Idiocracy 2019, Presumed Part 1

Welcome to Costco, I love you.
~Idiocracy.

The fuck, when you find a bunch of US flags dumped on the ground, but they've already had campaign slogans printed on them so what's the point?

I guess, to conservatives, America isn't America unless it's loudly glorifying their shitty beliefs, and apparently they can't even avoid knocking over the apple cart then.

I guess ideals like basic common decency, democracy and rule of law, not to mention love of country and respect for the symbols (like the flag) that they loudly claim to cherish when anyone's watching really don't matter all that much if there's a chance to make a few bucks, right?

And then, they can't even manage that with their own symbols, which have been altered to reflect their belief in their newfound god, who is of course not a god at all but a person, Donald Trump.

It seems to me like there's a Bible verse or three I should be quoting here but, ya know, why the fuck do I bother? It's not like they're going to get it anyway.

Religion, like everything else in the conservative mind, has been revealed to be disposable and transactional. You can't reason with unreasonable people...but it's also damned hard to reason with people who have no set values, whose morals are completely relative.

"Republicans name Ivanka and Don Jr. among top 2024 Presidential contenders?"

How in the flying fuck does that make any goddamned sense?

To be a Presidential contender, you used to have to have accomplishments, experience, and some things you could put your name to so that people knew who the fuck you were and what you'd done so they knew if you were worth voting for or not.

Apparently, to be a Republican Presidential Candidate now, all you need is a name, and apparently that name has to be Trump. Didn't we fight a war and become our own country just to avoid exactly this? Oh, don't get me wrong, there's a couple other names on the list, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley. But seriously, as this Trump mess progresses you can almost watch the political fortunes of those two wilt in real time. I mean, Nikki Haley seems to have barbecued her own political fortunes. And, seriously, even Donald Trump doesn't seem to like Mike Pence. That's ironic, because Mike Pence's chief skill seems to be keeping his lips firmly planted on Trump's over-large ass at all times. Yet no one cares, least of all Trump. In point of fact, like all too many "Conservative" Evangelicals these days, for all his claimed religiosity nobody ever seems to talk much about Mike Pence's religion, only his devotion to Donald Trump and social mores so outdated that it seems not so much quaint as outright deviant, as much because the whole mess is so out of step with even current Evangelical church culture (to say nothing of wider American culture) as because it suggests much deeper issues.

You could be forgiven, I think, for wondering what Evangelicals are even Evangelizing about.

Or could you?

Here's Sandy Rios gamely conflating Christianity with White Supremacy.

Who wants to be the one to tell her there's no white people, or at least no one identified as such, in the Bible?

Seriously the concept of "Whiteness" as such didn't come along until about the sixteenth century or so, when rich European Christian assholes needed some way to justify slavery and to divide slave workers from free ones.

In Jesus' time, much less when the Bible was compiled and written, prejudice was cultural, not racial. One was either a Roman or a Barbarian...just as one had been either a Greek or a Barbarian before that, and Greek was the language of the New Testament and Orthodox liturgy just as Latin was the language of Catholic liturgy and theology for some fairly serious reasons. Thus did many of the ideas, if not the texts, of Plato and lots of the ancient philosophers, not only survive but thrive under new management.

And nowhere in any of that text or those ideas were modern...or even ancient, for that matter...petty ethnic, racial and religious hatreds given airtime, much less oxygen, let alone primacy. In fact early Christian tradition, even post-Constantine, shows a trend toward inclusiveness if only to incorporate anything that would make it easier to convert people as modern holidays like Christmas and Easter show.

Why? Because when this stuff was written down the first time it was necessary to be able to use the text to convert people...and starting off with "I hate you and want to destroy your culture" was not a good way to win friends and influence people especially when the Emperor and his Legions might be thousands of miles away. The Romans had a way of making people want to be Romans, just as for decades people wanted to be Americans...and Americans wanted them to become Americans, because we knew more people, different ideas and the strength of being one nation that incorporated the ideas of many nations made us stronger.

But to small, mean, gate-keeping and purity-policing assholes, such ideas are anathema because they start off by thinking this, that or the other thing has to stay small and understandable so that it stays "theirs" and we wonder why so many fandoms become toxic, and how this has even extended to political and social conservatism? When people are stupid, the number of things that are understandable to them in turn becomes even smaller, which is precisely how one gets a Republican Senator, himself of Latin American descent, to proclaim that Taco trucks on every corner is somehow a bad thing.

When Ted Cruz said that, I was like "Hmmm, Tacos." More to the point I fail to see how the whole rest of the world wasn't as well. I mean, what the fuck kind of small idiotic person do you have to be, to be afraid of tacos?

A Republican or a White Supremacist, apparently, but I repeat myself.

I suppose, exactly the kind of person who thinks that Iraqis should be grateful that we invaded their country, overthrew their leader, destabilized their culture and enabled the worst of their fanatics, who then drove out ethnic and religious minorities, many of whom served actual functions in a highly traditional culture, because...we give the Iraqis money, I guess. Bitch, we started a war that destroyed these people's country, killed half a million people and fucked up countless lives for those who weren't killed. Two billion a year? That ain't shit, how about we not invade people on false pretenses in the first goddamned place, Marco?

Ya know, like that Bible you're always quoting says all who take up the sword will die by the sword?

Fuck these motherfuckers.

If you ever need proof that religion is all a scam, all you damn well need is Marco Rubio's Bible quote Tweets. It's like a fortune cookie, or a horoscope, except it doesn't taste good and it's not even entertaining or worth laughing at after awhile.

It very often seems to me that there are three reasons Republicans do anything. #1 "Fuck you" #2 Get Money and #3 Fooling the feeble-minded. I suppose it would be a mistake to think Republican religion is any different.

And I say that as somebody who used to be a Republican. I'd like to think we were better, or at least different, from this at the time. But on the other hand, as Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert are evidence of, I know that some of us weren't...and those of us who weren't bad actors or crowd followers are the ones who got driven out as all the current manias began to take hold in the years after 9/11.

And now Trump is threatening war crimes live on Twitter, 52 'cultural sites' one each for the 52 hostages taken by the Iranians when I was six years old. No joke, I wonder if Trump can remember what he was doing from 1979 to 1981? I really don't, except for remembering Christmas those years, seeing Empire Strikes Back and watching the first Space Shuttle launch with my Dad. The Iran hostage crisis doesn't even rank up there with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the 'things I remember' list. But somehow it's rankled Republicans so endlessly for 40 years that they're still trying to start wars over it, wars that we are fast losing the ability to fight, without even having any allies in the region or with NATO standing down in Syria because they're worried about Iranian attacks on their own troops. With the Iraqis ordering us out, we're either attacking from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Turkey...which likely won't allow us to use their territory...or we're launching airstrikes or airborne and amphibious assaults. Anybody want to take a guess how that's going to work out against a large and sophisticated armed forces that has a mix of East Bloc and Western equipment and which largely operates according to Soviet doctrine?

Let me give you a hint. Swarms of flying telephone-pole SA-2 Guideline/S-75 Dvina Surface to Air Missiles won't even be relevant to an F-35A Lightning II stealth fighter, but they'll wreak endless havoc on the C-17A Globemasters that are actually carrying 82nd Airborne infantry troops.

And if you think the morons in charge of military procurement, who can't even make sure our own new ships work, are gonna up their game on keeping enough AIM-9X Sidewinders or JDAM's ordered, produced, in transit and on the ramp to supply a goddamn air campaign of the scale we'd need...or make sure that enough Security Forces are present to adequately defend all these aircraft and munitions based across the Arabian Gulf in Saudi from threats over there...or keep them in jet fuel and spares or food for the pilots and maintainers...you almost certainly have another thing coming.

And then these people, who can't even make sure aircraft-carrier munitions elevators work or that the main guns on Zumwalt-class Destroyers have ammunition (or even a manufacturer for it! For rounds that cost a million bucks a shot, no less!) are going to properly support the kind of war you get when you strike at cultural and religious sites, against the kind of people who will hold a grudge for a thousand years?

I'm not buying it, hell I'm not even renting it, and these idiots need to go before they get a whole bunch of people killed because they're stupid.

And if you're not willing to stand up and vote them out, and fight if they don't go peacefully, then fuck you.

You're part of the goddamned problem.

Republicans don't care about America, fuck, they don't care about themselves. It's all about their shitty ideology.

And they see anything other than a "No" backed by the reasonable threat of force as an endorsement of that shitty ideology.

This crap needs to stop and if you're not willing to stand up and stop it, you're not even going to benefit yourself at this point, unless you already have billions, again, fuck you. I have nothing else to say to you but those two words.

These assholes need to go, it's really that simple.