Wut R U Wearing, Senator?

Respect for the God-given dignity of every human being, no matter their race, ethnicity or other circumstances of their birth, is the essence of American patriotism. To believe otherwise is to oppose the very idea of America.~John McCain

So, apparently Republicans have decided to blame a dead man for why there was an issue over the White House flag earlier this week.

According to Senator James "Snowball" Inhofe (R-Dumbfuckistan) McCain should have been more "Courteous" to Trump.

Yeah, and I suppose the Senator from Oklahoma also thinks that if women would just dress more modestly they wouldn't get raped, and maybe if those students had guns instead of school books they wouldn't have got shot, or any number of other dumb-shit blame-the-victim conservative excuses for "logic."

I'm sorry, but I've had it with These Fucking People.

John McCain has been in Congress since 1983, a member of the Senate since 1987. He served in the Navy for 20 years before that, and came from a family where all the guys did the same before he did it. Now, I've spent most of the last decade disagreeing with this dude about a variety of topics, but as regards service to his country in general and to the Republican Party in particular, there literally should be no doubt that John McCain was That Guy.

He'd been there and done that in all respects, from the depths of the Hoa Lo Prison in Vietnam to the heights of running for the U.S. Presidency, that guy was there.

How do they treat him? Well, as I've said so many times if you're a Republican you're apparently Persona Non Grata once you're dead.

Presumably out of fear of Trump and Trump's base, Republicans have basically abandoned a plan to rename the Russell Senate Office Building (named for a racist Georgia Democrat) for John McCain.

Apparently, dude is now the subject of thinly repurposed rape rationalizations as regards why Trump is treating him like garbage.

And Lindsey Graham, one of McCain's best friends, goes on Hannity and expresses fangirlish levels of support for Trump, after all this crap?

No, seriously, fuck these fucking people. Not to sound that way but I quite think that Captain Queeg picked about the right time to check out.

I just can't help but feel that the Republican Party...or any sliver of it that I or most of the people I know could recognize...died with him.

And then there's this fucking shit, about which I'll say very little, simply because I think the Twitter blurb says more than I'm willing to without excessive profanity and certainly taking the risk of saying something that's just wrong. But, as I told my younger friend C.J. who I specifically asked about this to the tune of "I'm not that fluent in 'Internet Nerd' despite being one. So, could you translate this shit for me?"

Look, I'm sorry, I came up in a different era and being a conservative at one point did mean that you were (or certainly, could be) more than just a bigot or some freakish internet troll. But starting about a decade ago, it certainly seemed like if you were anything else they didn't want you.

I'm fucking serious. Somewhere inside, 1990's Republican me is looking at this conservative Transgender Internet Fan-fiction Porn shit like "Oh my God, what the hell is that, please make it stop." I'm not sure how much more I can say here without recording myself actually shouting "GET OFF MY LAWN" but I was taught there were certain things that went with conservatism. This isn't it.

Then there's this ridiculous bullshit. Republican candidate Ron DeSantis, running for the Florida governorship, said of his Black Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum "We shouldn't 'monkey this up' by electing Democrats." I'm fucking sorry, but there's a million and one goddamned words he could've used to say the same thing besides one with all the racist connotations of calling a Black person a "Monkey." He knows it, he said it anyway. Fuck that guy and I'd say that to his face. I'm sorry but this is America in 2018, not 1958. Americans in general and Republicans in particular need to stop tolerating this garbage.

The demographics of the country are changing, the electorate is changing, I fully understand that Trumpism sees itself as a last-ditch effort to prevent change, but short of "Massacre everybody besides conservative white people" which is an idea that'd probably not end well for conservative white people...there's  just no way that's going to happen. The changes they fear are already ongoing, have been for some time, and the fact that they're just now seeing it and overreacting should tell you the same thing it told me.

These people are fucking stupid.

There's no two ways about it.

Look, you know what this is? Keep in mind that I was 21 years old before the Internet as we know it was even a thing, and that I lived through all those messy formative stages.

As an old psychology professor of mine once put it "In 1995 the general sentiment regarding the Internet was 'Oh hey, this is cool, I can talk to somebody in Bangladesh and it's not going to cost me anything. Now today, in 1998, one American gets online and starts talking to another one of the opposite sex and the second or third thing they'll ask is 'Wut R U Wearing' misspelling and all."

Then of course there was the early 2000's and the "Kill Everybody Who Doesn't Understand L33tspeak" phase, which was the birth of the Internet Nihilism that led directly to 4Chan and conservative transgender fan-fiction porn.

After that, came the era that I missed, in which it became cool for stupid white kids to say racist shit, stupid shit, and racist stupid shit online, which led thence to the Alt-Right Nazis, Charlottesville, Idiots with Tiki Torches and the fucking Dilbert Guy being a Fox News contributor.

Look, I wish I could say I had a cure for this shit, but I don't. The best I can offer is that maybe we should start making kids, teenagers and assorted younger internet nerds leave the house every once in awhile or as my Mom put it when I was a kid and she thought I was playing too much Nintendo "Turn that shit off and go outside or something."

There seems to be something about relating to other human beings exclusively through a computer screen that leads a lot of people to become sociopaths, and historically, humanity generates enough of those without electronic assistance...and don't even get me started on the Jacksonville shooting over the weekend.

If you're that into a damn video game that you're willing to kill somebody over it, I can't really help you, but the last thing I think you should have is access to a gun. It takes work and a degree of skill to actually stab somebody to death, even if they're sitting down playing a video game.

I can get pretty into a game, to the point of screaming profanity at it when something goes wrong, but murder has never been on my mind because of it.

I somehow learned not to abandon my friends, even if they died, just because it's politically convenient or some big orange galoot didn't like my friend.

I've never Photoshopped anybody, despite owning an actual copy of the program. I sure as hell have never written politically themed transgender erotica about some dude.

I was taught that racism was wrong, I was taught this by conservatives. Yes, conservatives were a little different back then, but not so much, really. I dare you, go ahead and research Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or the John Birch Society or Barry Goldwater's 1964 Presidential run...In your guts you know he's nuts!...and you'll see what I mean.

Listen up, America, we need to start doing better. Maybe we can at least manage speaking in complete sentences again?

We have to do something, before this silly bullshit kills us all.

Part Three.