Ferrets are better people than Republicans.

We're not going to have the America that we want until we elect leaders who are going to tell the truth - not most days, but every day. I believe in recovery, and I believe that as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it. ~Ann Richards

This is Alaska. The camera caught him in mid-yawn. Even the most chill, old rescue ferret that just wants to sleep all day looks like a fierce predator when yawning. It's my favorite ferret picture.

I got him almost a month ago, he's my disabled rescue ferret. Due to poor diet (he was fed Meow Mix) in his previous home and probably an untreated back injury or other soft-tissue injury his hind legs don't work very well. Most of the time he gets around just fine by crawling or dragging himself. He actually can manage pretty well most of the time. Better diet also means the fur on his shoulders is growing back. Alaska will explore and play, and he's starting to become social with the other weasels. Life is slowly improving.

He is slowly regaining use of his hind legs, he'll quite often scoot around on his backside now, like he's trying to walk sitting down. He got a new cage today, a nice new Ferret Nation single. When I put him in it, he was so excited that he madly scuttled around the cage for several minutes. I've moved several of the senior ferrets in with him,

It's really, really hard to get a ferret to not act like a ferret.

Sometimes, the smallest of things can be a great victory.

I've seen this several times in the last few days.

There's a bill proposed in Ohio that intends to try to make doctors reimplant the embryo from an Ectopic pregnancy inside the mother's uterus.

It doesn't work that way. The human body simply doesn't function like that. An Ectopic pregnancy means a woman will certainly lose the Fallopian Tube in which it occurred, no, the Embryo will not survive. The whole thing is a tragedy, and one that so far as I know, we don't really know much about the cause of it, only that it happens on occasion. In a general sense, this is wrong, for a lot of reasons.

Chief among them, is that there simply is no way to do it, nor any valid reason to. I'm not talking "not with current medical knowledge or technology, I'm talking never. It's simply not something that's possible.

Such a "procedure" would amount to nothing more than a particularly gory slasher-film murder.

If done, this would be medical experimentation on a living and unwilling person. It's against medical ethics...and any doctor who tried such a thing would lose their license for malpractice and probably also negligent homicide, and probably go to prison.

Also, abortion is not illegal and "abortion murder" is not a category of homicide nor of any other type of crime. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean you should get to make it illegal.

I happen to know a couple of women who have survived dealing with Ectopic pregnancies, and one of those was an Evangelical Republican ex-girlfriend of mine, who was passionately anti-abortion.

But, ya know, she wanted to stay alive because she had to care for her disabled sister and elderly parents so she went to the hospital and got the proper medical care.

Biology doesn't care about your politics and must be treated objectively or people die. It's as simple as that.

Perhaps more to the point, just sayin' if you cut up a ferret because of some insane stupid ideology or for no reason whatever, you're going to go to prison for animal cruelty.

But apparently, if you're a Republican it's perfectly well Okay to want doctors to cut up women for your insane stupid ideology or for no goddamned reason whatsoever.

You can't make a ferret be anything but a ferret, and even two ferrets who really don't like each other will almost always follow the same 'rules' they all seem to go by in dominance play or fighting.

Apparently, all it takes is enough money or politics or religion and it's damned easy to make a human being not act like a human being.

And all it takes to completely disregard the humanity of others or basic biology and medical science is to give such people power.

Think on that, will ya?

Right now, the Republican Party is destroying itself, and trying to take America down with it. This happened because Republicans and their voters started to care more about ideology and "winning" than about truth.

Sometimes, the unintended consequences of a great victory end up making defeat look far more preferable.

America, it's time to rethink your life.

People. Are. Stupid. (And Evil.)

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curse thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. ~Genesis 12:1-3

Yet again, are you fucking kidding me?

What the fuck is it with these people? I'm serious, how in the hell have Trump Supporters managed not to learn anything since, what, the 1930's?

I was raised Christian and conservative, and one thing I had drilled into me was that Antisemitism, racism, and shit like that were not cool. More to the point, I was absolutely raised with the idea that Jewish people (and Muslims, for that matter) were our natural allies. After all, we all believed in the same God. Sure, Jews were often more liberal, and Muslims often even more conservative, but that was Okay. We had more in common than we didn't and for much of the time when I was growing up, too many outside threats to spend a lot of time sniping at each other.

But it's more than that.

Read the verses from Genesis 12 posted above. Was not Abraham, at least in mythological terms the patriarch of the Jewish people? Didn't God make a deal with him in particular? And was not Abraham faithful to His terms?

I was raised Christian, and I was raised with the idea that as first among the Abrahamic religions, the Jews were God's chosen people. I was taught that this wasn't something one should try to mess with, after all, had not all the Empires that tried to dominate or destroy the Jews eventually fallen? From Rome to Nazi Germany, was not history littered with the bones of those who had incurred the wrath of God by seeking to destroy or worse, replace God's people?

Certainly, the history of Israel since 1948 seemed to bear out that theory. And when I was a kid and a young man, the wars in Lebanon raged for over two and a half decades of my life. They've had some close calls, but Israel hasn't yet been defeated in a war.

At least as I understand things, that tells me there just might be something to all this mythological and religious belief. I don't care if you agree with me, that happens to be what I think.

The Arabic term the Palestinians use for themselves literally is "Philistine." So if you go by the Bible, the country we call Israel has basically been the location of the longest-running known ethnic-religious conflict in history. Factor in all the other stuff that the Jewish people have been through on top of that...and it's not hard to imagine these people needing...and having some level of divine backing just to survive.

And there's people...Christians, Evangelicals, people who claim every word in the Bible is divine truth...who want to fuck with that? Now I realize that for a certain species of conservative and/or fascist and/or religious fanatic, this kind of shit is basically normal.

But you'd think they'd at least have read their own sourcebook.

It doesn't make any sense to me that these people, of all people, would want to preach hatred of or attack Jews, but they do and they have.

And now they want to do it for Donald Trump?!

Some people are just plain fucking stupid.

I wonder if their next step will be practicing black magic like the Nazis did?

Abomination Of Desolation

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes. And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days! But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day: For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened. ~Matthew 24:15-22

Not this AntiChrist bullshit again.

Rick Perry, calling Trump the "Chosen One." I saw this yesterday, and anything I tried to write about it turned into a text wall of profanity. Like seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

The first time I saw this kind of silly bullshit my hackles went up. Casual blasphemy and the embrace of AntiChrist is now apparently a conservative value.

Last night at work, I saw this. Apparently Traitor Carlson is now openly rooting for Russia, ruled by Communist KGB Agent Vladimir Putin, to invade a mostly free and democratic Europe. Who needs ITAR-TASS when you have Fox News?

I mean, seriously, why don't these fucking people just go to California and dig up Ronald Reagan's corpse, desecrate it, and scatter his bones all over the Simi Valley while they're at it?

What's next? Waving AK-47's around and shouting Allah Akbar?

What belief or personal value or political shibboleth will these fucking people utterly reverse themselves on next?

Fucking seriously?

Who knew that all the Commies had to do to defeat Red-blooded Marlboro-Man Craggy John Wayne Style American Conservatism was pretend to switch sides and be right-wing themselves? For fuck's sake, Vladimir Putin has reintroduced Josef Stalin's personality cult. Do I have to spell it out for you? Hello, is this thing even on?

Actually, it was probably some sort of mistake to even ask that question, because apparently as the walls close in and they get voted out by irate constituents or indicted or are subject to impeachment inquiry, the sole core value of "Conservatism" becomes nothing more than "Fuck You."

I sure cannot think of any other even remotely workable reason for pardoning a man convicted of raping a six-year old girl.

There is literally no goddamned good reason for this.

I suppose it's strangely fitting that I just gave up, yet again, on conversing with an Evangelical ex-partner of mine who seems to not even hear me when I say that she needs to get a job and get out of the crappy situation she's in...and she counters by going deeper into unreality.

And for what? It's not going to get her anything that she actually needs in life. It's just not, much less the things she says she wants.

I suppose it's the same with all this Trump bullshit. People would rather light themselves and everything they've ever claimed to care about on fire for some imaginary greatness than do the little bit of adapting, or the little bit of work, that it would take to achieve actual, tangible, great things.

People would rather hang onto the 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance that they might somehow manage to get rich because something something gazpacho that conservatism says it offers than get the education and do the necessary things that it would take to have a legit, no-shit chance of making good money or getting rich...or even just have everyone pay a little more in taxes so nobody has to go hungry...that political moderation, liberalism or social democracy offers, because the latter requires that they might have to give something, put some effort forth, or at least ya know, change a little.

They'd rather be Russians than Democrats because, I don't know, at least Russia has always consistently been some kind of a shitty basket case that never quite managed to live up to its full potential no matter what form of government it had.

They'd rather bow down and worship emperors as gods because, I don't know, that worked out so well for the western Roman Empire, or something.

I honestly think these fucking people have no fucking idea what they want, except that as the walls close in, they seem to be trying to claim the right to use the rest of us as guinea pigs to work out their mental issues on. Fuck all that.

And that's funny, because I remember being taught some pretty solid fixed values as a young conservative.

Except that, well, now that the line has moved so far and I haven't, I'm more or less a liberal, bordering on socialist, simply by default and a factual understanding of the world.

While conservatism-as-it-is-now ultimately calls for the reinstatement of Emperor-worship...in a nation that was never intended to have such a thing as emperors. How the fuck does that work exactly?

When did fear and hate and ignorance and superstition become conservative values?

I'm not sure I know what the answer is, but if you're a conservative at this point, read the Bible verses that I used as a header, read them real careful, and consider that it might be time to rethink your life and get out.

I did it over a decade ago now, the journey since has not been easy, but nobody ever said life was easy. And those who promise you an easy, safe life if you'll just follow them are liars.

It's just that simple. Truth is often hard, sometimes inconvenient, but if you want to be free you have to respect it and understand what it is.

Because the alternative is destruction.

It depends on what the definition of "Is" is. (Republican style, presumed part one.)

Matt Lauer: You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle, and that one side or the other is going down here.

Hillary Clinton: Well, I don't know if I've been that dramatic. That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this—they have popped up in other settings. This is—the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.

~Today Show interview, 1998.

If there ever was a "Vast right-wing conspiracy" if this Trump bullshit is the result, it was junk. It might have accomplished the goal of denying Hillary Clinton the presidency...but it seems to stand a good chance of destroying everything else.

The House public impeachment inquiry hearings are over, and a vote to Impeach looks extremely likely, but yet somehow the partisan divides have become even deeper, and the Cult Of Trump (formerly known as Conservatism or the Republican Party) has doubled down on their belief in their Orange God.

But America was not designed with political cults in mind, not even close. And that's a problem.

I used to be a Republican, this pisses me off. We've heard this song and dance before. I'm pretty sure Irony died when Republicans started to try to redefine the word "Is" just like Bill Clinton did 20 years ago.

As I wrote yesterday on Facebook, before this is over, Republicans will try to redefine "Is" and Bill Clinton will win, at long last. I didn't expect the turnaround to be this fast, however.

With the hearings over, and the dismantling of all of their bullshit excuses, Trump Republicans have officially reached the "Dog Ate My Homework" find any excuse no matter how pathetic level of trying to defend their corrupt fascist bullshit.

Or maybe, just maybe, these people have been morons who never should have been given power all along.

And maybe, just maybe, their supporters have been shit all along, too. At least some of us had the sense to get out before it got this bad, though.

I love that the new rationalization is "Liberals are messy...as if that is an excuse for dictator wannabes and fascism. Funny common variable among those who say it, though. Apparently, none of them are people who have to clean up after concert-goers at a Country concert...because there are damn few people as stank-ass nasty as overwhelmingly conservative, often Trump-supporting country music people in my experience, and that's often across the board in terms of appearance, attitude, and cleanliness. Imagine an overweight white girl stuffed into a cowboy hat, a tube top, booty shorts and cowboy boots. Belly hanging out, muffin top, and the whole nine yards. Now, I like bigger women, personally. I also know that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I also like people who take care of themselves and dress like they have a modicum of self-awareness and self-respect.

#Hashtag Things you learn working in a concert venue.

All people are messy, people who have been taught right clean up after themselves regardless of their politics. But these are mostly not those people.

And that's exactly the problem, that Republicans have lost all self-awareness and self-respect, and it probably doesn't help that most of us who had those things got ran out.

The upshot is that these goddamned people know they're losing, they know they've lost any moral right to be in any kind of position of power, but they're going to try to do or say anything they can to stay there anyway.

And if this deepening partisanship on the part of Republicans is not stopped, this is going to end with Americans shooting at each other. It will most likely end with Republicans breaking off a piece, which will almost certainly end up being some kind of bullshit Russian satellite-state banana republic in any case.

The key thing to remember here is that there's more of the rest of us than there are of them. This can be stopped.

But we all have to stand up.

Part of the problem is, they actually know this. I believe they've seen the writing on the wall...and I don't think they care. Or if they do, they've already resolved to break off a piece. Why? because as contradictory and disorganized and scattershot as 'resistance' to them has been...the fact that it exists at all has driven these fucking people insane.

Because deep down they know they're going to end up being irrelevant, and that scares them more than anything.

Funny enough now that the shoe is on the other foot, Republican defenses of Trump have been contradictory, disorganized and scattershot. They've seen the writing on the wall. They know, long term, that they're going to lose. Whether they get put up against the wall for treason or simply voted out, they know it's coming.

And they fear that end. But all things end.

If they really believed in their God they'd know that and be prepared for it.

They know now, if they didn't before, that they backed the worst horse possible.

Now it's "The Dog Ate My Homework!" Next their defense will be to pull a gun and demand that everybody else do what they say.

But that won't work either, not on a grand scale, not least because other people have just as many guns as they do...and are often more skilled at actually using them.

But that's beside the point.

If it's not stopped, there is going to be conflict, which these people will lose. But, culturally and geographically they do have certain levels of concentration. They will win in some places. I'm serious. If we cannot talk these fucking people out of their March Ever Rightward and around to basic humanity, these people and their supporters are going to end up walling themselves off from the rest of us and shooting at anything that comes too close. As tempting as that image is to liberals and others who would just be glad to get rid of all the right-wing nut jobs, or whatever, the key thing to remember is that a hell of a lot of people who don't deserve to be would end up trapped in there with them.

And in their own heads these fucking people have built, and hate passionately, a version of "The Left" that is basically composed of a lot of their own atavistic fears.

Here's the thing; Lunatic dreams create nightmare reality for the sane.

I was taught that there was a baseline of truth, always.

I was taught this, by conservatives. We all lose out because they have abandoned this teaching.

But none of us will lose more than they will.

I can see what's coming, and I can see that it's not going to work out the way "Conservatives" think it will. And the tragedy of it all is that they will have thrown it all away for an unworthy slob like Donald Trump.

It's not that you people should have chosen better gods. You had a better god and rejected him for Trump.

They tried to bullshit God, and when that didn't get them what they wanted, they simply went out and got another one.

They don't care how shitty he is, he tells them what they want to hear.

For that alone, Republicanism deserves to be relegated to the ash-heap of history.

Core Values.

O Beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountain's majesty
Above the fruited plain!
America, America, God shed His grace on thee.
And crowned thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea. ~America the Beautiful, Katherine Lee Bates, first stanza.

A United States Army officer and his family have been moved to quarters on a military base for their own protection.

Not from the Enemy, not from terrorists, not from any hostile foreign force.

They're being protected from Trump Supporters.

The officer in question is, of course, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who I've written about previously. I've been saying for longer than I care to have been saying it, that this mess or something like it would end with the far-right, or the religious nuts or white supremacists or whatever taking up arms against the United States government and the military.

Do you believe me now?

A decorated United States Army officer, a Lieutenant Colonel with a long and distinguished record, a hard-core expert on the country to which he was assigned, is under threat from...let me get this straight...supposedly-conservative Republican Americans for...doing his job and taking his oath to the Constitution seriously...?

Imagine if you will, eating, sleeping, watching TV and trying to go about your business and live your life and have your family do the same...under the constant watchful eye of Security Forces. Imagine, quite possibly, having to have weapons close at hand not because you live in or are serving in a combat zone...but because a bunch of your own countrymen are threatening your life because you did what you are supposed to do, what your oath demands of you, what has been baked into the cake of your professional training since the Academy, or Basic Military Training, or Officers Candidate School. For the people who are worth a damn, those oaths aren't just words, they're a reflex, a constant brake on one's actions, a constant set of higher values.

Integrity Above All.
Service Before Self.
Excellence In All That We Do.
~United States Air Force core values .

One one level, my first response regarding these fucking people is basically "Better pack a lunch, assholes." The United States military oath specifies "All enemies foreign and domestic" for a fucking reason.

But on another level, it shouldn't have to come to that, Ever.

This is America, since the end of the Indian Wars in the 1890's at least, we tend to resolve domestic conflict with ballots rather than bullets, or through peaceful protest rather than violent action. Politics, as distasteful as it often seems...is most often far more preferable than the alternative.

In my own day, it was the breakup of Yugoslavia, then Somalia, Rwanda, interminable conflict in Bosnia, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and later conflicts in Kosovo and Macedonia and various African civil wars...not to mention Northern Watch and Southern Watch, making sure Saddam didn't get too out of control. If the 1990's...the era of militia nuts and Newt Gingrich, when all this toxic partisan bullshit got started...should have taught us anything it's that civil wars suck.

And I'd like to remind you that even peacetime military service is hard and dangerous and dirty and lonely even if your greatest adversaries are defense cuts or the weather, but it does have the benefit that there's nobody shooting at you.

And that's before the new century, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and watching my bros...both figurative and family member alike...have to deal with even worse. I have a friend who was permanently disabled when his vehicle hit an improvised explosive device in Iraq, and another who came back from Afghanistan with PTSD that was severe enough he eventually committed suicide. I have a cousin who's battled alcohol and drug addictions since he got out of the Marine Corps. Far beyond that, there's many more walking wounded whose scars both mental and physical are not immediately visible, who are still with us, beset with a crumbling veteran's health care system all too often maliciously neglected by Republicans whenever they're in power, and under-funded by them even when they aren't.

Republicans.

The same people now threatening the life of a US Army soldier, for doing his goddamned job.

The same people whose President, who they revere as a personal champion and damned near worship as a god, pardons actual war criminals who were turned in by their own teammates, or whose own enlisted platoon members testified against them at Courts Martial.

I'm here to tell you, Republicans don't "Support the Troops" even when the Troops are hard-core Republicans...unless there's something in it for them. And I hope I'm wrong, but along those lines I see something sinister in the whole idea of Trump pardoning convicted war criminals...like he thinks he's going to want a core group of loyalists with military training who owe him something...or something like that.

And there's an awful lot of these fucking people who have yet to come around to simple concepts like basic humanity, there's a lot more of those people who are Trump Supporters than who are not.

And these people have been threatening violence against those with whom they disagree for a while.

Now take what we know, what we all see on a fairly well daily basis, all the stories we've heard and all the pain that we know exists stemming from conflicts in places like Afghanistan...

...And transpose that to Alabama.

Instead of Iraq, imagine if you will an insurgency in Idaho. I guarantee you, there's people who live there who have imagined exactly that.

Do you think people in California or Michigan will be kindly disposed towards refugees, if those refugees are from Mississippi or Oklahoma, rather than Syria or Vietnam?

I've read about the Depression, and heard stories from my grandparents. I've heard about and studied the successive Great Migrations of African Americans. I'm here to tell you they won't be.

The destructive nature of what these people are doing is only going to keep piling up and get worse, until it is made to stop.

Do you think people like Tucker Carlson are going to be smirking any less when the MLRS rockets are striking some ridge line in Appalachia than he would be if they were hitting Taliban positions on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border?

Do you think the CNN or Fox News talking heads will opine more or less gravely about the "beauty" of American power when those Tomahawks launching from the Vertical Launch Systems on the USS Ramage are targeted to strike insurgent positions in East Texas than they did when it was some random airbase in Syria? Will the furor about Russia selling S-400 missiles to Turkey be greater or lesser than that of Russia selling them to Alabama?

No, and long story short, the corporations and the media and all type of other people will find ways to profit from the misery that's going to result from the conflicts we have coming if we as a people don't stand up and put a stop to this bullshit.

That's what the "Blue Wave" a year ago was about, and that's what Impeachment is all about today. In a war, one of the first casualties is usually the truth. That's what these Constitutional and political processes are about, is upholding the truth and the law so maybe we can stop this shit and leave the assholes railing at their demons in the darkness instead of taking them out on the rest of us.

I have a feeling that some degree of conflict is inevitable, but it's going to be worse if people don't stand up.

Remember that when some rando tries to tell you that both sides are the same, or nothing matters. That is a very Russian talking point.

And who would profit more from our downfall? Even if they only partially succeed?

It's time to put a stop to this crap, people, before it does get worse.

If we don't care enough about the values we proclaim to stand up and fight for them, to hold ourselves and others to them, why even bother?

Fundamentally, we have a choice, either we all get a say in how things go...however small that say is.

Or we accept small and shitty and ever more aggrieved autocrats and nobody gets anything but them.

Your call.

And slimy things did crawl with legs, upon the slimy sea.

For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. ~Matthew 23:4

I saw something yesterday that pissed me off.

Some dumb-ass Trump-Supporting Republican Congressman said, and I quote "Democrats are trying to convince us that three makes a couple."

No, asshole, they're really not.

But that aside, first of all, whatever Katie Hill was doing was none of your damned business.

Second, why in the fuck are Republicans always so obsessed with the sexuality...or the sexual acts...of other people? Democrats, LGBT folks, Republicans with whom they disagree? It doesn't seem to matter, seems like everybody is having more sex than them, and they hate it.

Like, seriously, what the fuck difference would it make in the life of the average Republican if a bunch of dudes ran a train on Katie Hill? Does it matter?

If she had no sex at all, they'd just find something else to bitch about, because fundamentally these idiots want to hold Democrats up to some unreachable standard...and then still disdain them...while they'd be perfectly willing to ignore or even praise Donald Trump for banging 72 virgins that all had plastic surgery to look like Ivanka, a gay midget, and two goats.

And I'm fucking tired of it.

The Party Of Small Government, ya'll. Guns in every household, no health care, no social safety net, and a government that...by definition...does not benefit you. But god damn, give them half a chance and these motherfuckers would regulate sexuality on a level that would make the Taliban look like pikers, and dole out orgasms like Soviet apparatchiks distributing cabbages to hungry Communists.

Unless of course, you're a member of The Party and then you can do whatever you want.

Meanwhile, these motherfuckers go on and on praising Trump, who does nothing but shit all over everything and claim the accomplishments of others as his own...and who has done more than his own share of sexual misdeeds...and this is known.

Fuck all that.

And apparently, on top of all that, this asshole is now trying to take credit for some non-existent Christian revival or something something Gazpacho.

Meanwhile, the only religion I see growing all that much among Republicans is the Cult Of Trump.

I mean, it seems like to a certain extent even the Evangelicals have given it up. I remember seeing awhile back that Jerry Falwell Jr. seems to spend more time talking about his business acumen than he does about Jesus.

Bitch, the only religion ya'll growing is the Cult Of Donald Trump.

And meanwhile, the leader of the Old White Guy Anti-Sex League is getting trademarks for brothels and "massage parlors" in China.

A Democrat gets judged for having sex with more than one person, and here Republicans, led by Trump, are basically saying they support prostitution...so long as a Republican owns the trademark?

I mean, marriage is a relationship between a man, his wife, and his bevvy of Prostitutes, right?

Hello? Is this thing even on?

Fuck all this goddamned hypocrisy.

And if you don't have a problem with this shit, then fuck you too!

I used to be a Republican and I've had it with these sons of bitches. I'm sick of them, vote them ALL out. And if you don't have a problem with this bullshit? Then fuck you, too.

I'm tired of these human slime-trails.

A Tale Of Two Parties.

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
~Ronald Reagan

Walls Work.

I suppose one could be forgiven for looking at the Reagan quote and the snipped Tweet and thinking these were people from two different parties. Or at least, perhaps, different ideologies?

Walls work?

I suppose that's why the East Bloc and the Soviet Union still stand, with the Iron Curtain as resolute as ever, isn't it? Why Ronald Reagan went down being known for failed arms control policies and the Iran-Contra scandal, and was replaced by the ineffectual Michael Dukakis in 1989, and why I spent eighteen months in the mid-1990's serving overseas duty as an Air Force Security Policeman at Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland, protecting a flight line full of USAF F-15C Eagle jet fighters and USN P-3C Orions on long, cold watches and then cracked under the pressure of the isolation and the hard, intense mission. Ever since, I've been spending my days collecting my small disability percentage, working a decent factory job, and raising a family as a middle of the road conservative Baptist and Republican, right?

Wrong. And it doesn't even make for an interesting alternate history.

Anybody with a brain in their head and the attention span God gave the common domestic Ferret knows what happened 30 years ago this weekend. Myself, I watched the Wall come down live on TV as a teenager just a few weeks from my sixteenth birthday and even then I knew life was on some level going to be considerably more complicated than the bipolar world I'd lived in so far. It was a good time to be a young conservative, and quite frankly I for one unabashedly welcomed the possibility of a world broader and filled with more possibilities than the number of options I'd been given thus far. Perhaps more to the point, we won. Our values and our firmly-held principles and our belief in democracy and freedom and individual choice won.

You couldn't be a Republican and not hear those words and the sentiment behind them all throughout the entire 1990's.

I'm so old I remember when Republicans didn't just end up on the winning team, by honest means, but we were the goddamned team captain and everybody knew it.

I've lived my life since that weekend 30 years ago mostly doing things because I wanted to do them, and being glad that I wasn't constantly living 30 minutes from the potential of nuclear war. Considering that I spent half my life around strategic targets (and only three years or so of that voluntarily) stuff like that matters. The fact that I've lived my life not having to worry about getting blown up because two groups of assholes that I never met couldn't get along has never been all that far from my awareness.

Try talking to a German, or somebody from a former East Bloc country or Soviet "Republic" who is old enough to remember what it was like, and you'll have a new appreciation for all the stuff we take for granted. An awful lot of Republican fears about socialism are actually misplaced fear of Soviet Communism and the shitty standard of living most people under it endured.

Anybody who lived under it and wasn't an ethnic Russian of a certain social class is glad that it is gone. More to the point those people appreciate the possibilities that life not controlled by centralized bureaucrats offers.

Myself? I fucked a girl that was from Latvia when I was in college. Who I got to screw when I was 27 was not who I imagined I'd get to screw when I was 15. I lived to find out differently, and I appreciate that, too. I've messed up a lot more than I haven't, since, but ya know it was kind of a fun ride.

I lived to see a time when an Ilyushin Il-78 Midas was not so much an enemy aircraft, but a thing of interest on the flight line at K.I. Sawyer, and in fact the only large jet aircraft on the flight line and you could just drive by and check it out with naught but a wave from the sheriff's deputy watching the thing, because the BUFF's that used to be there  and the Security Forces troops that guarded them  are long gone and the base reverted to its original intended use as a municipal airport, because the Cold War ended.

Because Walls. Don't. Work.

I lived yet longer, instead, to see a time where Conservatives, and Republicans, embrace the possibility of life controlled by Dictators and centralized bureaucracies and guns in every household and tanks in the streets and kids in cages so long as they think the Dictator is their guy, and there are no firmly-held values, and democracy and freedom and individual choice either don't exist to them, or are only any good when they're the only ones that get to have it.

I lived to wonder just what the hell the first three quarters of my life was even for, and to question my entire purpose for all of that time.

Why?

Because what remains of the Republican Party has come to hate and fear their fellow Americans more than they feared seeing Soviet troops shooting it out with German Bundeswehr and US Army troops in the streets of Frankfurt and Munich.

Because what remains of conservatism fears "Happy Holidays" more than they fear inbound bandits on the radar screens at Dulles or JFK or Otis ANGB or Wurtsmith AFB, and they fear "Happy Hanukkah" or "As-Salaam Alaykum" or even "OK Boomer" more than they would cringe at the sound of screaming jet engines on afterburner overhead and the wail of air-raid sirens in the distance. And far too many of them value this fear more than their own lives. As much as 30% of Americans are basically not salvageable at a societal level, instead requiring somebody who they respect but who might have slightly different beliefs to be their fucking therapist for years to get them to come around to...I don't know, basic humanity?

I'll never get it. But then I found it easier and less emotionally exhausting to be able to shrug and walk away, or to fall back on the fact that minding my own business was a central tenet of the conservatism I was taught.

These fucking idiots seem to think that other people even having their beliefs, customs, rights, etc. let alone having them openly acknowledged and even catered to (most often by the sacred Free Market itself!) as somehow detracting from their own. Somehow Christmas isn't Christmas if it might involve somebody buying the Muslim girl next door a leopard-print Hijab. Never mind that Muslims believe in Jesus just as much as Christians do, but in a different way.

Because what remains of conservatism, functionally, fears social change and tax increases on the rich more than it fears an instant sunrise in the cold Northern Michigan night as Soviet SS-18 warheads reduce K.I. Sawyer and Wurtsmith Air Force Bases (not to mention Detroit, and Los Angeles and New York and dozens of other places around the country) to radioactive wind-borne ash.

Their fear of death is overwhelming, because far too many of these people don't believe in God and never did. But it goddamned pales next to their cowardly, gutless, ravening fear of change, even if that change is simply them being treated the same way as everybody else is. Even if that change is something as simple as a Black President or a Nike commercial in Arabic featuring a Muslim girl on a skateboard or that some rich guy might go to prison for actively betraying our country.

They fear the same complex and multilateral world that I, as a teenage conservative 30 years ago, reveled in the possibility of.  They fear that their son might screw some girl from Nigeria while he's away at the University, even though there's an excellent chance that she's just as much of a Prosperity Gospel Pentecostal as they are and he is, even though it might just be shared faith in Christ in a secular environment  that brought the two of them together in the first place. Even that much difference or social change scares the hell out of far too many of these people, and liars like Rush Limbaugh have been stoking that fear damn near since Reagan left office. And they love that fear so much that they throw away everything they ever believed in, for an asshole loser like Donald Trump.

Hell, I found out as a forum admin years later, that to lots of Evangelicals and Pentecostals, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union simply wasn't real, they conspiracy-theorized their way out of it, or at least out of acknowledging it. And to this day, if you try to point out to them that there are people who believe the same way as they do in places like Estonia...they'll look at you like you're from Mars.

They simply threw away one of the greatest geopolitical developments in the late 20th century, simply because it didn't fit their fearful world-view.

In so doing, they threw away a lot more.

Including, mind you, everything that Reagan ever stood for, except maybe the racism that the Gipper managed to mostly suppress or talk around in public.

And fundamentally, what they want to do is impose that fear on the rest of us, because to fearful crowd-followers there is no greater sin than not being afraid. They think that somebody saying "As-Salaam Alaykum" or "Happy Holidays" to them is somehow something something Gazpacho going to take their Jesus away.

Never mind that these same people spent decades worshiping the godless Ayn Rand, only to cast her away and bow before Donald Trump.

Not that these people have faith in God, or Jesus, or any such thing. Their "Christianity" is nothing more than a tribal superstition or something to beat others about the head with. They want to reduce the Cross of Christ to nothing more than a leering tribal mask at the edge of the camp, or worse turn it into a flaming lawn ornament, with its message not "Come to me all who are heavy-laden and I will give you rest" but "GO AWAY! GO AWAY! FUCK YOU, I'VE GOT MINE!" And what's worse is that they don't even see how much of a perversion or a tragedy that is.

They'd rather throw America away than have to acknowledge that there have always been liberals or Muslim Americans or other people celebrating their own holidays or trans people or...whatever.

And what's actually worse is that they're reaching the point where throwing themselves away, the last Banzai-charge of the Old White Brigade, is apparently something that's on their mind. I watched the video of Jeff Sessions declaring his run for his old Senate seat the other day. I watched him praise and swear fealty to a man who did nothing but belittle and insult him and did it enough that it actually bothered others who knew of it. He never even mentioned the office he is seeking.

I'll tell you what I was taught. If somebody belittles and insults you, you sure don't flatter them or praise them or swear loyalty to them. You fight back or you get away, or both.

If you work for somebody and they treat you like that, according to what I was taught, it's time to start looking for another job. And if a person who acts like that fires you? You march your ass down to the unemployment office and file, and you consider getting a lawyer and getting stuff around for a hostile work environment lawsuit or bringing the bastard up on charges.

Having a backbone is a basic life skill that I was taught by conservatives. Not being afraid, being able to do things like have a sincere religious faith, to mind my own business, and to not get offended at the differences between people...are things that I was taught by people who were very often deeply and passionately Christian and conservative and Republican.

Fun fact: Out of those people who taught me this stuff, most of those who are still alive are Democrats by now, or at least voting that way, even if they still believe all the same things...because of Trump.

The story of going from  "Tear Down This Wall!" to "Walls Work" is not the story of two different political parties, but of one.

The arc of Republicans going from despising the Soviet Union to seeking to emulate it and acting at the behest of those who were its agents and their leader openly wishing live on CNN that he could go to Moscow and sit at the right hand of a former KGB agent has taken Republicans a mere 30 years.

And it is to everyone's misfortune that this is so. One has to wonder if, given another 30 years, they will be reduced to gathering in moldering basements and sewer tunnels to worship the devil?

I spent over half my life so far actively participating in this fall from grace. From "Character Counts" to "LOL nothing matters" has been a long, slow slide.

I feel like I either didn't fight hard enough for actual values before they ran me out, or I switched sides too late to make a difference. Maybe everything was fucked by the time I came of age, and maybe I just didn't see it.

And for that, either way, I am sorry.

But we can't spend too much time wondering how they came to be this, we have to do something about it.

#Next5 #Top20

Remember, Remember...

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent

To blow up the King and Parli'ment.

Three-score barrels of powder below,

Poor old England to overthrow;

By God's providence he was catch'd

With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holla boys, Holla boys, let the bells ring.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

And what should we do with him? Burn him!

Election day this year fell on November 5th.

Speaking as a fan of V for Vendetta here, and a student of the actual history of the time, I thought it was interesting that things came together that way. Since the movie came out in 2006, its symbolism has been adopted extensively by those who are against established power structures,

Yet perversely, the actions of some of those people who were part of that trend in the later 2000's and early 2010's...Julian Assange and Wikileaks in particular...led directly to the election of Donald Trump, who sought to undermine established power structures only to push an increasingly mostly botched attempt to assert older, more repressive powers in their place.

And on Tuesday, in two out of the three states where major elections were taking place, and in dozens more local elections around the country, Republicans got shellacked yet again.

Good.

Remember, remember, indeed.

I have no time for the fake, phony "Conservatism" that these people are trying to push. I have not, and never have had, one single shred of use for Donald Trump.

And I have no use for a political party that shreds every value it ever claimed for that fucking guy either.

I don't necessarily always agree with or even like the Democrats, but at least they seem to be trying to make things better. Republicans these days? Well, they don't even seem to care about themselves, having abandoned even basic survival instinct in favor of blind worship of Trump. When even their religious support is nothing but bullshit ass Prosperity Gospel liars trying to claim the White House is "Holy ground" because they're in it? Not to mention the same people continuing to try to turn Christianity into nothing but a Tribal belief for "Conservative" White people, and the Cross of Christ into either a flaming lawn ornament or a scary Tiki at the edge of the camp? Well my feeling basically is; All this money and media attention and supposed political acumen, and this is the best they can do?

The thing to consistently remember here is that the shitheads currently running conservatism have always been with us, and they've always been this stupid, and yeah maybe relatively decent people like me should've stayed in there a while longer and we could have kept a lid on it...but you go ahead and try and deal with nothing but endless Jesus-flavored venom for a week at a time

.A penny loaf to feed the Pope

A farthing o' cheese to choke him.

A pint of beer to rinse it down.

A fagot of sticks to burn him.

Burn him in a tub of tar.

Burn him like a blazing star.

Burn his body from his head.

Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.

Hip hip hoorah!

Hip hip hoorah hoorah!

Eventually, it got easier just to get away, especially since most people at the time preferred to ignore the threat these idiots posed to everything. Only in the last decade or so is the kind of awareness I had in, say 2003 starting to become all that widespread.

A decade ago it was a rare person who didn't look at me and my description of my experiences with religious nuts like I was the crazy one.

For all of their fake religiosity, all of their money and political scheming, this kind of crap is the best they can do. These fucking people are going to fail.

I'm not impressed with their bullshit, and I used to be one of them. I'm going to continue to vote for the other team.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Father Of Lies.

Here, have a dollar
In fact, no brother man here, have two Two dollars means a snack for me But it means a big deal to you
Be strong, serve God only
Know that if you do, beautiful heaven awaits That's the poem I wrote for the first time I saw a man with no clothes, no money, no plate
Mr. Wendal, that's his name
No one ever knew his name cause he's a no-one
Never thought twice about spending on a old bum Until I had the chance to really get to know one Now that I know him, to give him money isn't charity
He gives me some knowledge, I buy him some shoes
And to think blacks spend all that money on big collegesStill most of y'all come out confused. ~Mr. Wendal, Arrested Development.

You know, out of all this crazy bullshit going on around Donald Trump, there's one aspect I'll never understand. This religious aspect.

But then I grew up a fairly serious Baptist, at different times attending Catholic and Lutheran schools, and the Prosperity Gospel, with its rock concert-like services and damned near literal worship of money, is foreign to me. This is not Christianity as I was taught that religion. I can remember being a kid in Christian schools in California, or a teenager in middle school, and laughing at morons like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and their insincere, gold-plated Gospel.

In the video the snipped picture is from, Paula White basically goes out of her way to take the extra step of deifying herself.

I imagine that's going to lead to an awkward conversation when she goes into the afterlife.

Pro tip: It'll end with "You go to hell."

To me as you may infer by rap song lyrics posted above, faith is something to be lived. It involves service and sacrifice and a lot of other stuff that's basically your rent for being on this Earth, because you're just a traveler, just passing through, and you didn't ask to be here. To have faith is to take the time to help out those who are less fortunate than you, because Christ ministered to the least of these. He did not comfort the powerful, He confronted them.

But see, for people like Paula White and Trump, this is all there is. So of course religion becomes about what you can get out of it and when you have no concept of spiritual power in any real way, it very quickly becomes about power and politics. In the absence of Soul force, brute force will suffice.

And as for any kind of "To say no to me is to say no to God" kind of crap? It's things like that, that are why I'm no longer a Christian. My ex-wife used to pull that crap all the time, and it never worked, but she couldn't stop doing it.

These people fear any kind of democracy or religion that doesn't serve their bullshit ass political agenda, specifically because above and beyond anything else, they fear being told "No."

So therefore, they will go to absurd lengths to avoid any circumstance in which you have the capacity to even speak, because they don't want you to be able to say no.

And they don't want to even hear it, much less have to accept it.

If these people actually trusted God, ten percent as much as they say they do, they wouldn't act like this.

In the absence of soul force, and when even brute force might turn against them, that's when they go with Lie Force, because at the end of the day it's all they've got.

And who does Christianity teach is the Father Of Lies?

But it's actually even worse than that.

All the way back in Genesis, in the beginning of the Bible, God said He would reward Abraham for his faithfulness by making of his descendants a mighty nation. All the different interpretations of this story point to the Jews being Abraham's descendants, and thus God's chosen people...although Islam teaches that Ishmael, rather than Isaac, was the favored son, the story is otherwise the same.

Just sayin' it's kind of funny to me, how so many other groups down through time have thought to claim that they were God's chosen people and to attack the Jews, and somehow it never works out well. I'm not a big believer in coincidence above a certain level, and while I don't subscribe to any particular religious narrative, it's gone down that way too many times for me to not wonder if there's something to it.

 But, again, to these people any kind of honest soft power or soul force is only to be feared and they want to endlessly stage-manage the world, so all they hear is cheers. Think of Trump's reaction when he got booed at the World Series game.

These people want to make you kiss their ass and live by their dogma so that they can live in a world of blessedness and glory while all you get to do is eat shit. And in the meantime they're convinced that everybody else is holding out on them and not recognizing their greatness and that's why their life sucks. They have no concept that they're morons and shitty people. That's what stuff like Q-Anon and all these bullshit conspiracy theories is really about, making these fucking losers...feel good about themselves, like they're important or something. The storm is coming, any minute now, you betcha. God, but that must be a hell of a way to live. I don't think I could do it. More to the point, I wouldn't want to. I was never that kind of "Conservative" anyway. I didn't switch sides because half the chubby nerd girls I used to screw were liberals or because of weed or because I thought I'd get something out of it, I switched sides for my own conscience long before this Trump mess, and if that gets me out of having to justify why Trump called himself the Chosen One and acts like every tin-pot dictator that ever lived mixed with a bad parody of the Left Behind novels, GOOD!

Fundamentally, I'm a Democrat now, rather than a Republican, because I'm not flexible enough to fit my head far enough up my own ass to see these people's point of view.

And you know what? I'm glad I am. Because as of right now, the same people who five years ago waxed most eloquently about the power of God today lavish those praises on Donald Trump.

It's to the point where they've all but formally declared Trump their god.

And that ends badly, perhaps most of all for them, and most of them know it.

But they chose to play that game anyway, with malice aforethought. Fuck them.

I have no sympathy.

Lie down with the devil, wake up with a burning sensation in yo junk.

Truth is simple, what God asks of us is simple.
Man makes it complicated because he does not want to obey.

Republicans, your ass is showing.

When the earliest settlers poured into a wild continent there was no one to ask them where they came from. The only question was: Were they sturdy enough to make the journey, were they strong enough to clear the land, were they enduring enough to make a home for freedom, and were they brave enough to die for liberty if it became necessary to do so? And so it has been through all the great and testing moments of American history. Our history this year we see in Vietnam. Men there are dying; men named Fernandez and Zajac and Zelinko and Mariano and McCormick. Neither the enemy who killed them nor the people whose independence they have fought to save ever asked them where they or their parents came from. They were all Americans. It was for free men and for America that they gave their all, they gave their lives and selves. By eliminating that same question as a test for immigration the Congress proves ourselves worthy of those men and worthy of our own traditions as a nation. ~Lyndon B. Johnson.

I woke up this morning to find Richard Spencer trending on Twitter.

A lot of people kept pointing out that this asshole was on CNN (again) just four months ago.

Maybe it's just me, but I thought racial slurs against Jewish people started going out of fashion after the world found out that Nazis incinerated six million Jews. But ya know, that's not even what got my attention here.

"Little fucking Octaroons..." Now THERE'S a word I've literally never heard of anybody using outside of a historical context until I saw this...and I have a spent a fair portion of my life studying the Civil War and the conditions that led up to it.

I mean, seriously, who in the fuck talks like that, ever? Even in this day and age I thought people talking like that had long since gone the way of the Dodo bird.

Oh, right, Richard Spencer, Milquetoast Nazi Mr. Rogers. As I wrote all the way back in 2017, Fuck That Guy. I mean, seriously, what the fuck is even wrong with these people?

And by "These People" I can't just say "Racists" it increasingly seems to apply to Republicans in general. After all, here's a picture of Richard Spencer at the RNC in 2016.

I want you to think about something.

You know what's really going on here? All the shitty Republican policies, right wing attacks on people's basic rights, health care, the Constitution? Reproductive and sexual freedoms?

Trump?

Trump isn't the end game. He isn't even close. Trump is a symptom of the dysfunction put in place to get to that end game. And what is that, exactly? This fucking guy is the end game, a shitty fucking murderous Nazi who doesn't alarm unobservant white people because he maintains a photogenic TV personality, but when the cameras are off he's screaming profanities at people and demanding the "right" to rule over Jews and mixed-race people. What he might have in store for others one can only guess at, but it's probably worse.

And Republicans gladly let him into their inner sanctums.

If you enable Nazis, you're a fucking Nazi. It's really that simple.

These Fucking People are here memorializing the murder of a Black teenager, that was based on a lie, and for which the perpetrators were eventually ostracized but never held legally accountable.

For murder.

That's the end game here, murder, ethnic cleansing, and they'll fight a war to get it if they have to. And mind you, the "League Of The South" is considered a respectable organization in some quarters, this isn't a bunch of drunken frat-boys out shooting up signs.

Although they did install a bulletproof sign and security cameras, so you might think on that, as well.

Just like with the whole "debate" over the confederate statues, wherein if these motherfuckers can't own slaves, they want to memorialize the time when they could...if they can't just murder People Of Color for being People Of Color on the basis of the most ridiculous of excuses, they want to memorialize that as well.

Don't take my word for it, listen to them in their own words.

"I don't want our culture diluted, we need to close the border and 'let' everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life."

And what about those who don't want to do that? What about people like me who see these ideas as, on a base level, bland and boring, banal cruelty dressed up with an inoffensive "Politically Correct" appearance, hiding their Un-American, Unconstitutional bullshit behind the boring blandness of being a bro in a T-shirt or an old white guy in a suit. What about those of us who'd rather die than put up with this horse shit?

Fundamentally, this is about the fact that a certain kind of white man desires to be able to kill people and take their stuff for no reason whatever. Because they're conservative white assholes, but they are offended on principle by having to explain even that much.  I'm serious, and I cannot stress this enough. There are people in this world who would rather hate than eat, who would rather kill and steal than live, and what remains of conservatism is full of people who seem to have no greater ambition than to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die.

In the end, who it is won't even matter, because they aren't going to stop and ask for your beliefs or metrics before they try to kill you. When these fucking assholes start trying to do their thing, plenty of white conservatives who won't sign on to this crap, or who are serving in the military or the police, are going to die right along with the rest of us. This kind of thing has already happened.

These assholes tell us so, every so often, when they say that John McCain or Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or even Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan wasn't a "Real" Conservative. Hell, lots of these people keep telling us to our faces that current Republicans in Congress are just a bunch of no good RINO (Republican In Name Only) fakers.

And what is this all really about? It's about keeping other people, whether LGBT, Non-Asshole Whites, Non-Christians (and by the same token, seriously-practicing Christians) People of Color, Women and others from having as much of a say in our society as this subset of asshole white conservative men does.

And they're already terrified because the number of them is declining, to the point where they're not really punching above their weight anymore. I mean, years ago some pundit said they weren't generating enough angry old white guys.

And how do you think that scales, in real life?

When Trump gets impeached, if Republicans lose their ass next year even half as bad as it looks like they might?

These people have already abandoned every value they ever claimed to stand for, and are damned near openly embracing White Supremacy...and if they have to choose fascism and going to war against the rest of us to preserve that, I no longer think it's much of a stretch to say they will do so.

I mean, seriously, CNN and other "liberal" organizations; Do we have to let these people secede, break off a piece of America for themselves and then begin a Bosnia-style campaign of civil war and ethnic cleansing for you to fucking get it?

Stop enabling these motherfuckers.

Because no matter how much you do that, you're still going to be the first ones up against the wall...for not enabling them enough.

Most of the rest of the United States began to accept the idea of a multi-ethnic, pluralistic society 55 years ago. But not these assholes.

And especially as Impeachment bears down on Donald Trump...and I guarantee you that the scope of the man's crimes will come to light and greatly reduce the power of his adopted political party and even his social class and I suspect it will be grave enough that even the current Senate will have to vote to impeach and remove Trump from office...just to save their own skins from an irate public...it will get worse.

And when this problem eventually blows up and comes to a head...and it will...when the Klan and League Of The South and the Trumpist People's Liberation Front are shooting it out in the streets with the Army National Guard and the cops and paramilitary neighborhood defense groups, who do you think Fox News is going to support?

When the FBI catches Russian Wagner Group mercenaries or Spetsnaz advisers in gray uniforms supporting the bad guys, whose line will Fox News echo, that of the United States government, or that of the Kremlin?

And how much will all the same entities who've profited from all our dysfunctions thus far seek to prolong that conflict as long as they can...for nothing more than their own personal profit?

When the dust settles, when we're all watching war crimes trials on CNN and picking up the pieces and trying to rebuild our society, remember that the Russians didn't do this to us, we did it to ourselves by not relegating words like "Octaroon" to being nothing more than a historical curiosity, by continuing to enable and cater to toxic bullshit like racism, by allowing people to profit off of hate, by allowing evil beliefs and philosophies to simply hide under the radar until a time such as this, and all too often by doing it all in the name of capitalism or the most empty-headed sort of tolerance.

All the Russians did was play on our own weaknesses and use them to their advantage.

We knew better fifty years ago. We knew not to listen to these assholes then. What the hell is the problem now?