Philosophically speaking, American government is the greatest experiment in freedom in human history. To ignore, or deny, that we have something great on our hands is a denial of an inheritance that was blood-bought at Antietam, Normandy and Fallujah. A casual unbelief in goodness or importance of the political system leads to apathy in participating in it. And a citizenry’s lack of participation allows the selfishness and largesse that has driven away Millennials in the first place. They embody a simmering disgust with the elite and an awareness that America has become a small filthy rich trumping ruling class, large swaths of poor laborers, and just enough middle class to appear like a democracy.
Apocalyptic movements only grow beyond the fanatics and cultists when the whole of human consciousness is tugged by the need to overturn the tables and make examples of the terrible people in charge of our futures. I bring to you, then the beginning of the Organized La Resistance! And it is starting even before Donald Trump sets tiny, be-loafered foot into the White (again) House. California has said no bueno to Trump’s amorphous campaign promise to deport two to three million immigrants in his first days in office. In reality, finding and deporting millions of human beings is a lot harder than saying it and getting cheers at a campaign rally with hats. Bug-eyed House Speaker Paul Ryan is too busy salivating over the prospect of privatizing Medicare, and said Sunday Congress is “not planning on erecting a deportation force. Donald Trump’s not planning on that.”
To you who bemoaned what a horrible candidate Clinton was and you know who you are. You dot get to cry that Trump i our president I’m not talking about your vote. As has been endlessly observed, your vote in many places (including here in CA) is a grain in a pile of rice. CA was never at (much) risk of going for Trump. I’m talking about the endless online/offline slagging of a fine candidate. “She’s a criminal, she’s dishonest, she’s a Wall Street WHORE, she’s a LIAR, she’s a terrible human being”. No, no, and no, no and no. You helped do the work of the right wing hate machine. You helped drag down a fine candidate as effectively (if not more effectively) than the reddest necked mouth-breathing racist Fox News troll. All this public handwringing about how you couldn’t bring yourself vote for the lesser of two evils merely because you’re afraid of Trump. Well guess what, dummy? It’s ALWAYS about the lesser of two evils. If you find a political race between pure good and pure evil, pinch yourself awake because it’s a dream. Being afraid of Trump was a FINE, FINE reason to vote for Clinton. I AM AFRAID OF TRUMP, The implication that there’s some moral scale of evil where Clinton is a 9 and Trump is a 10 is fucking appalling. There is no moral scale of evil in which Trump is even orders of magnitude close to Clinton. Maybe that’s the only scale on which Trump is a true billionaire.
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Look, I get that Hillary Clinton is the devil because she is part of the Democratic Party, and man, it’s the worst and did not even let Bernie win even though the Millennials voted for him and their votes should count more than seniors’ and blacks. Maybe Sanders could have won if he’d been nominated. Doubt it! But HE DIDN’T GET NOMINATED. Maybe Abraham Lincoln could have won if he were nominated. Or Michelle Obama. Maybe Ghandi. Beyonce. That musical Hamilton. My mail lady. That old shoe. THEY WEREN’T ON THE BALLOT EITHER. It was a binary choice, the lesser or the greater evil.
Oh, but maybe politics just needs a “shakeup!” from old establishment Obama! Maybe the system is so broken we needed this, like an oldsey timey tonic or a leeching. We have to confront the brokenness to fix it. Any history majors out there see the flaw in this logic? Let’s go full Godwin. Germany is now a much nicer place than it was before Hitler came to power. Maybe they just needed a few years of utter hell to break down the old corrupt system? How about the Cambodia? Just a wee breakdown, a restart if you will, a few years with Pol Pot to purge all the corruption?
Make some noise ladies, because we did it! We killed the patriarchy! We will ever have to live another day being talked down to, devalued, or raped. NEVER AGAIN. Well, haha, no, be we did go get our currency feminized, well sort of. ….still, at least it’s something — and women are real good at being grateful for the “at least it’s something” crumbs. And we only have to wait another five years for that female funny money, which is nothing compared to how long women had to wait for the right to vote. And the right to have their own bank accounts. Just One hundred years ago, women couldn’t vote. Just Fifty years ago, women couldn’t have credit cards in their own name. And in this, the year 2016, a mostly male Supreme Court heard arguments about whether the state of Texas, and thus the country, had the right to make it all but impossible for women to receive reproductive healthcare because male legislators consider vaginas inherently icky, and they believe women’s medical decisions are far too important to leave up to women. For their own good, of course. I for one am sick TO DEATH of listening whiny jackholes complain about how feminism has ruined manhood by daring to advocate for women to be treated as full-fledged human beings and not underpaid, overworked fetus incubators with no agency over their bodies and their reproductive decisions. If we’ve suffered through the worst year ever so that women will no longer feel like they have to keep silent about abuse, then it is worth the pain.
Also in the year 2016, our first female presidential candidate was accused of being a “witch”/ Yes, the lid was blown off Hillary Clinton’s involvement with a known child trafficker, thanks to a partnership between Wikileaks and the brave detectives of a rabid pro-Donald Trump group on Reddit. Google hashtag “spirit cooking”.
In the past year, Hillary Pantsuit Clinton travelgated to Whitewater to drown-murder Vince Foster in a menopausal rage, with her headband. She killed those embassy officials with her literal vagina, swallowed them up whole, then private-jetted home from Benghazi to lie about four dead Americans, in her secret email server lair to her spirit cooking buddies pals while watching “Nurse Jackie” and snacking on the fingers and feet of fetuses. She’s too old, too short, too shrill, she’s been around too long and done too much, and she’s accomplished nothing except marrying well. She is the anti-christ in a pantsuit.
But tomorrow, the aforementioned anti-christ – Madam First Lady Senator Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Esquire – will make some motherfuckin’ history, y’all. She will be our POTUS and in, like, a landslide.
So can we fucking acknowledge the history of the moment – which we were not allowed to do when she became the first female nominee for a major party (No, Jill Stein does not count), because something something Bernie – because HOLY SHIT THIS IS A BIG DEAL. And if you don’t think so, well go fuck your life with a rusty tire iron because one of the most revolting things men and white people, and, well, straight people — any fucking powerful, privileged group — can do is act like it’s somehow unserious to acknowledge that history has, in fact, been made.
Okay, fine lets say it is true. Then I think we really need to make major changes to theology because apparently Satan – while sometimes not being as progressive as we would like – is trying to make life better. At the same time, the good Christians work tirelessly to screw over the poor, discriminate, wreck the environment and make life harder for anyone who isn’t them.
I’m from Pennsylvania, where we’ve been riggin’ the vote for years. In fact, I’m a rigger. My father was a rigger and his father before him was a rigger. It’s a noble profession. Every election day I’m up early in the mornin’, I get together my rigging gear and I head out to the polls to start riggin’ even before the break of first light. You know sometimes you rig a big one, sometimes you rig a small one. It don’t matter. You just do it for the joy of riggin’. It’s a tradition and you just have to take pride in each election ‘ya can rig. We do it the old fashioned way. One vote at a time. We got to! We don’t have any of them new-fangled computer machines. We just got ta rig wit’ guts and determination.
As this shitbrick of an election becomes mired in even more shit, I take solace in the fact that Bannon and his minions of stoopid are being shown that they really do not know anything about the American public. They have destroyed Mr Comey and brought down the wrath of everyone, including their own cheerleaders. When not one single person with subject-matter expertise is rising to your defense, and when even Republican stalwarts like Joe Walsh are crying foul, you have well and truly screwed the pooch.
There is no coming back from this one …. they have popped off the final top of Pandora’s Box, and the retribution will be swift and merciless. No corner of their echo chamber of dumb will survive the onslaught that is barreling down on them.
Melania: drain the ATM, and get your passport …. time to get out while you still can.
from the washington times:
An Alaskan lawyer has accused Supreme CourtJustice Clarence Thomas of groping her at a 1999 dinner party.
Moira Smith, the vice president and counsel at Enstar Natural Gas Co., told the National Law Journal in an article published Thursday that the conservative justice grabbed her behind several times at a party at the Virginia home of Louis Blair, the former head of the Truman Foundation.
“He groped me while I was setting the table, suggesting I should sit ‘right next to him,’” she alleged, the New York Daily News reported. “He was 5 or 6 inches down and he got a good handful and he kept squeezing me and pulling me close to him.”Ms. Smith, now 41, was 23 years old and a Truman scholar at the time. She first wrote about the alleged incident in a Facebook post on Oct. 7, the night The Washington Post published a leaked 2005 recording of Donald Trump boasting about groping women.
Justice Thomas has denied the allegations, issuing a statement through the Supreme Court’s press office, The Post reported.
“This claim is preposterous and it never happened,” he said.
This quote was in the Raw STory version, based on what she told the National Law Review (NLR is behind a paywall.)
“We now know that many men in power take advantage of vulnerable women. That willingness by men in power to take advantage of vulnerable women relies on an unspoken pact that the women will not speak up about it. Why? Because they are vulnerable. Because they are star-struck. Because they don’t want to be whiners. Because they worry about their career if they do speak out. But silence no longer feels defensible; it feels complicit.”
The last line is the best one.
Clarence Thomas is almost everything wrong with the ‘conservative’ personality in a nutshell: A veneer of prim, repressive Christian morality covering a swamp of gross, closeted creepiness, a permanent, resentful chip on his shoulder about all the ‘cheaters’ and the ‘takers’ – i.e. liberals – that make it hard for virtuous, hard-working Christian men like himself, and an unexamined, arrogant presumption that he and virtuous men like him have an intuitive grasp of What The Founders Intended, unlike blindly fashionable secular liberals. It’s all there. The whole big steaming shit-brick of a package. He also seems to have a personality marked by a neurotic self-loathing and internalization of abuse that started with the sadistic grandfather who raised him, and continued through his career. When he was unable to find a job after law school, he didn’t blame the white-owned law firms that refused to hire him. In his eyes, it was his own fault because he was black and therefore perceived, entirely understandably, to be an affirmative-action baby. He thus spent his entire professional career working for the government, which he disdains like all conservatives–only in his case, it was probably the “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me for a member” syndrome. I wonder how many other black conservatives have this kind of self-esteem problem?
P.J. O’Rourke is an asshole, but he had it right when he said:
“Self-loathing is one of those intuitive leaps that is almost always correct.”