Doctor My Eyes

Oh brother, here we go again:  boy is Doctor Fauci angry with Trump's disrespect and lying now. Ooh, you can just feel the palpating fury and seething resentment, can't you? Yeah, baby, he's had it. Don't make him take his glasses off.

Give me -- and I cannot emphasize this enough, as they say -- a fucking break. Any "doctor" who continues to ply their trade for these murderous scumbags has abdicated their oath, period, full stop. That is all there is to this anymore. They are flacks for a monster who fantasized about wearing a Superman tee-shirt on his way out of the hospital last week, for some pathetic publicity stunt.

(Frankly, I think it's a goddamned shame someone talked him out of it. This is the sort of high-fiber content his shitbag cult deserves to be thumped over the head with.)

You could have made some sort of argument -- one I would still have disagreed with, but one which at least had some amount of good-faith reasoning behind it -- up till about June or July that Fauci felt that his comparatively moderating presence had some sort of practical effect on at least keeping the spread and the count lower than they could be.

Two hundred and twenty thousand deaths and eight million cases into this, though, and three weeks from the election, this is no longer remotely true. Fauci is, as he has been the entire time, providing a thin veneer of "respectability" to the ongoing carnage. Frankly, he should be ashamed of himself at this point. I'm embarrassed for him. I do not find him a credible figure; the fact that he is permitted a bit of room to roam with public "disagreements" and averrals does not change the fact that he clearly knows what kind of animals he carries water for, and still chooses not to set down the buckets and walk away.

Fauci turns eighty this Christmas Eve, so this is not about maintaining his career opportunities, or even burnishing his legacy, since his complicity these past months have, if anything, undermined that legacy.

If Dr. Fauci is truly committed to conveying accurate scientific medical information to a country in crisis from a deadly pandemic, then doesn't it make more sense for him to walk away from his role as a government minion, and be completely unconstrained by destructive, poisonous political considerations? I don't know what the man's fucking problem is, and I give up asking.

You're not saving a bunch of lives in the next three weeks by letting a piece of shit like Donald Trump dump on you further. Do what you should have done three months ago, and join Biden's campaign, and hit the chat-show circuit with the truth. Get that monkey off your back once and for all, doc. The best legacy is doing the right thing when it matters most.

Job Qualification, Slight Return: Dereliction of Duty

Per the previous post, Adam Davidson has a brief explanatory follow-up as to why and how the money-laundering sausage doesn't get made so much. And while it all makes a certain perverse sense, it's just a lame excuse. "It's confusing"? "It takes too long and doesn't have enough impact"? "Everyone knows Trump is corrupt and has become numb to it"? Really?

If that's their rationale, then my response is, then what the fuck do we need you for? If we already know Trump is a corrupt liar, then what is the point of sending journo minions to sit in carefully spaced folding chairs to transcribe the obvious lies of soulless shills? Is it not the job of good journalists to take stories that are complex and possibly "confusing," and craft a narrative that clarifies and explains, without oversimplifying or omitting salient detail?

Watergate was complex. Iran/Contra was complex. Somehow ways were devised to explain these narratives to the thumb-sucking rube that apparently constitutes the average mainstream media consumer.

I don't blame Adam Davidson for this, mind you; I've read plenty of his pieces and he's one of the good guys. Anyone wanting to be a solid reporter could learn a thing or two from him. But these self-serving excuses from editors, providing cover for their imperialist running-dog corporate publisher overlords, are bullshit, pure and simple.

Take a look around and pick at random from the rancid piles of content garbage Corporate America has made you care about, or at least know about. I've never watched so much as a minute of American Idol or Bachelor or Survivor, but there are names and faces I know and recognize from these products, thanks to constant network cross-promotion and Google News aggregation.

Obviously, that's the first step of effective marketing -- creating awareness through promotion and repetition. You're telling me they can do this with the thirsty wretches of reality teevee purgatory, but not with the fact that the chief executive is a treasonous, money-laundering criminal who literally doesn't care that the Russians are paying Islamic militants for American military corpses? Really?

In the past, when presidents have had especially egregious scandals, journalists felt some editorial responsibility to weigh in, sometimes even suggesting that they resign "for the sake of the country" or whatever. More than one hundred newspapers -- including most of the leading national ones -- called on Bill Clinton to resign before he was even impeached. These days, not so much. They don't want the headache generated by pissing off cultists.

Well, guess what, folks? No matter what you do or what you say, if you're not fully in the tank for Orange Foolius, they will hate you regardless. So you might as well do the right thing. Do your job.

Same goes for Democrats, especially House Democrats. They pre-emptively squash the idea of impeaching again, which gives the angry toddler a pretext to continue his behavior, knowing that it will not be curbed or punished. And why shouldn't he? He has no disincentive not to.

When challenged on this, the reflexive cry is, the Senate will just acquit, so it's pointless, the people just have to show up and vote.

So let's look at those two points separately:

1. House Dems were fond, at least before the #TrumpPlague hit (and hey, there's a missed opportunity for opposition branding, no?) of pointing out how many hundreds of bills they had passed, but that big meanie #MoscowMitch was holding up because he's a dick. Well, by their own logic, this is a stellar example of pointless, symbolic posturing. Why bother going through all the motion it takes to propose, write, troubleshoot, and pass bills when you already know they'll be ignored or rejected? But in fact, it's even more useless than another impeachment would be (or, for that matter, a separate impeachment of Bill Barr). The impeachment process entails extra mechanical process of investigation, which not only adds scrutiny to the proceedings -- assuming a few diligent scriveners can be prised from Kayleigh MagaNinny's asshole, or the East Wing Tiger Beat column Maga Haberman runs for the Times -- but also legally mandates compliance from the targets of the inquiries. In other words, Barr wouldn't be able to just laugh and blow it off, knowing that the Dems don't have the stones to make it sting. He' have to comply, or face criminal charges. This would effectively halt (or at least impede) Barr's ability to continue his behind-the scenes evisceration of the federal prosecutorial system.
2. The people did show up and vote. It was called the midterms. It was in all the papers and everything. It was triumphantly known as the "blue wave." Maybe you heard about that. The idea that the "blue wave" parsed out to, ehhh, just drag your feet into eventually making one half-assed attempt at impeaching this fucking traitor, and when you fail you totally don't have to bother trying anything else until the next election, good job everybody! is a ludicrous lie that only a cosseted, self-serving politidunce could possibly believe. The voters voted. The message was clear. You want me to vote again, I will, but I'm going to make sure to vote for people who take the fight seriously. Gutless dweebs who whine about the battle being lost before it is ever fought need to go back to their fucking car dealerships or whatever. I want people who are going to exploit every media outlet available to them, in order to spread a clear, consistent, unified message, and if that's too much to ask, the unemployment line is over there.

This is the great question we should ask ourselves and each other, about these self-appointed guardians of democracy who always seem to get caught sleeping on the job -- what is the job of journalists, what is the job of opposition-party politicians? I would suggest that maybe the layperson's understanding of those jobs is fundamentally different from the understanding of the people who actually hold those jobs. In that gap lies the real problem at hand.

We can't just keep whining that journos are in the tank for Republicons. If that's the case, then fucking boycott them. If you're still bothering with CNN or the NY Times, you're part of the problem anyway, whether you know it or not. If you're not primarying establishment hacks like Pelosi and Schumer, ditto.

Think back to Obama's terms in office. However corrupt and mendacious and comically awful the opposition party was, they were effective. Their goal was to obstruct and impede, and they largely succeeded. They kept him from doing most of what he wanted to do, and effectively ankle-bit him even when he was successful with something. They don't give a fuck about looking "unpatriotic" or whatever. They go for the throat, lie about whatever needs lying about, and say fuck you to the rest. They don't punt on first down or go into a prevent defense for the fourth quarter. You keep fighting until the whistle blows, period.

Summer is the doldrums, and hopefully the Democrats are using the downtime wisely to run up the score in the homestretch after Labor Day. This is not just about getting rid of Trump and getting Biden in there. This is about retaking the Senate and increasing the House majority. This is about the necessity -- the actual, practical, operational necessity -- of driving a stake through the blackened heart of that party of traitors and criminals, for the sake of whatever's left. This is about putting down a rabid dog.

Whatever the Dems think the score is right now -- 42-17 in the third quarter or what-have-you -- they have to commit to going all out in that fourth quarter and running the score up as much as possible. Make it 84-17 if you can, or 200-0. Changing sports metaphors, go Harlem Globetrotters on them. People like to tell themselves and each other that the best offense is a good defense, but that's not true. The best offense is a good offense. Don't overthink it.

The comfortable fiction -- one that not only Republicons but their feckless Dem enablers need you to believe, for the preservation of the establishment money machine that greases them all -- is that Trump is an anomaly, a political aberration. That is a lie, a goddamned lie. Trump is the culmination of fifty years of tactics and propaganda, come to fruition. If he wasn't such an asshole about it, they wouldn't even be embarrassed to say it.

The Republican party needs to be ended as a viable political entity, full stop. It is a fascist mishmash of grubby plutocrats, sweaty authoritarians, and thieving evangelicals. They hate you and everything you've ever cared about in your life. They are more than willing to completely destroy the country if they can broker the ongoing looting of the country for a handful of billionaires. It is important not only to end all support for them, but for any entity who continues to operate as if they can be "worked with" in good faith.

If corporate media entities can't be bothered with that sort of work, then leave them to their reality-teevee coverage. If politicians can't be brought around to understand who the real enemy is, then it's time for them to go. There is no longer another option.

Shit Doctrine

Looks like four Republicon Senators so far (Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Jim Inhofe, and Ron Johnson) are known to have sold off large quantities of personal stock holdings, after receiving briefings early on regarding the impending severity of the "hoax" virus. What do you think the mathematical probability might be that there are many more -- including, of course, Kim Don Un's family of grifting locusts -- that have been profiteering in real time from the delays and denials and supposed logistical difficulties in preparing for and responding to the situation?

I've expressed skepticism of the actual severity of the plague early on, and you could say I've cautiously revised those early assessments. Again, going from empirical data and common sense, it is now more clear that the numbers were artificially "low" here because no one's been tested yet. The numbers are likely to skyrocket in the coming weeks, and people will die.

(I'm still not entirely convinced that completely shutting down the world and trashing the economy is a practical solution, but clearly something needs to be done, since certain people were not as proactive as they could and should have been.)

Other people will be laid off or cut loose from their jobs, and in a country where a significant number of people are four hundred bucks away from the sidewalk, that can be as much or even more of a death sentence than the virus itself. Poverty is a health-care issue, duh.

And these fuckers are making a smooth buck of it, cashing in on the misery of their countrymen. Loeffler is the wealthiest member of Congress, worth half a billion dollars. Her husband is the FUCKING CHAIRMAN OF THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE. But she got the briefing several weeks ago, cashed in a few mil, and turned around and bought stock in Citrix, since people will be working from home for some time, doncha know. (Those that still have jobs, anyway.)

And the entire time, these dirtbags have been praising Dear Leader's competence and manly stamina, like the dutiful little bootlicking worms that they are. They knew what was coming down, could have taken any number of actions publicly or at least in their respective home states. But no, there was a precious dollar to be had. Money always comes first with people like that. Always. It is not figurative in the least.

Entire states are being shut down now; just a few hours ago, the governor of California instituted a "shelter in place" order for the entire state (the order had been going county-by-county over the past several days). One in eight Americans lives here. Forty million people, who now can't go to fucking work to get money to buy food and pay rent.

I feel grateful and fortunate that I have almost two months' worth of vacation and sick time banked, though given the extraordinary circumstances, I might not be able to use them. I won't know until tomorrow or Monday. I have enough in the bank to last us a couple months as well, though. The thing is, I know a lot of people who don't any such cushion. I'll try to help out a few friends if need be, and maybe find a way to donate to the local food bank.

But a lot of people are well and truly fucked, and are about to find their lives in a hole that may take them years to get back out of, if ever. Debt can be a prison of sorts, especially in an economy explicitly designed to keep the vast majority in a state of permanent precarity, of always being a missed paycheck or bad health-care break away from living in a van down by the river.

They should know that a small group of people deliberately profited from their misery. They deserve to have a political party that actually represents them and fights for them, instead of gutless incrementalists that couldn't lead a scout troop across a dirt road.

I've been thinking about this post I wrote last weekend, almost since the very minute I finished it. I was way, waaayyyyy too hard on Matt Colvin and the rest of the "garage arbitrageurs" in that article. I have read enough of the "side hustle" and "nichepreneur" blogs and articles and mini-books to know that there really is a very small but very committed group of folks out there that do this for their living. Usually through Amazon's affiliate program, they do things like find clearance pallets on Alibaba -- or, in Colvin's case, driving around to all the dollar stores in a hundred-mile radius, buy items that they know they can sell for a markup on their affiliate page, and move product or have it drop-shipped.

It's work, and while it occasionally ends up being some asshole in Tennessee sitting on a garage full of hand sanitizer, trying to gouge desperate panic-buyers, the fact is that we should be able to muster a proportionately larger volume of genuine outrage at wealthy people who have sworn a legally binding oath to never use their elected office for personal profit. The Tennessee Attorney General seized all the contents of Colvin's garage last weekend, and I sincerely hope Colvin was at least compensated for his expenses.

As long as the health-care gougers and corrupt politicians get away with their evil shit right out in the open, I feel embarrassed for even picking on a schmuck like Matt Colvin, who at the end of the day was trying to get what might have amounted to mid-five-figures at best. A life-changing amount for him and his family, unlike the couch-cushion change Kelly Loeffler sold out her country for. But I'm leaving that post up, unaltered, as a reminder to myself at least.

Another prime example from this week is that spring break kid from the Florida beach, who just wasn't all that concerned about the virus. If I get it, I get it. People expressed their outrage at his "selfishness," as if we weren't all that way when we were nineteen. As if that kid, and everyone in his generation, hasn't been explicitly told their entire lives, tough shit, your problem. Climate change? Your problem. Mass shootings in schools? Your problem. Decades of student-loan usury and gig-economy wage slavery? Your fucking problem. We got ours, sucks to be you.

But yeah, surfer dude's the selfish asshole. Right. I'd say he's internalized the lessons that have been taught to him his entire life.

A decent society that had a real understanding of what it's facing right about now would truss up that cohort of Senate profiteers like Thanksgiving turkeys, set up a guillotine in front of the White House gates, and commence with justice. It's bad enough that they'd happily watch you die in the gutter, but they decided to cash in on a situation that they knew would worsen drastically, and say nothing about it. They aided and abetted an ongoing crime that will kill people and ruin lives. They should be punished accordingly. The Republican Party is an organized crime syndicate that needs to be detained, investigated, and imprisoned, before they completely destroy what's left of the country. Really, it might already be too late now.

Since we are no longer a decent, serious society, and maybe never really were, we all already know what will happen to them -- nothing. They won't resign, they won't get censured or fined, there might be some insincere mea culpas and a few enraging homina-homina moments from the prime suspects, and then maybe some canned rebukes muttered on whichever MSNBC host needs a guest at the moment, and that will be that. It's all just a big game to them -- your life, my life, all of it.

Because let's face it, folks -- the real problem right now, the one truly undermining the stout fabric of a once-proud nation, is that the Chapo Trap House guys are dicks, and someone was mean to Bret Stephens on Twitter that one time. Priorities, people.

Oh, and fuck your feelings. Remember that one? Good times. They weren't joking.

Your Periodic Reminder That Newt Gingrich Is a Piece of Shit, and Should Have Been Flushed Decades Ago

If you have ever looked around at the parlous condition of the United States in the last, say, twenty-five years or so, you can always remember that Newt Gingrich was the prime architect of all of it -- the lying, the hypocrisy, the open corruption, the literally Orwellian manipulation of language for purely political ends, the obstructionism, the borrowing of North Korean lickspittle tropes used to convey approval for Dear Leader's every stanky burger fart and dusty old-man ejaculation. You want to know why your government has been rendered impotent and ineffective in the face of rapidly spreading problems and events, Gingrich is one of the main proponents of that movement.

Gingrich pioneered the industrialization of all of that and more. He's done more to deliberately and methodically destroy this country than any single person outside the Billy Graham-Jerry Falwell multigenerational axis of evilangelism. A decent society would have shunned the likes of him -- and them -- long ago.

The man is pure scum and Italy can have him for as long as they can put up with him. He's a cheap snake-oil huckster of the absolute lowest order, and deserves far worse than he'll ever get. He should die penniless in a back alley and be discarded into a vat of eels for food. It's no wonder Gingrich idolizes Trump; neither man has ever been tethered to anything resembling a moral compass. Shame on any media outlet that gives Gingrich any sort of venue to peddle his wares. The more respectable thing for Newsweek to do would be to give O.J. Simpson or Harvey Weinstein a regular column.

I think what I'm saying here is fuck Newt Gingrich with an ebola-laden baseball bat.

Scum

Suspending my FTFNYT boycott for five minutes, only to say that I literally cringe to think about the many awful things that could happen to these plague profiteers, and it would only amuse me. If his house burned down tomorrow with his "investment" and all his worldly possessions in it, and it turned out he had no fire insurance or family to fall back on, I'd actually laugh out loud. I don't know what the hell happens to people that they turn out like that, where every crisis is an opportunity to screw over your neighbors.

I didn't used to be this way, wishing real misery on idiots, but then we didn't used to be this way, at least not so easily and publicly. The panic-buying of toilet paper is beyond stupid, but there has been a concomitant rash of stories like this across the country, these little weasels hitting all the Costcos and Dollar Trees in their area, buying up all the cleaning supplies, and sticking them in the garage, in order to jack up the price several hundred percent for their neighbors.

However, to be (a bit) fair to Matt Colvin and his ilk, how is what they are doing any different that what the various collusive legs of the health care stool do? Every facet of that filthy industry -- HMOs, insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations -- all engage in the very same type of "disaster arbitrage" Colvin is trying to pull. You think those COVID-19 tests are going to be free? You think treatment is going to be fully covered, even if you have insurance? Really?

Don't get me wrong, these jerkoffs are messing with the well-being of their communities, trying to turn a quick buck off of other people's panic and pain. They've earned your scorn, and it would serve them right if all they get out of it is a lifetime supply of Clorox wipes and Charmin. Just keep in mind that they're pikers and amateurs compared to the companies that profit mightily every single day from extorting money out of a captive market, all so their CEOs can rake in twenty million a year or so. As bad as Matt Colvin is, the people who gouge $500/month for insulin or $600 for a pair of Epipens that cost one-tenth of that to produce are a thousand times worse.

Or the people in the federal government whose job it is to protect the population from a pandemic, absolving themselves from responsibility and fawning over Dear Leader's stellar planning and astute stewardship, this heedless clown who literally claimed the disease was just a hoax right up to two weeks ago.

You think I'm indifferent to the fate of these Amazon arbitrage weasels, don't get me started on the health care execs and Trump's bootlickers. If every single one of them suffered and dropped dead from the bug it would seem like a fair exchange. Their conduct has been at best a complete dereliction of duty, their silence nothing more than complicity with a scheming, chiseling lunatic who would nuke Omaha tomorrow if he thought there was a few bucks or a few poll approval points in it for him.

Maybe it's time we all take stock of ourselves, and each other, and decide what kind of society we really want to be. Because if this is what we've fallen to, these chumps who are so out of options that they think that hustling a garage or pickup bed full of household goods at inflated prices is going to change their lives for the better, we're in deeper trouble than we think.

Leap of Fate

Here's a (probably) unpopular but nevertheless a surface-of-the-sun take:  the hysteria over the corona virus seems maybe a tad overblown so far, considering that tens of thousands of people in the US alone die every winter from, you know, the "regular" flu. This is not to say that the COVID-19 can't or won't be a real crisis, just that so far, it's not yet The Stand, you know?

But even if it disappears tomorrow, the fact is that it has already solidified a great many assumptions about the incompetence and corruption underpinning even basic service components of this Florida outhouse of an administration. Starting with the predictable mendacity of how basic vital information is released and communicated, to the abject, subservient controls put in place on people who dare speak the truth or express any skepticism over the handling of the situation, clearly these animals will not be happy until a sufficient number of casualties have been counted.

Then there's Iran, a country whose problems with the virus do seem to be increasing rapidly, and in no small part due to the incredible dishonesty and bad faith the US has displayed in abrogating the JCPOA, and dumping sanctions on Iran that has notable prevented them from obtaining the medical equipment necessary to prepare and combat an epidemic. The Obama administration had opened pandemic control and information offices in nearly fifty countries, including China; Trump closed eighty percent of them, while gutting the CDC here.

Sad to say, maybe this is what it takes now. It sucks that people have to die in order to (maybe, just maybe) get a sufficient number of people here to see just how pig-headed and malicious and stupid these fuckers really are. It's not hyperbole, it's not snark. These people are flat-out evil in their sheer indifference and irresponsibility. Literally, innocent people are dying simply because this sociopathic dipshit can't stand to be "wrong" about anything. Tell me again about karma.

This is the natural consequence of decades of right-wing pols, buttressed by talk-radio scumbags, doing everything they can to underfund and undermine competent governance, so they can then point at how government never works. The Trump cult is the apotheosis of that brutal ideal, purging even the whiff of competence, and replacing with pliant homunculi, notable only for their boot-licking prowess. So of course nothing works right anymore -- everyone who could do anything competently has been pushed out, or quit in disgust.

Take my assertion in the top paragraph that while the virus could be a big deal, that maybe it isn't really quite yet, that maybe there's a bit of hype and paranoia right now. I hope I'm wrong, but again, let's say I'm right and the whole thing just disappears over the weekend. No more casualties or deaths. It's done, they rush a vaccine to completion and production and the world is saved. It's not going to happen, but let's say for the sake of argument it does happen.

Even in that unlikely event, these people still deserve to be thrown out of office at once, for their sheer ineptitude. Because let's face it -- if this is how they're going to handle things when the industrial-strength mega-super-flu comes around, we're fucked, medically and economically. There is no plan in place for any of this, for rapid response, treatment, mitigation, any of it.

This should be a clear warning for natural disasters as well, because when the next Cat 5 hurricane finally drills Miami and puts it six feet underwater for a month, you'll have Pence with his dick in his hand, Kudlow scratching his neck waiting for his next eight-ball, and King Fuckface shitposting how it's all the Dummycrats' fault. That's a fucking guarantee, and we all know it.

I couldn't care less about the stock market, and not just because I don't have a portfolio to fret over. The only way to get the owner-donor class to have any skin in the game is for Fuckface to be bad for business. They don't care otherwise; a hundred million people could drop dead tomorrow, and as long as the precious keeps rolling in, they won't even blink.

But if the stock market keeps plummeting next week and beyond, and the virus really is a crisis, then these cadaverous skinflints have a reason to care about something other than their ill-gotten hoards. And when they vote with their wallets, we all hear the rumble.