked that the President would speak and comport himself in that low manner.

At the same time, they celebrate Biden for being the genuine human we need in the White House in these troubled times. He’s down-to-earth, he’s poor for a career Senator, he has working-class roots, he’s liberal, and ad nauseam with the bullshit and lies. He’s definitely rich. His parents were white-collar upper middle class by the time he started high school. No attentive, honest obsever would ever make him out to be a poor simple country lawyer whose daddy worked in a wildcat mine.

Mind you, they don’t mean sexually human. That little something-something with the Defense Secretary’s wife didn’t happen. He doesn’t grind she-bikers on his lap in front of their husbands. He doesn’t sniff little girls’ hair. Or if it does, it’s a nothingburger. (Centrism is braindead straight down to its catchphrases.)

This is shit that would get an ordinary man throttled in a church parking lot or beaten to death in a bar brawl. The rules are different for grandees who are guarded by dedicated squads of crack federal agents standing by within lunging distance whenever they leave the house. A man would get tackled or shot for reclaiming his wife from Joe Biden. When a man has that level of protection and publicly, repeatedly makes moves on women in front of their husbands,who are painfully aware they cannot safely do a thing but outwait, that man is not decent. He shows what he is. He’s a predator.

Back east, I used to run with some frisky chicks in MontCo and Manayunk whose boyfriends didn’t mind if they danced up on me, and I on them. Shit, Burmila, I used to have it. Guess I still do, after a fashion, but good God I’m in here writing this crap. One of the chicks was Irish. Her boyfriend was super chill about it, not cucked, just laidback. Two others, both of them Italian, were both dating low-key weird and messed-up Jews. The one chick was the distant, hella crazy kind of Italian. The chubbier, more approachable one named her ugly-ass tomcat after me. That cat was like if you put G. K. Chesterton in a fur suit and then ran him through the warp setting on FaceApp.

It was still an honor.

There’s something wrong with the Italians, but we knew that. Point is, we basically maintained the normal give-and-take that normal people maintain in normal interactions and relationships. (The Insurance Schmuck was how I knew these people, so it was a small miracle.) Nobody showed up with the Mormon answer to a rapper’s entourage and threw his weight around all night. I sure as hell didn’t.

It’s perversely encouraging to consider that a fair chunk of Biden’s coalition only thinks it admires him for his character. The last thing good property-owning liberals want to do is admit that they vote as property owners, not liberals. As I’ve said before, it’s refreshingly apsychotic to get the feeling that the shitlib booj are voting their interests, not acting on an eanest terminal obsession with the tiresome Schoolhouse Rock shuck and jive about civic values.

This shit is why GnocchiWizard encourages his followers to walk away from politics and focus on art, on making the world a more beautiful place. Does this essay count? I feel less brainscrambled than sometimes from The Craft, so there’s that. We’re all just crying out into the void, into the wilderness or some shit. But we still have prayer, just like Jesus. We still have the prayers handed down to us. We can still pray for our politicians. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us against that shitty creep. We didn’t order that. Return to sender.

You think I’m kidding. I wish I were.

Hungter Bangin

Gee, the Biden kid is an embarrassment, huh. Democrats are good half-assedly liberal careerist strivers, so we get to listen to their awkward insistence that it’s normal for a dissipated satyr with no professional or educational background in much of anything get corporate board positions paying $50k a MONTH when his father just happens to be the sitting vice president. The kid must have brought something to the table, they say. We don’t just hand out sinecures to the degenerate adult children of crooked government officials, like Nigeria or something. Joe’s no crook!

Uh, have you taken a look at the “state” he represented? I’m sure his staunch belief in personal responsibility for things other than being a huge sex pest, in particular financial contracts entered into as a result of fradulent lender statements, has nothing to do with his decades representing the state where every sleazy corporation imaginable domiciles itself in a storefront mailbox like it’s Mark Judge. This shit isn’t hard to piece together. Hunter Biden acts like the barely functional ne-er-do-well child of any particular tinpot corporate satrap with natural resources cursing his constituents and a Swiss bank account to show for it because that’s exactly what he is. The main difference is that Delaware is a conduit for bribes securing wealth extracted from productive work elsewhere, not itself a country with natural or, as they say, human resources worth exploiting for all they’re worth and secreting the ill-gotten proceeds abroad. It’s Switzerland, but just in the seediest, most dysfunctional possible ways.

The Trump campaign is right that Hunter is a massive scandal. In any normal election, Joe would be toast. To paraphrase Billy Currington, I don’t know much about clearin’ out bogs; I don’t know much about millin’ big logs; I don’t know much about fightin’ mean dogs; but I’m pretty good at postin’ hog. My “I did not lie around in bed all day smoking crack and getting a foot job” T-shirt raises a number of questions already answered by my shirt. Nobody living in the real world who wants to present as upstanding, or even the least bit normal, would give that fuckup brat a position of any public profile, ever.

The problem, for the Trump campaign, is that the complaints about Hunter Biden are coming from the Trump campaign. Hypocrisy doesn’t begin to convey the absurd incredibility of anyone in that family for calling Hunter Biden a degenerate crook. In 2016 they were able to argue, fairly credibly, that Hillary hated people who worked with their hands for a living. She was visibly uncomfortable around hardhats; Trump was enthusiastic, unliike Her. This time, they’re fuming about how that bastard Hunter does nothing but get money for nothing in fake jobs, get strippers into trouble, and smoke crack. That’s a decent description of Donald Trump and his three oldest children, excluding the incest. Hunter may be the most louche son of a bitch I’ve ever seen, but he doesn’t seem as crazy as Don Jr. or Ivanka, or as dumb as Eric.

None of the four of them is employable. Don and Ivanka come relatively close, but like a lot of rich kids–here I mean really rich, not some slacker whose father was a dentist–they dick around in make-believe jobs that will never let their nominally earned income drop anywhere near the high five figures. The sourcing of Hunter’s wages of crookedness through shakedowns of sovereign governments is damning, but it’s really no worse than the Trump Organization doing whatever it had to do to rehabiitate paterfamilias with his coarse let’s-play-office TV show, defrauding students through Trump University, stiffing creditors and contractors under the auspices of its ostensibly bankrupt money laundering fronts, and of course lavishing the useless Trump kids and various cronies with the proceeds.

This money and credit, and the resources they claim as media of exchange, are parasitically extracted from working people: dentists, machinists, winery and vineyard workers (whaddup dawg), strawberry pickers, foot job masseuses. None of these assholes lives anywhere in the vicinity of the real world. I feel decadent for pigging out on Snyder’s honey mustard sourdough pretzel bits and Safeway cinnamon rolls on days when I do six, seven, eight, or sometimes ten hours of physically and mentally demanding vineyard and winery work. Do I earn a quickie with thicky trick for doing that? Financially, lmao hell no; cosmically or karmically, I think so. Compared to our candidates and their useless spawn? God yes.

It’s a common theme in postmodern American life, but deserve has jack shit to do with jack fucking shit. Hunter Biden gets to lounge around with a crack pipe in his mouth and a whore’s feet on his schlong because he’s in a position to extort money on his father’s behalf. The Trump kids and their spouses get direct sinecures in the family company–these days it’s the White House–because daddy is a rich Republican. That’s what rich Republicans do: They give their fuckup children and children-in-law sinecures. Rich Democrats actually believe in meritocratic horseshit for their children, or at the highest levels some sham of it, such as the premise that Hunter was qualified to sit on corporate boards. In general, it pays better to be the useless shithead child of Republican shitheads, not the useless shithead child of Democratic shitheads. The succinct explanation (maybe too succinct) is that Democrats hate their own children.

We aren’t about to have anybody in or around the White House whose means of support or mode of living is not utterly alien to ordinary Americans. Trump, Pence, Biden, Harris: Not one of these ghouls is tempted to do an honest day’s work. Pence is somehow the closest of the four, but every frame I saw of his shifting but constant sneer at the VP debate convinced me that he considers the vice presidency his due, not his honor to hold or his duty to execute. He looked like he was submitting to the imposition of explaining himself to the ungrateful filthy peasants tasked with reelecting him in the worst possible ill humor. Trump is a lifelong flimflammer. Harris is a socially climbing psychopath.

Biden did once have that lifeguarding job, the one where he swung the length of chain at Corn Pop. Yes, Joseph, thank you for sharing that with the class.

These are Irish Catholic family values. The Trumps are right that it’s bullshit, but they’re the last ones who should be complaining about it. Must we really hear it from them? Are we seriously to believe that they have a scrap of moral superiority to the Bidens? Mother of Christ, Huizenga, oil beef hooked the hole why bach to Tipperary to foal fur such a crock o shite.

Strong change he leaves in a pine box

Things are not looking good for our Large Adult Son in Chief. Rarely have the thicc been so sic. A family friend who spent decades doing professional editing sees a pronounced stylistic change in Trump’s tweets since his admission to Walter Reed and is convinced that he’s no longer writing them. His last proof (sic) of life (sic) was a photo op in which he was shown signing his name in the middle of a blank sheet of paper with nothing else on the desk. A hospital-wide shelter-in-place order was texted to Walter Reed staff in the 21:00 hour Saturday night. It remained in place for over half an hour, without explanation. Observers believe it was for an emergency test, probaly a CT scan of his lungs.

Trump’s medical and political entourage, if I may repeat myself, are blowing sunshine up the national ass. Everything they announce about his medical condition is hours old and heavily sanitized. Information leaked on background within the same hour is consistently much more dire.

Gerontocracy is a whole-ass Mood.

Honestly, I’m not opposed to or in support of Trump’s death. To paraphrase His Thiccness himself, it will be what it will be. I’m entertained by the effusive schadenfreude, but I’m entertained from a distance.

It’s Greekly tragic that he may already have William Henry Harrisoned his fat white ass. Was I, Fat Cracka, in any position to save him from himself? Of course not. Am I so fat, slovenly, and chronically stuffed with McDonald’s? Nope. Fat Cracka gets fed better than that. I do yard and farm work. I’m able to negotiate stairs and ramps.

Even odds he leaves alive, and that’s to be generous. A city of over 200,000 departed surely has room for one comorbid more.

Whatcha gonna do when war is no more? Whatcha gonna do when war’s verdun?

We wait in joyful hope for the Blessed Eschaton, the day to come, not right now but someday, somehow, if you can hold fast to patience, Kroeger, we will climb aboard the Cruise Ship, leave it all behind, sail to Lahaina, and get into a street fight over a picnic table with a family of Micronesians.

This is how we allocate territory and resources more aloha. That’s almost an anagram for haole, whose insolent ass the Visitors Aloha Society of Hawaii will gladly return to sender, with or without an escort to the gate from the Attorney General’s office. One of the meanings of aloha is “goodbye,” yeah? She jus toldja, Pablo, yeah? She ain’t invited ya to da luau dis time, not to come here and pass da kine dacha coffin.

When push comes to shove, to wax delicate about these rude matters, the rules are whatever the hardest group of hard bastards to show up to the pig roast say they are. Indigeneity is an arbitrary, nebulous concept. “We were here first; who the hell are you?” is a reasonable position, but reasonable doesn’t carry the guns. Multiple indigenous tribes fight for control of the same patches of the Levant, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, with renowned results. Maybe they aren’t indigenous after all, depending on whom their ancestors charged in and beat to death first.

As Rachel Dolezal will agree, we’re all Africans. Pitcairn Islanders are mixed and at the same time inbred. They’re like Mainers, always thinking they’ll accomplish something by miscegenating with the Canucks. If you’re here, you’re family, and you might not want to be.

Back here on the Mainland, haole be talking the story all words-like about how we need to respect and obey our kupuna, notably including John Bolton. That Chesapeake Walrus was on NPR again, this time for his book (duh) but also to promote in-person voting, the civic pilgrimage of standing in line with the rest of the neighborhood. Why wouldn’t that pompous son of a bitch act like a quadrennial or biennial trip to the school gym to vote is the only time Americans ever leave the house to engage in the agora or the polis? Yeah yeah, we have off-year and primary elections, too; whole lotta folks showing up for that lol.

Voting is expressly and strictly a mechanism for the individual citizen to tell the government what to do. For example, a common constituent demand is “mail me my ballot, bitch.” In other words, I’m telling you what to do for me, and I’m telling you from home, asshole.

This is meta, but barely. We have to fight for our right to fight for our right to tell John Bolton to fuck off from the goddamn radio. That ghoul got over a million people killed for no good reason and tens of thousands more grievously injured or maimed, and there he is, using a book plug to complain that voters aren’t sufficiently reverent in how they vote. That’s what this shit is. It’s a procession. It’s a pilgrimage. It’s the fucking Stations of the Cross and the Camino de Santiago and all that shit, but for Norman Rockwell-ass nerds. Of course we should resent the government for pushing this shit on us. Of course we should vote the bastards out if they don’t put a stop to it and let us vote with maximum convenience.

John Bolton wants us to wait in line like dutiful pilgrims to express our will to our governments. I don’t suppose the lines at his polling places resemble those in, say, Atlanta under Brian Kemp, probably in large part because his neighbors think it’s ridiculous and demand ballots by mail. I fucked around at the County Center for a few hours on election day in March and watched traffic at the drop box, but I’d be pissed if Sonoma County told me to do that as a condition of voting, and I’m annoyed to hear John Bolton, of all Strangelovian horrors, being the faux-folksy codger who says that’s how it ought to be. Andy Rooney wasn’t behind a string of war crimes.

At some point, I have to wonder what isn’t meeting tonight to make waiting in line to vote feel so resonant. The Rotary? The Knights of Columbus? We do rather more of that than we should, as Americans, and we have precious little to show for it. The good Tocquevillean shit doesn’t work so well when Carnegie and Frick hire their Pinkerton goon squads. Standing up to such thuggish scum is how people wrest back their rights from tyrants. Queuing up in a parish hall like it’s the fucking unemployment office doesn’t connect cops with bricks.

We’re confusing upstream and downstream here, just as Bolton and the gang would have it. Since riots and other protests have been flaring up this year, we’ve been hearing more than usual about how much our public officials and other supercilious derelict busybodies respect peaceful protesting but abhor rioting, violence against police, and every other tactic that forces them to pay attention and do something. Of course they want a few handfuls of doofuses milling about on the National Mall in tricorn hats. Of course they want the pussyhatters, wearing a different style of tricorn watering the tree of liberty with a more peaceful flow of blood.

They started allowing us (sic?) to vote in the first place as a way to figure out how to keep the bricks in their place in times of popular grievance, i.e., by keeping the cops in theirs. It wouldn’t be unproductive to stage a runway sit-in anymore than it was unproductive of Richard Daley to send that streets crew into Meigs Field at half of dawn. Remember, we’re trying to get our way here, not express fealty to officials who can’t be bothered to care. *Most civic antigentrification Roger Schafer voice* I didn’t do shit to the dozer! I was cutting concrete!

The same tyrannical impulse drives all the scolding our Oaf of Office caught a few weeks ago for calling our war dead losers and suckers. The war dead he caught the most flak for disrespecting were from the First World War, the War so Great they didn’t try to plan for one greater. In other news, Francisco Franco is still dead.

I’m unaware of Americans of any importance making a patriotic stink about the Grand Army of the Republic in my lifetime. This is in stark contrast to Vietnam, although somewhat oddly not Korea. In effect, Trump holds the majority opinion on honoring our WWI dead, specifically, that it’s unimportant.

The namecalling doesn’t play as well in Peoria. Constituents who support Trump’s effort (lol sic) to get our boys (and girls!) out of the desert may well take offense to hear their antiwar president speak so contemptuously of war’s victims in the United States Armed Forces. Again, though, the doughboys he was dissing have been dead hella long, and the media shot their load on the story by focusing on Trump’s disrespect for our irrelevant war dead from the trenches of the Western Front and not on those who didn’t manage to run through the jungle.

As obnoxious or offensive as our Thicc Moist Boi’s private commentary may be construed, it was heartfelt. He genuinely and personally believed that the cemeteries weren’t worth visiting. The shitheads who piped up about his disrespect for our war dead don’t care about our war dead themselves. Many of them obviously treat military personnel, dependents, and casualties with dripping contempt. They did the same thing here as always. They seized on the latest bullshit controversy to impugn Trump’s character because they resent him for being a messy bitch from Queens who lives for drama. People of his character should not usurp high office, they fume.

What they mean by character, of course, is poor manners. Most of his predecessors were men of shockingly bad character. It’s just that they cleaned up well and the Donald does not. SuperZIP gaslighting victims now esteem George W. Bush, a man who respected our troops enough to get thousands of them killed in a war he started on false pretenses, with the main effect of destabilizing a country whose strongman the Blob hated for some reason, even though he was one of the less hostile officials in his region. Fuck off if you think I’ll grant that cokehead failson the good repute of caring about the military personnel under his command. He cared about them as much as he did the victims of 9/11. *Suprisingly high-energy Jeb! voice* Please, collapse.

Donald Trump gets war in a way few of his recent predecessors have. There may be an idiot-savant element to it, but he has the good sense to recognize that it was disastrous of the US to intervene in WWI and a Vietnamese civil war. Framing the disaster in terms of the gullibility or lameness of the grunts who fought these wars is pretty close to the mark, even if offensive. If they’d refused to go, we wouldn’t have gone, because they were us.

The battlefields and cemeteries don’t really tell us what happened. They’re misleading if we aren’t careful. I’ve walked around Valley Forge and Gettysburg. They’re deceptively peaceful. They’re long cleansed of the blood and piss and shit and moans of death. We watch Ken Burns for some drumming, a quick spot of shooting, and another spin of that sweet-ass Ashokan Farewell. Gettysburg wasn’t like that, either.

An area I like even better than Gettysburg is the Catoctin Mountains. I’ve walked around the ruins of the Catoctin Furnace and read the interpretive signs. It may have taken a loser or a sucker to run the forge for the rich degenerates who owned it. It certainly did to work for Carnegie. It takes nothing of the sort to divert ball bearings to the riot police. Horsey go wheeee!

Donny Fingers cares about that every bit as much as he cares about Camp David. What good is it for golf? The fucking government owns it, so he can’t charge for accommodations. That loser Lincoln only has one Bedroom.

Camp David has been used for peace, though, and so, in bizarre ways, has Donald Trump. That’s one of the reasons he’s so hated in Washington. He won’t mouth their deadly pieties. He’ll mouth his own, of course, but not theirs, and hoes mad.

What is it good for?

Regardless of whether or not Donald Trump in fact refused to visit a WWI battlefield cemetery in France because the American war dead buried in it were “losers” and “suckers,” the story is hella funny. The Doughboys WERE losers and suckers for dying for that bullshit. We shouldn’t need the Donald’s insight to notice this.

Since we’ve now received it, however, either as true witness or as scurrilous fun, we get to hear every sanctimonious centrist Beltway chickenshit with an axe to grind about Trump’s constitutinal crises, prolific corruption, breaches of sacred norms, and messy bitch antics intone about how shocking and scandalous it is that our thicc moist boi, the Oaf of Office, would DARE speak ill of our fatally wounded warriors.

The Vet Respecters have logged the fuck on, to make sure we never hear the fucking end of it. Many of them look down on our current military personnel with casually homicidal contempt. Much of the scolding we hear about the need to thank them for their service comes from deferment wranglers and other loudmouthed cowards who use the children of their social inferiors as board pieces in a real life game of Risk. Much of the rest comes from noncombat personnel and veterans swarming the Pentagon and its contractor satellites doing God knows what–my guess, as always, is not a hell of a lot–under the hilarious conceit of national defense. Ask not how Broad-Bangin’ Jack can do you; ask how you can do your country.

Whether we’re enjoying the nonfictional or the fictional version, Trump hit the nail on the head about how cucked our boys were to agree to ship out and become Salisbury steak tartare in Greater Belgium to satisfy the egos of a bunch of titled German degenerates who were upset with their cousins. They were all related to each other, and few of them just once. The Habsburgs were an entire lineage of intensifyingly retarded Latino Rachel Dolezal. That’s the quality of people who were ruling Europe. Victoria’s son and heir Edward was a total ditz. Britain went to war for a belligerent rabble of brass band drunkards and one branch of a degenerate extended family where being a dimwitted failson good at nothing but boning Irish camp followers was no obstacle to inauguration as the head of state.

They would have crowned Elon Musk, Cartman, and Timmy in uninterrupted succession if they’d been in line for the throne. More than a few of them made the imminent Charles III look dignified AND handsome.

Spending months getting gassed in a shitty mud pit for any of them over some incomprehensible treaty obligations a bunch of kraut bigshots had to abruptly activate because one of their kin had gotten whacked by a no-name hunky really is cucked. The First World War was the dumbest fucking war ever fought: no natural resources in dispute, no moral objectives, shockingly ugly conditions on the front.

Anybody who deserted that horror show was wise and righteous. So is pointing out that there was no glory or good repute in sticking around, toughing it out, and getting dead at eighteen. There is indeed some corner of a foreign field that is forever suckers.

Whoever wins this November, Oaf of Office or First State Skull Pudding, we’re facing another four years of lectures from bloodless psychopaths and their equally bloodless asskissers about the need to respect Our Troops (just not those with criticisms of war), Rick Snyder, our other very worst Third Way-curious governors, the Intelligence Community, and a grab bag of other shitsnakes and servile milquetoasts. Our war dead are already props for various Strangelovian adventures; there’s no reason they can’t also be props for tertiary-syphilitic fantasy fiction about how President Bartlet always respected our servicemen (and women!). Cheerio, m’cunt!

Hoosier favorite Hoosier faggot?

Andrew Yang debased himself into deep homophobic cringe in that excruciating comedy (sic) sketch about Mike Pence with Julia Louis-Dreyfus because Louis-Dreyfus is an A-List celebrity worth $400m. That’s what we call causation. Wealth alienates those holding it from the real world. This is worrisomely hard to explain to the normies, but it’s some basic shit. What on earth about Louis-Dreyfus or anyone else at her station sounds normal, let alone ordinary? She’s unfathomably rich and surrounded by servants 24/7. Hollywood is full of supremely arrogant divas who take the servants to include Gavin De Becker and Benjamin Brafman. On-call retainers swoop in at a moment’s notice to clean up any mess. Not all maids are Mexicans.

With rare exceptions, celebrities are abnormal, and the prominent among them all the more powerfully so. Michael Jackson’s entrancingly tragic career shows what can happen when the extreme wealth and power of celebrity suffuse a person with unhealed childhood trauma. Other celebrities are object lessons in the ill effects of giving the same wealth and power to the belligerently arrogant (Mel Gibson), the all-around cruel (Ellen DeGeneres), the hypomanic (Charlie Sheen; Tom Cruise), addicts (Charlie Sheen; Lindsay Lohan), those with intractable sexual resentments (Harvey Weinstein), the more generally sexually disordered (Woody Allen), the violently sexually reactive (Phil Spector), other styles of perverts (too many to count), or narcissists (ditto). Many such cases!

We’re all aware of celebrity perversion; the gossip rags see to it. It’s obvious, then, why celebrities ought to be used sparingly in politics: their deployment as proxies is high-stakes, and they’re very often too extremely idiotic to offer a credible upside to campaigns. They work best when the voting public is every bit as idiotic, a situation many would call standard operating procedure. An assumption of popular idiocy doesn’t work as well as it did a generation or two ago, on account of the internet. It’s impossible to direct widespread idiocy from the top down anymore.

The legacy media understandably resent this. Cronkite, they intone, told it the way it was. It’s fascinating that the major networks were the province of eminent gentlemen of the news, of Murrow and Sevareid and Rather, and never of a dumbed-down sleazeball like Pat Sajak. Does Connie Chung bring back greasily unsettling memories? Goodness, I, for one, always expected better of Maury Povich’s wife.

A big bunch of shady characters are chronically resentful of the breakup of the manufactured consent-industrial complex. They never cared for that sweet antitrust action of the free (lol) market. Sensing their looming semirelevance, the political gatekeepers coarsened their sexual shtick, most bracingly with the shitty saxophonist Bill Clinton, a man whom neither boxers nor briefs could keep continent of slick willie. They’d been more demure about His Vigor Broad-Bangin’ Jack; Christ, Bobby, this isn’t the comic books section in the Bowery heyah. By the surprisingly gay nineties, they saved their discretion for flyover country he-frumps like Dennis Hastert and clumsily weird squares like Larry Craig, unconcerned that John Spritzgerald Kennedy at his soapiest dindu nun wah Denny Dundiddly dun.

Public sexual coarseness in American politics, even presidential politics, dates back at least as far as partisanship in Congress. Washington didn’t care for any of that, but Jefferson and Adams did. There have, however, been periods when this sort of seediness was towards the margins of American political culture. For example, it’s historically been rare for partisan conventions to explicitly sexualize candidates on the main stage.

This manifestation of self-respect in politics is missing lately, along with a number of others. It’s painful. Class analysis, the determination of who gets to take whose shit, isn’t fundamentally any more refined, but it tends to crowd out obnoxious idpol bullshit, and idpol wedges are routinely used to distract voters from economic platforms they may find distasteful or unacceptable, i.e., from class analysis.

Here’s the question. Do you want to allocate our collective resources through a political process focusing on the allocation of available resources, or do you prefer to do it through a pissing match about who’s gay? Our elites continue to reaffirm their choice. It is to judge booty. Our preferences may differ, but if that’s the case, they sure as hell didn’t ask us.

*****

Pay attention to what the party kingmakers do to Democratic candidates whose normal inclination is to stay above that seedy shit. Bernie Sanders, who has too strong a sense of dignity to take sexually coarse bait, just emerged from his second primary ratfucking in two successive primaries. Andrew Yang, who is goofier, needier, and more suggestible, debased himself in that cringe-ass standup routine about Mike Pence being gay because Julia Louis-Dreyfus and company thot it was a good idea.

This is where we find ourselves. A slick faculty brat gentrification thug from South Bend is the good kind of Indiana Gay; a slick hard-right talk radio grifter from Columbus is the bad kind. Mike Ponce, Mike Nonce, What Eva: We run with the cool kind of homosexual, a man from South Bend, first name Peter, last name Booty Judge, husband’s name Chasten.

The Democratic Party is fulfilling its civic pledge to give proof through the night that the fag is still there. Surely a state the size of Indiana has nonpsychopathic gay guys, too, but who cares? Mayor Pete is so inspiring! He’s so unifying!

Inspiring and unifying of what, though? Again, the omissions paint a rich picture. Like Obama in his own prime time and Bush the Younger in Trump’s, he unifies the affluent with the good feelings about their politics that they wish to enjoy along with their money. Trump yells a lot, you see. He makes people feel bad by yelling. He shouldn’t do this in our politics. He shouldn’t do this TO our politics. His predecessors weren’t screaming meanies. They were nice.

It helps to forget the terrible things the center-left constantly had to say about W during his presidency, many of them appropriate to his conduct and some of them understated. It REALLY helps to forget about the Patriot Act, Gitmo, the second Gulf War, and the rest of that big basket of fun. Obama has never come close to the very partial reckoning W faced, and it’s a matter of national consensus that the nineties, back before the Bush family organization did its naughty little thing, mostly in New York, were a time of national innocence.

What we actually mean is immaturity. One of the lines of evidence used to push this stupid narrative is the popularity of the Seinfeld show, our girl Julia’s old hangout. I’ll be sure to ask Ricky Ray Rector for recommendations on later episides next time I see him.

It would help if the arguments people who get paid to comment on politics made were grounded in nonfictional politics, not fictional stories about some friends hanging out in the living room. The nostalgia is for make-believe versions of the nineties, as we’re shown all too well by the continuing obsession with that bitch-ass Bartlet. That cracker is made up, and he was made up to sanitize a Clinton administration that had already been scrubbed good and hard for polite enjoyment. It’s a second-order delusion.

Rector’s execution fits all too neatly into the black lives matter narrative. So do so many of our executions. So does capital punishment as an American institution. On the other hand, we don’t want to say bad things about a charming, beloved president emeritus just for having one poor bastard killed in cold blood purely for political advantage. The mob can have a little Barabbas, as a treat.

Forget Lewinsky and all the adulterers and closet cases she scandalized on Pennsylvania Avenue. The definitive vignette of Clinton’s character as a president was his campaign trip back to Arkansas to execute the dessert afterwards guy. I knew he was a psycho from the start, and I was only ten.

This is the point at which we start discovering just how many Americans–not just people anywhere in the distant abstract, but our own–are expendable as pawns in the great game of moderate politics. The Big Dog had to perform a human sacrifice for the Electoral College, you see. He had to show swing voters that he was tough on crime to win election, and with it the opportunity to govern liberally.

That very premise is utterly amoral and rather inept, and sure enough, as President, Bill folded every time some sleazy busybody with a closet full of sexual skeletons called him a dirty liberal. Instead of Joycelyn Elders, he gave us the Defense of Marriage Act. The worst voters in the country had to be placated. The master triangulator focus-grouped the bigots first and foremost. If there’d ever been anything liberal worth a damn about that ghoul, we would never have blundered anywhere near the position in which it was more politically inflammatory to encourage teenagers to carry condoms in their purses (Be Prepared!) than to execute a guy retarded enough to set his pie aside for the evening.

We can see where some of the hostility arises towards face masks in our time of global sickness. Fascist argumentation has, unsurprisingly, driven psychotic ideation about personal and public hygiene. It’s other people who get dirty and sick. Duh. Gentlemen surgeons have no need to wash their hands. Huh. Maybe medicine has a historical problem with fascism of its own.

It’s a poorly kept secret that the Third Way crew is viscerally uncomfortable with the poor. All we have to do is compare Hillary’s demeanor around the poor and their surroundings to Bernie’s. It’s night and day.

If individual poor can pull themselves up by the bootstraps under the cherished neoliberal framework, excellent; they make neoliberalism look as wonderful as themselves. Not so much if they get use public assistance to take care of their families, or if they collectively bargain through unions assertive enough to steamroll management and capital, or if they decide Trump is better for them than Her and vote accordingly. At that point, they suddenly don’t understand their own interests. They’re self-destructive idiots, voting for Elmer Gantry to dispossess themselves.

The Third Way would have said the same thing about William Jennings Bryan. This shit has nothing to do with policy, as the Democratic establishment shows time and time again. What they mean when they say that the poor vote against their own interests is that the poor vote against the interests of the affluent, as asserted by mealymouthed centrist Democrats. Tu casa es mi casa, pendejo. It’s what Mencius Moldbug called a nostrism. Bitch, who’s “us?”

NAFTA was good for the country. Okay, who the hell is the country? Who the hell is the economy? Can the fuckers even distinguish between the overbearing rich assholes who own the factory and the working stiffs who actually run it? Another whiny prick who blew the proceeds of his fabrication business on framed sports memorabilia is on NPR to bitch about how he *needs* discount Chinese steel to compete on the mercilessly competitive market. What the fuck does that do for a town full of people who got laid off when the hot mill closed, whose kids are now floundering on the margins somewhere between dead-end jobs at Dollar General and an archipelago of dope squats? What are the aggregate numbers worth? Who puts food on the table in the fucking aggregate?

Ah, swamp critters with think tank salaries and portfolios to defend. Of course.

They can’t possibly imagine they’ll win disaffected voters over by thundering on high from their 90% model minority (Asian/White) neighborhoods in Arlington that Trump’s supporters are on his side because they’re all unrepentant, incorrigible racists and sexists. Can they? Some of them are delusional enough to believe it, but the bigger impetus is their burning desire to humiliate and punish their inferiors. It’s the same thing they in the ACA with the individual mandate and the doubling down on affluent parents as the channel of health insurance for downwardly mobile young people whose age peers were already raising their own school-age children. Fuck you for not having insurance. Fuck you for not having a job. Fuck you for not deftly and happily Navigating The Marketplace.

Fuck you for thinking the company owes you a decent job doing something else if it won’t give you a decent job on the floor at the mill. Learn to code, bitch. Stack cash with Uber. Fuck you for not having a 110% serviceable late-model car. Invest in yourself. Fuck you for not finishing college.

And of course, fuck you for not voting for us. Why are you such a bitter uneducated racist? This abrasive lace curtain Irish car salesman-ass shithead from the Commonwealth of Chancery Court, LLC, and his creepy diversity office dungeon mistress lieutenant from the sniveling part of San Francisco (which one?), aslo a prosecutor, are here to defend you against predators.

Just trust us, for God’s sake. You ain’t black if you don’t. Why are you asking me about guns, punk? Let’s take it outside.

A bonechilling faculty brat sellout whose whole career reads as proof that affirmative action and Title IX are vectors of capricious discrimination is here riding shotgun to Bhad Bhabie with hair plugs, and we’re supposed wholeheartedly believe them decent, empathetic people, committed public servants looking out for us always.

There’s much to be said for voting for Trump expressly to punish these ghouls back. It isn’t hugely much; the #resistance is right that Trump’s bad. Maybe Nancy could fucking do something about him, then, like not expedite his homeland security wish lists. Mitch McConnell jammed up Barack Obama’s judicial appointments just to be an asshole. There’s no procedural reason Chuck and Nancy can’t both run a turtle-speed train on Trump’s entire agenda until he at long last behaves himself. Instead, Lady Gelati won’t even play good cop to Rashida Tlaib’s bad cop. She won’t even be Captain Queegan, sympathetically but firmly warning a punk to shape up and watch his ass, to Macky Mack, Steyaff Seaagent.

Good God is that an odd squad. It’s no wonder, then, that the convention featured a jarring juxtaposition between Pete Buttigieg waxing earnest about how he wasn’t allowed to live his gay truth until Obama and Biden finally allowed it with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s obnoxious gag about Mike Pence being a perv and a fag. It’s no wonder that Yang got ganged into taking part in that extreme cringe. They would have decked him out in Kente if he’d been in town for that helping of spicy Jollof rice.

There’s zero principle to any of this shit. The orchestrators don’t care about the welfare or survival of ordinary African-Americans. They don’t care about sexual liberties. Our smarmy phony is good for being gay; your self-righteous demagogue is bad for being gay. Hurr durr Trump and Putin are butt buddies. First of all, that’s too improbable to consider, but what do coarse schoolyard taunts add to the already weak case that Trump is Putin’s Manchurian Candidate? Besides, we/ve known for years that the Saudis don’t need to personally sex our officials to have their way with them.

This is the party of sexual privacy as a human right, if you can believe it. Can they just let him have a private sex life and focus on something that matters? They’re studiously silent about the Epstein affair, the great Implicator of Faves. Maybe this would be a good time for shysters running cover for an international child sex trafficking organization to demur about their salacious speculation that Mike Pence is a switch hitter. It’s obnoxious, it’s stupid, it’s morally and civically derelict, and it isn’t going to win them a single vote.

Fancy them caring about that, though.

The Democrats are impressively unfunny. They raise it into something approaching an art. As performance bits go it’s excruciating, but there’s something awesome about their dedication to inept self-seriousness so total as to produce political standup routines with all the lameness of Jimmy’s summer camp set on South Park but none of the entertainment value.

Maybe comedy, too, is that polarized. Shit. It’s confusing to come across so many liberals who see absolutely nothing funny about the Oaf of Office when he waxes rude about “college students, crummy students, great students, horrible students, dumb people, liberal people, conservative people….people with PhD’s from MIT, people with PhD’s from crummy colleges.” Their objections to him are aesthetic: Barry and now even George the Younger barely register with them for having done things that were just as bad. Paradoxically, this keeps them from enjoying the amazing aesthetic gifts he brings to the presidency.

Again, this shit is a distraction from the people’s business, which the Democratic Congressional caucuses steadfastly refuse to do. If they brought serious articles of impeachment against him and eighty-sixed his ass, he’d be free that night to get airtime for blurting out the same ridiculous shit as ever, just not from a high public office invested with the most frightening powers.

The Democrats care about aesthetics. What distinguishes them from the Republicans is that theirs are atrocious. A small community of squeamish nerds digs that shit and everybody else hates it. The Epic Clapback could have been fun, but Fancy Nancy doesn’t know how to have fun. The giorno di gelati came close, but it, too, was overly performative and forced. Nobody had fun at the Kente Cloth Kneeling Ceremony. They don’t enjoy delivering their lectures.

They’re too desperate to defeat an opponent they refuse to meaningfully oppose to enjoy Funny Uncle Joe’s recurrent brain scrambles, which–let’s be honest–are hella funny. “Covid has taken this year, just the outbreak, has taken more than one hundred year–Look, here’s it–The lives, it’s just, it’s–I mean, think about it, more lives this year than any other year in the past hundred years.” If it’s okay to ridicule anyone for talking like that, Joe’s it. He’s a psychopath pretending to be a left-liberal and a reactionary authoritarian at once, nominated for the presidency on the cusp of eighty because his crooked party fixed the primaries on his behalf, appearing in public with a skull full of watered-down Quaker Instant Oats.

Why can’t we make fun of his cokehead son? He got the kid sinecures with Amtrak and Burisma. I make fun of Larry Kudlow for being a cokehead, too. They aren’t all that shitty, but a lot of them are. Rob Ford is okay, though; dudes rock!

It’s not like the Trump Organization, which we actually have good reasons for calling that, isn’t crawling with shambolic characters and covered in the splatter of their hilarious substance abuse problems. Steve Bannon seems like one the Dems could fun to good effect. Our boy Stephen Kevin decided to bamboozle the griftable with a story about how he was going to Build The Wall, privately, on federal property, with their donations. The only thing that chunky dunker was about to build was another mound of corned beef and cabbage to ward off the whiskey munchies. Can you believe it?

Bannon, like his donors, had what the Massachusett elders called Lassen Knee Innis Hat. Did I ever tell you about the time Vladimir Putin rode a tiger all the way through the taiga? Somehow, these stories only ever get worse; that one’s so headspinning I can hardly bear to tell it myself. Can you believe they got Charlie off and gave him his own checkpoint? CHAHLEE! My favorite Vova anecdote, though, is about the time he joined a search party to look for a group of old hunters who’d been friends in the war, a Czech, a Brit, and a Frenchman. The search party came across two exceptionally plump and sated bears. Uh-oh. Vladimir Vladimirovich drew his sword and with a single deft stroke sliced open the belly of the sow, revealing the Brit and the Frenchman. Turning to his horrified companions with a shrug and a smirk, he said, “Well, I guess the Czech’s in the male.”

That was free, whatever the hell it was supposed to be. The wall isn’t. When I first read about Bannon’s wall grift, I assumed he was hard up for cash after living beyond his means. Then I read that he was worth $48m, acid enough for as many hot tubs and trips as he desired. It turns out what he did was almost archetypal: people who study white-collar crime say it’s never the guy making $80k who goes crooked for a windfall of $3m, but always the guy making $3m who cheats for an extra $80k.

That tubby old parrothead-looking-ass lush stacked the cash because he was totally gonna build the wall. They had to send a crew of Coasties and Posties out to bring him back from #YachtLife. What the hell was wrong with him? Switzerland doesn’t have a maritime border, but Costa Rica does. You might want to Christopher cross into waters that don’t fall under our extradition treaties, big guy.

Whale oil beef hooked, Huizenga, it is a hearty Colcannon. Mercy, my Dutch love, oil beef hentai Eire leaf hooked to lie me yeas upon the flue of lard sloughing off that greasy hot cross bun.

That was rude. I guess we should just let the make-believe Veep call the real Veep a fag instead. Vote for Cuomo, not the homo. *Impossibly annoyed Alan Chartock bedtime voice* I’ve always wondered when the party would run a colored man for that office.

D mock crass, see

NPR’s initial coverage of the debut of Kamala Harris was loathesome. Hope springing intermittent, I’d been foolish enough to expect better, not good by any stretch but also not excruciatingly embarrassing. Oops. The breathless fawning over Harris’s great liberal vision, personal toughness, popularity, and trailblazing ethnic identity was beyond my tolerance, so I actually turned the state radio off a few times to spare myself, but I got a taste of it, good and hard.

NPR is the same network that aired an El Paso Walmart shooting survivor’s insight that “as a Latina, you sometimes argue with your mother.” Christ. Are they Jews now? The Harris debut is that, but lasting for days, and focused on one prominent psychopath’s bottomless virtue, warmth, and popularity. For the Harris festivities, they interviewed a lady who collaged her own Biden-Harris sign at home and an Indian doofus who gushed about Kamala for being one of his kind. My excruciating favorite was Robin Young’s softball to Amy Klobuchar about how she removed herself from consideration for the vice presidency because she felt passionately that the nomination should go to a woman of color. Klobuchar is an ice-cold weirdo who yells bloody murder at her staffers and throws projectiles at them, so I’m sure her dwelling place in an even uglier part of the uncanny valley than Harris had nothing to do with her decision, and surely there was no partisan corruption or intrigue at play for an elder stateswoman of her character.

Listening to that sneering freak enthuse about her fellow prosecutrix was like getting Dennis Rader’s thoughts on the upcoming sheriff’s election. “With Dahmer unfortunately departed, many have been asking me to run, but I’m as much of a kraut as that treacherous bastard Landwehr, and I’ve come to believe that the position demands a colored fellow. Say what you will about Joseph DeAngelo, but know this: He’s an Italian. Joe won’t just be a top cop. He’ll be a wop cop.”

This is exactly what the KHive and its allies are doing with their rewarmed idpol shit. They’re being just as crude as I am. The difference is that they’re pretending to be refined and intelligent, not disingenuous wokescolding partisan hacks.

I voted for Loretta Sanchez twice in 2018, but I guess she doesn’t fit NPR’s bill as a Congresswoman of Color. This may have something to do with her being genuinely liberal, not a deeply illiberal megalomaniac. The Wilson-Deukmejian Republican vote was going to go somewhere, and not all of it followed Mark Fuhrman up north onto the Whitey Rez. In 2018, it went to John Cox and Kamala Harris. Cox is a proud Republican who loves to yell about crazy shit. That talk radio energy falls flat in the burned-over district off Mark West. Harris is a grandstanding wackass herself, but she codes it to barely meet rich liberals’ standards for dinner party respectability.

Kamala is popular in many rich white neighborhoods. Is it because she’s black? Oh yeah sweet baby girl it is. Few dare admit it, probably even to themselves, but what they cherish in her is the cover she gives them for their most bigoted authoritarian impulses. They’re squeamish around brashly authoritarian Republican white boys like Pete Wilson noting that California traditionally cooks with gas but they’d consider switching to electric. It makes them feel bad to quietly agree that minority crime is a real problem having more than a bit to do with their settling in the hills.

Harris, then, is a real Brahmin score, a black yuppie who’s made it on the San Francisco social scene and talks a great game about shit like the importance of education and the professional gatekeepers of the nonprofit-industrial complex. She’s sassy, but not TOO sassy, and she QUIETLY locks up the young bucks. For disingenuous hypocrites whose currency is virtue-signaling, Kamala Harris isn’t a hardhearted prosecutor who spent much of her career disproportionately incarcerating black and brown constituents for a combination of extremely minor offenses like their children’s truancy from school and the state’s interest in maintaining a full complement of inmate firefighters; she’s their black friend.

These are affluent, sheltered people who get really irate and defensive when their politics are challenged, especially by those they presume their fellow travelers. One reserves one’s worst ire for the apostate, not the heathen. Why the fuck are Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris feminism, but not Jill Stein and Loretta Sanchez? Have they ever even tried feminism? Katie Hill has. The common denominator of what it means to be With Her is center-left yuppies shrieking about the absolute need to support some of the most vicious, illiberal, corrupt candidates the Democratic Party coughs up for high office. We need to defeat the bad orange man, they scream.

Okay. Find me a challenger who isn’t atrocious. The handsy hairsniffing funny uncle behind the crime bill and the student debt crisis has now chosen as his runningmate a crazed prosecutor who argued in court to keep the slaves in their camps to fight fires on the cheap. Biden and Harris are literally slavers. Kamala prefers direct slavedriving, while Uncle Joe demands to Shanghai the poor into debt servitude as an adjunct to the slave camps.

These are just two terrible parts of their records. Knowing what I know just about American prisons, I cannot for one second believe that Donald Trump is the absolute standard of evil and danger in American politics. He’s running against two challengers with longstanding records of doing their damnedest to lock Americans up. Even his own ghoulish, Strangelovian Attorney General, Bill Barr, has directed the early release of federal prisoners in the interest of public health.

It’s telling, though, that so few #Resistance loudmouths have seized on Barr as an exceptional threat to our constitutional order and our civil liberties, instead continuing to focus on Trump as an utterly and uniquely bad leader. What they’re doing is pretty straightforward: they’re scapegoating the Oaf of Office for being a messy bitch. Barr cleans up well, just like every other depravity from the movement conservative hard right. They speak in public like white shoe lawyers. Trump speaks like exactly the celebrity drama queen he loves to be.

Hence the endless bellyaching about who on earth let HIM in here. Hence the squeamish whining about his activation of the white working class, a constituency that never would have come close to electing him without Trump’s much larger base of Optimate business success guys and right-wing professionals. Trump is an MBA leading a base heavy on dentists, car dealers, industrialists, and major landowners. He’s still widely presented as a washed-up carnival barker leading a rabble of out-of-work coal miners. The assumption is that they’re all uneducated, ignorant, and stupid: never mind the keen working intelligence needed to make it through the day in a shaft mine or a steel mill, of course.

In other words, Trump is unqualified to lead, and his voters are unqualified to vote. This is facially bogus under the US Constitution, of course, but the West Wing nerds don’t care about any of that shit when it conflicts with their prejudices. We need more and better political education, they moan. And where the hell do we go for that? MSNBC? That shit’s Wesley Willis psychotic, with none of the insight and humility. There are a lot of really disturbed people who would gladly admit that they must have been off their meds when they caught Vladimir Putin’s cube farm elves rewiring their brains over the computer. Shit, Aftab, you aren’t gonna believe it, and indeed he won’t. Maybe florid conspiracy theories about Kremlin mind control that ignore the overwhelming evidence of the losers’ political ineptitude should be taken on advisement.

Mind you, I’m just an overqualified loser myself, and I don’t even have the political sinecure to show for it. All I’ve gotten are interrogations about whether I’m wallowing in the samizdat. Nice try, officer. This party that demands my vote in exchange for more or less jack shit has taken an official stand about foreign election interference that is clinically paranoid and also extremely fucking whiny.

That’s just the aesthetic obnoxiousness of it. Substantively, it’s evasive, not just in how it deflects blame for self-inflicted fuckups but in how it projects every seedy and crooked thing about US politics onto foreign scapegoats. Our presidential campaigns are awash in manipulative ads costing over a billion dollars a cycle in recent years, but the problem is Grandmother’s special internet friend, a Russian pretending to be an American. We’re explicitly lectured to heed warnings from the “intelligence community.” Excuse me, but that lame-ass name is about as old as the Trump Administration, and those motherfuckers lie. There’s no warranty that any particular classified briefing our elected officials claim they can’t disclose to us isn’t a crock of shit. In point of fact they’re immunized against prosecution for reading classifed information into the Congressional Record, but solemnly intoning about their secret knowledge is mainly another way to lord it over the rest of us.

It’s unconscionable to be expected to treat any of this nonsense as prudence, not insanity. They work for us, not vice versa. We have a compelling interest in their honest services and every reason to demand it. This easily includes the disclosure of bad acts that have been given cover of classification. They actually have the nerve to lecture us about how we need to believe them that they have our best interests at heart when they’re obvious crooks and they refuse to offer us a full accounting of what they’ve heard from the spook nests.

Again, they fucking work for us, not for Langley. A den of liars who keep promising to tell the truth told them a bunch of shit that we’re now expected to take on faith even though we’re unworthy of the details. They want to know what we’re reading to give ourselves such outlandishly conspiratorial ideas, but they don’t trust us with full information about what they’re reading.

Yeah, here’s a point of order, punk: go fuck yourself.

These same ghouls won’t shut up about how much they’re doing for ordinary Americans. “Working families” seems to be the popular term of art, probably because the country has fewer residents than usual either working for a living or living in families. They do all this shit for “us.” For the Democrats, much of it is not being Donald Trump, as they loudly point out. In other words, they beat us up less than our ex did. They buy us flowers afterwards.

Who the hell is us? It’s obviously bougie trash who are too squeamish and self-esteeming to Bradley Effect John Cox into the Senate to protect their property values. That ain’t me, chief.

This is not an incidental, negotiable point. My circumstances and interests have dramatically diverged from those of my parents and their peers, and I fucking expect our elected officials to do something about it. That’s the whole fucking point of politics. It’s precisely and exclusively the raison d’etre of representative democracy: we vote and they act on our demands.

The yuppies, young and old, who vote for dungeon crawlers like Kamala Harris and Eric Garcetti fully understand this. They vote against Bernie Sanders because they fear, correctly, what he’ll do to their privilege in the broad public interest. Their prerogatives as gatekeeper and rentiers will become unenforceable. They’ll have to do something honest for a living or just live on their properties, not exploit them for financial gain at their neighbors’ expense. Their portfolios may lose value.

Personally, I’m sympathetic to their fears of socioeconomic decline and retaliation, having caught a fair bit of it myself. This is why we so desperately need to equalize our society, to level up the worst-off and ensure that none among us ever again crashes into their degraded circumstances.

What I find absolutely unsympathetic is their insistence on speaking on behalf of the entire left-leaning swathes of the poor and the downwardly mobile. Nobody has my blessing to speak over me on my behalf. That’s when I talk over them until they shut the fuck up. Biden, Harris, and their ilk have done significant articulable damage to my prospects and circumstances, and I do not forgive them. They need to whole-ass 180 their ship to have a chance in hell of winning my grace. They didn’t incidentally or accidentally flood the zone with bad, ill-disciplined cops, cater to the worst banks, or structure the disbursement of public funds in ways maximizing the employment of obedient failchildren in gatekeeping positions at the expense of beneficiaries who need the fucking help.

Anything I have to do with Biden or Harris is going to be 100% transactional. They need to shut up and serve me. Again, this is the point of politics: voters don’t turn out, let alone campaign, for candidates they don’t expect to effectively and consistently serve them. If that’s Donald Trump and not Joe Biden, what the fuck else am I supposed to say? This is the point at which a shrieking chorus of property owners who have lived for decades in segregated neighborhoods angrily call me a racist, but Fat Cracka ain’t here cause he cares about any of that.

This same affluent, notionally liberal constituency proudly proclaims that it cherishes an engaged, passionate citizenry. Then that passion and engagement works in Donald Trump’s favor, even a touch, and they flip their damn shit about how the only people who even think about voting for him are idiots, ignoramuses, and bigots. Maybe check out the records of his opposition if you’d care to revise your statements; hell if I know. I could drive to the watering tub just over the hill on 29, or I could get screamed at for the better part of an hour a block off Silverado. It probably depends on how much company I need.

Joey and Kammy–those two are in no position to tell me how they are to be addressed–are thrust before us as the indispensable bulwarks of relative good against the absolute evil of Donald of Orange. It’s a cool story for those of us who are familiar with precedents for much worse evil in American politics: you know, Preston Brooks, Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, the rest of the CIA. We had an NGO gig in Indonesia under the Ford Foundation, yeah? We tortured some folks, yeah? We’re just trying to deal with our old grievances against past administrations more aloha here. *Juicily disturbed Guy Hagi voice* See you out in the Pacific!

Now, white Punahou alumni aren’t supposed to pass da kine of da local parlance into themselves, and Mocha Haole is half white. In fact, he’s wholly White. What I’m writing about our first half-white president is a spicy poke bowl. Any worse and I’d be in public office myself. In fairness, he’s pretty competent at politics, apparently convicing a plurality of Americans that he’s a black guy from Chicago and half-assedly reforming the health insurance system to spottily restore coverage to young people whose affluent parents raised them to vote.

Don’t let anybody tell you the politics of division don’t work. They work great for messy bitches from Queens, too. Many wonder about our Thicc Moist Boi’s acumen for responding to a combined public health and economic crisis by Posting Through It, but he’s in show business, same as ever, and he’ll continue to grift his goobers whether he stays or goes. So will the Democrats. Does any of this look like it’s NOT a business?

The coming politics of unity this November and the four years starting the following January is another piece of fantasy fiction. It’s Harry Potter, but with gravity, as Shoko Asahara is said to have ultimately experienced. We obviously spend too much time reading about Bartlets and wizards and construing them as political models. If I published Keebler Elf fan fiction recapitulating the beleaguered yeoman virtue of the early modern English farmer, I doubt I could justify the cultural disgrace with the royalties, not in a land whose public television network is always airing bitch-ass Downton Abbey. Nah, let’s be real: I’m not too self-respecting to refrain, just too disorganized.

Who the fuck are we gonna unify this fall? Americans who earnestly regard that stupid manor soap as reputable, harmless entertainment with those of us who correctly identify it as lame, low-key seditious trash about a castle full of the most miserable cunts? Affluent, secure property owners with precarious to flat-ruined renters? Is there a place for the homeless in this coalition? I don’t mean as an agenda item for do-gooders to handle; I mean actually fucking listening to the homeless, as Democratic politicians do to any shitlib homeowner with property values to defend. I can tell I’m on the wrong side of that transaction for having personal experience, as far as they’re concerned.

On that gross topic, I’m not here to accept ANY blame from them for having become or remained homeless. They’re always free to start blaming their own propertied base for making homelessness such a huge problem by being pushy about zoning and chasing cheap deals that screw over workers. Besides, you don’t win voters over in politics by blaming them. Donald Trump knows this. The Democratic establishment is so accustomed to abusing the lower strata of its own target base that it doesn’t care. We’re obviously on the shitlib do-gooders’ side. What upsets them is when they talk over us and we have the insolence to talk back. They’re highly qualified, you see.

Yeah, it’s passionate political engagement, bitch, and political ignorance it is not. I’ve closely followed Bill De Blasio, Lori Lightfoot, Jacob Frey, Jenny Durkan, Ted Wheeler, and Eric Garcetti over the summer. Blue no matter who is going great!

Lose me with the cult shit. That’s like pointing out that George Pell is Roman Catholic. It’s meant as a disingenuous appeal to tribal affiliation but works out as a grand object lesson in derelicts and moral horrors who should immediately be banished from any party claiming the mantle of the left. I don’t need a reason to stay Catholic, incidentally because nobody is all up in my face to demand my fealty to bad clergy. On the other hand, I’m not a Democrat. Yes, I’m registered as one, but all that means is that I’ve told the registrar of elections to let me vote in Democratic primaries. I am not a member of that outfit and have never been. Do I sound that stupid? Go bother your own people.

If the Democrats want me on board, or millions of other Americans who are angry about the way both parties have been running the country, they can run on a platform that isn’t dogshit and be credible about it. For starters, they can promise to provide for public medical and dental coverage on demand and free at the point of service, a medical debt jubilee, a student debt jubilee, the imposition of strict oversight and discipline on the police, an end to qualified immunity, an end to civil asset forfeiture absent a conviction or verdict of liability, the prosecution of bad cops and prosecutors, the systematic release of prisoners who do not pose an articulable and credible threat to public safety or welfare, the systematic overhaul of the entire criminal justice system, postal banking, a crackdown on residential evictions and foreclosures, a major buildout of high-quality public housing, the close regulation of credit reporting agencies, strict limits on the use of credit scores, an end to drug tests (with narrow exemptions for truly high-risk positions, if need be), and a monetary and fiscal policy reestablishing a goal of full employment. It’s straightforward: we demand to be treated like fellow people and fellow citizens, to have our general welfare safeguarded in the same fashion as the most affluent, and to regain the liberty to tell bad actors in positions of authority to fuck off witout suffering consequences for prosocial assertions of our rights.

What would the Democratic Party say to this? We already know. Oh, be reasonable. That’s unrealistic. You’re asking for too much. We need to appeal to moderate swing voters in the suburbs. (Cool, property owners again). Be patient and wait your turn. Go back to school. Learn to code. The loser can have a little means-tested tax break, as a treat.

If this shitty party insists on catering to the shittiest elements of the upper middle class, there’s nothing the openly poor, downwardy mobile, or precarious can do to directly force it to actually be the big tent it brags about being. They’ve rigged their own presidential primaries twice in a row to ratfuck their most popular candidate, done their best to marginalize him as he’s tried to engage and influence their platform, and surrounded themselves with a forcefield of prissy bougies who feel beleaguered for having home equity but not the prerogative to summarily silence insolent peasants.

Here’s where it gets abusive again. What happens if we defect? What happens if we tell them to go fuck themselves? Oh no, you can’t do that! You can’t vote Republican! You can’t vote Green or Libertarian! How can you say ANYTHING good about Trump? Blue no matter who! We need to stop him! We need to stop Putin!

What the hell Putin has to do with any of that, including Donald Trump, is pretty tenuous. In any event, it would be more reputable to examine our own interference as a nation in other nations’ elections.

It’s worth noticing that all they ever tell left-wing dissidents in their own defense is that they’re better than the Republicans. They’ve now reached the disgraceful point at which George W. Bush is better than the Republican Party, certainly better than Big Orange. They can take that take straight to hell, no $200 on the way past Go. A survey of what they actually represent and accomplish shows that they’re too busy for the little people because they’re occupied in a spirit of great devotion with the psychic and material maintenance of their real base: affluent Brahmin conformists. They’re siding with a prickly, defensive constituency articulably adverse to me as socioeconomic and cultural actors. They’re representing voters whose politics have already done me significant harm and have killed many.

Guys. Ya gotta do better.

Not to brag, I was right about Trump being too outrageous and provocative not to stir up opposition to agendas he shared with centrist Democrats. They crafted the Crime Bill and continue to quietly delegate police violence to local agencies; he had federal goons gas and beat protesters out from the curtilage of a church for an absurdist photo op with a bible, had goons go on rampages in Portland that helpfully distracted the public from Ted Wheeler’s failure to control the PPB, and fumed at length about his plan to deploy feds to Chicago, distracting from another Democratic city government’s deployment of out-of-control municipal police. They allowed the GOP to ratfuck the Post Office with pension prepayment obligations, left these obligations in place through two years of unified Democratic government, and publicly mulled privatizing the Post Office; he appointed a blatantly corrupt crony Postmaster General to remove mailboxes and sorting equipment a bit over a month before an expected huge surge in electoral mail.

Trump is such an incorrigibly messy bitch, he forces the Democrats to do their job and stand up to him. They can’t West Wing it and throw all the usual little people into the buzzsaw; he makes the whole gig too blatant, forcing them to act on their avowed principles. A good reason to fear Biden and Harris is that they’ll revert Washington to the usual bipartisan civility gobbledygook, giving themselves and Congress the cover to workshop more privatization schemes. I say workshop because nobody has yet been able to get the full privatization of Social Security or the USPS into law on account of the blowback. Even so, we’ll have to stay on guard, even more than we do with a raging oaf appointing a sleazy doofus who owns lots of FedEx and UPS stock to unabashedly trash the Post Office. That’s reason enough to distrust and resent the Democratic ticket.

Shit. Maybe Biden and Harris are having Trump kayfabe them into a position that will force them to beef up the USPS. This shit can be baffling. Chuck the Schmuck and the Donald get along fabulously behind closed doors and open curtains, a heartwarming bipartisan friendship between two greazy bridge-and-tunnel sleazeballs. I doubt Obama minded being smeared as a Sharia Mau-Mau when he’d already spent so much of his life establishing himself as a member of the Chicago Community. Or, as his Vice President Emeritus would say, you’re articulate, but you ain’t black!

I doubt Kamala minds the tokenization, either. It’s powered much of her career. In fact, I’d be surprised if the campaign isn’t directing the fawning idpol coverage of her debut. They must expect it to appeal to Millennial Voters of Color. Every Thirty Seconds a young Latin becomes eligible to teach Antonio Villaraigosa Spanish. Personally, I’d start with English. At least they’ve still got that colored fellow Garcetti as mayor, although word on the streets in the Gateway Cities has always been that Paul Tanaka is white.

These are the things that matter when the police are committing an armed insurrection against the citizenry. With Kamala, it’s an overachieving Indian-Jamaican state beatdown. It’s a refusal of color to reexamine the conviction of that Persian son of a bitch who definitely shot RFK without any help.

The party line is that Harris will help win over the minority youth vote. Okay, but why is she so hated and distrusted in young minority neighborhoods and so popular with shriveled-up old honky motherfuckers? Look. I’m just trying out racial essentialism; I learned it on NPR.

Duh. She’s got Whitey’s back. It’s the same answer as before. NPR is dressing her up for the fancy crackers. This is why we hear about how the Indians love her because, like the Oaf of Office, they love the Hindu. It’s why we hear about how the Jamaicans love her because she’s an overachieving Jamaican from an overachieving Jamaican family. Say, could you shut the fuck up about your above-average children? We grow enough of that shit at home not to have to import it.

Of course not. It’s NPR.

For all the identitarian shit and wonkery, Totebag Nation has no grasp of how the racial framing of Kamala Harris plays with young voters. It keeps hitting me that thirty-year-olds today have spent their entire adult lives under either a two-term black president or his immediate successor, who barely beat a woman in the general election. There are no assurances that young voters see anything trailblazing about Harris, while it’s well established that many of them are unhappy with her record. Most of them, if they vote, will still vote for her, but mainly because they’re horrified by Trump, or just sick of him. The suspicion that she’s a phony, a sellout, and a ghoul won’t be put to rest with fawning coverage on NPR. They’ll sour on Harris and Biden in a hurry if they don’t deliver the goods in ways that repudiate their own longstanding records. They’re already off on a bad foot for being a cop and a rapist in a time when both roles are under great fire.

Can you believe it, DeAngelo? They can’t even maneuver a hand truck through a supermarket warehouse!

Did you know that Kwesi Millington is an Afro-Canadian? Did you know that Monty Robinson is an Indian drunkard? If you’ve been around here long, I’m afraid you do. I shouldn’t polerize our politics, so of coarse I do exactly that.

I don’t know why I just thot of that, but they don’t seem to be sending us their best.