Fuck Erick Erickson. (Fuck Republicans I.)

 If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

I saw this earlier today. Evidently, at least for Erick Erickson, The Supreme Court and the "Conservative" movement in general going off the rails lately is all about revenge.

Revenge for what, Erick? Civil Rights? Women not being your personal property? The fact that your side lost the Civil War?

Fuck that motherfucker.

My personal theory is the Supreme Court went rogue to try and cause distraction and kick up a fuss to protect the Republican Party in general and Donald Trump in particular from accountability since there appear to be...maybe...a dozen Republicans nationwide who weren't balls-deep in the whole goddamned attempt to overthrow our government and replace it with Donald Trump. A man who, evidently, threw food at the wall, tried to choke out a Secret Service agent, and who damned well knew members of the mob he whipped up were armed.

And Trump wanted to lead them into battle, against his own country.

Think about that for a second.

That's the literal Constitutional definition of treason, right there.

But Erick here shows that Trump isn't really the problem, just a shitty opportunist.

And Erick, that Supreme Court you're bitching about? It's been dominated by Republicans for that same 50 years you're bitching about...but not your kind of Republicans, apparently.

And in that lies a warning for all you other Republicans. If SCOTUS keeps at this rogue bullshit it's going to break this country. At that point, normie Republicans, you will be at the mercy of the mob.

Which ostensibly-respectable, often anti-Trump Republicans like Erick Erickson will be only too happy to lead, since it never was really about Trump either. 

It was ever and always about racism.

And all this bullshit is about accountability, not just for 1/6 but going way back. For example a warrant was found this week in the basement of a Mississippi court house. A warrant for the arrest of the white woman whose lies led to the murder of Emmett Till. She's still alive. His family wants that woman arrested.

That's what these fucking people are afraid of. What you got to hide, Erick?

If you think these motherfuckers will stop with wrecking the Civil Rights of Black people, or of LGBT people, you're wrong. In fact, they'll probably be coming after you first...because as racist and terrible as you've been you weren't racist or terrible enough.

My Grandpa, a Naval Aviation retiree, had saved some newspapers for various reasons from when he was stationed in the South. As a kid...and later as an adult after he died...I looked through some of those. There's not much those Southern white people hated more than Northern white people, and it was mainly over the whole idea that people in general had rights, that workers could organize, and stuff like that. A lot of those Southern newspapers were the Newsmax and Fox News of their time.

But it's worse than that, even.

Apparently a lot of these Republicans want to fuck 12-year-old girls. They keep getting caught talking about that shit. The same people who call liberals "Groomers" and LGBT people "Sexual Deviants" are consistently getting caught talking about the idea of Tween girls having sex.

Doesn't that seem kind of fucked up to you?

But it's part and parcel of these sons of bitches' belief that other people's humanity and sovereignty over their own bodies is not a thing they need to respect.

And when the massive social disruption caused by these so-called "Conservatives" leads to a divided America and Neo-Confederate forces and the United States Armed Forces peering through their gunsights at each other, and a bloody tit-for-tat of airstrikes, missile attacks and naval battles, and hordes of refugees...many of whom will be non-Christians, non-fascist conservatives, People of Color and women...expect that among those refugees will be 13-year-old Moms...and those who (rightly) don't want to be Moms.

Expect that if we ever take back the parts of the country that these sons of bitches end up controlling, we're going to need things like the Special Court for Sierra Leone...but here in America and specifically for dealing with things like sexual assault.

Because that's the kind of world These Fucking People want to live in, apparently. 

A world where most people's lives are nasty, brutish and short...but where old wealthy white dudes get to live in fabulous wealth and practice perversions that would shame the Devil...while old simpering priests that dress like one-man Pride floats extol how "Righteous" they are before the captive masses.

I don't want to live in that kind of world, and you don't either.

Vote these fuckers out, demand that Trump be prosecuted, and remove the current corrupt Supreme Court members...and more to the point bring them up on charges of treason too, because when you're literally working on behalf of a foreign power to destroy America and replace the Constitution with radical Catholic doctrine...the Knights of Malta...that's what you call that shit.

Treason.

And people like Erick Erickson go along with it because Racism. Don't let them fool you, either.

This is America, assholes, we don't goddamned answer to your religion, the Federalist Society, or the Sovereign Military Order of Malta...or the 1920's Ku Klux Klan, neither.

And we all sure as hell ain't waiting for the Rapture...which isn't even a Biblical doctrine, but something a dude named John Nelson Darby made up whole-cloth in the 19th century.

The time for Knights ended 600 fucking years ago, the age of aristocrats over 100 years ago. We as a goddamned species had better wake up and deal with the 21st Century and stop tolerating those who won't, be they Communist-revanchist Russian dictators or American Catholic extremists.

Слава Україна!

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

"White Life?" (You Break It, You Buy It, One.)

I don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do. And that's the way every Negro should get. Any time you know you're within the law, within your legal rights, within your moral rights, in accord with justice, then die for what you believe in. But don't die alone. Let your dying be reciprocal. This is what is meant by equality. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. ~Malcolm X.
 

I saw this the other night, Representative Mary Miller called the overturning of Roe Vs. Wade a "Historic victory for White life." She tried to walk it back later, but she said it and the crowd roared, Trump was standing right next to her and made no move to challenge or correct her. 

What the fuck is "White Life?" Note I ask this as a white man and a former Republican. Has there been some kind of Jim Crow Memorial Society or Segregationist Underground all this time that I didn't know about? I grew up conservative and I was taught this shit was wrong.

And it's funny how, given that the whole Pro-Life movement was, in fact, a proxy for racist bullshit this whole time...just how stunningly fast they've discarded that whole "Pro-Life" thing, now that they don't need it anymore.

Telling, that is.

Shortly after I saw that quote, I saw this. As regards women's health issues, the Department of Defense and the military have basically told the Supreme Court to go fuck itself.

As a veteran who knows how important things like that are in terms of readiness and the health of female Airmen, Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers, I have to support such a decision even though I well understand the negatives.

And what are those? Well, it further frays the apolitical nature of the United States Armed Forces and it further damages civil-military relations issues and undermines civilian control of the military, that is actually bad. But of course the military...and the wider Federal government on general principle...can't just take this crap laying down without adverse effects for itself and the country as a whole.

I rather suspect there's going to be a lot of Federal agencies telling this Court to go fuck itself or simply ignoring its dictates until this situation is rectified one way or another or until the Court stops handing treats out to the far-right, or both.

But like I've already said, I think the far-right knows what's up, knows their days are numbered and is trying to grab what they can, while they can, before the hammer falls. It's not just the 1/6 hearings, it's resistance to their crap across the board. It's that Democratic favorability for the midterms has swung ten points in favor of the Democratic Party in just the past few days.

And also, I think, because they know something's up, and because I think some Red States are going to try to secede, I think they're also trying to establish a basis for their own legal system. I think something like what the Russians are doing in Ukraine is going to end up happening here, and there's going to be a war...or at least a Right-wing insurgency...because that's what the Far-Right is saying it wants, openly, period. When somebody tells you who they are, believe them.

And here's the thing, here's why I think their scheme to break off a piece of America for themselves might actually work:

I see a hell of a lot of people disgusted, and taking down flags, and one hell of a lot of them are veterans.

The Supreme Court has caused a full-on legitimacy crisis and damaged the full faith and credit of our government. Not in some abstract way, not with some other country or other entity, but with Americans, with We The People, with those who traditionally should be at the vanguard of supporting our country and its government. 

This is on top of "Conservatives" spending basically the entire last generation trying to do exactly that in one way or another already, because Ayn Rand Libertarian Horseshit or whatever, or because Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay or Paul Ryan had some other moral low they needed to plumb...and that was before Trump.

I've been saying for a long time that "Conservatives" hate America. And now they've successfully dinged the whole damn country...not with our allies this time, not with shitty bad actors like Saudi Arabia who laugh at us Infidels while they conspire with even-more Atheistic bad actors in our own government...but with us.

With people like me who've served this country and put our asses on the goddamned line. And no, I absolutely cannot find fault with that when I find out that the entire political philosophy I was raised on and spent 17 years of my adult life actively supporting was nothing but a goddamned lie.

And that's what faithless fucks like "Conservatives" in general and these Supreme Court Justices in particular seem to have forgotten. When you lie to people, when your Word ain't worth SHIT, you ain't either.

Respect is earned, by every action, every day. You can't buy that shit. You can't force people to respect you. It's a thread that runs through our entire system that our government only operates with the consent of the governed. It says so right in our founding documents.

That consent, that moral right, is evaporating in real time and we can all see it.

And here's the thing, who's more likely to fix this situation or to start something new that's actually workable? People who, whatever their disagreements and faults, believe in compromise, cooperation and working together??

Or the people who'd happily shout "Unga Bunga" at golden idols while cannibalizing murdered neighbors, so long as their lust for more hate and rage is sated, and for whom no immorality is too much??

Again, respect is earned by every action, every day. All the time, no mistakes, and it takes but one violation of that trust to lose it forever.

Service Before Self

Integrity Above All.

Excellence In All That We Do.

You break that shit, you bought it, and you can own the fucking consequences.

Someday, conservatives, y'all going to need something from the rest of us or wish America as it was, was still a thing, and none of this...and none of us...will be there for you. 

You break America...and you can own the shitty little banana republic that you'll get out of whatever part of it you take...probably only after a whole bunch of fighting that wasn't worth it for nobody.

And the rest of the goddamn world will move on without your ass, and never take you seriously again.

And what I find endlessly incomprehensible is just how much These Fucking People hate their fellow Americans.

White American "Conservatives" would rather burn America to the ground, and hell, destroy our global civilization and our planet than see LGBT people, People of Color, or women or anybody else get their fair share of America. 

I don't know how the hell people can hate anybody that much...much less everybody.

Civilization keeps you alive, too. You might want to consider that before you keep trying to burn it down. Cultural and social change, and the future, is going to happen no matter what.

But they'd rather end the world in the name of their small, shitty, miserable god than accept that.

Fuck these motherfuckers.

Слава Україна!

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

Mask Off (DixiePublicans, Yo.)

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

I wasn't going to write today.

But then, I saw this.

Lauren Hoebert literally calling Pro-choice protests an "Insurrection." Yes, this is exactly how much contempt Republicans have for you and your Constitutional Rights under the First Amendment.

Yet Republicans can try to literally overthrow our government and that's a "Protest?"

Seriously, fuck these bad-faith motherfuckers.

And then it got worse.

John Cornyn, literally trying to argue to Barack Obama that Brown Vs. Board of Education was a wrongly-decided case that somehow stripped rights from people. Mind you, that and the Civil Rights Act were what undid Southern Segregation.

What? The right of Black people to be treated badly by society and have to go to substandard schools, etc. etc. ???

That's not a right. That's not what rights are.

Cornyn just gave away the fucking game, he believes that he has, or should have, a right to discriminate against other people.

If you wonder why...why all this anti-abortion, libertarian, religious-right crap not to mention the constant glorification of the 1950's that's been going on my whole life...that's why. That right there. John Cornyn and most Republicans now living aren't in any mental or ideological space "Conservatives" else they'd have gone with the status quo which, at least for my whole life, has been civil rights.

Cornyn and a lot of those like him are Segregationists, and it's been very uncool to even think that, much less say it, for almost 60 years now.

 But literally everything that's driven Movement Conservatism for the last 60-70 years has been a reaction against not so much Roe Vs. Wade or Civil Rights or any of the stuff that's come up since...but a visceral, emotional reaction to the Brown Vs. Board of Education decision...and they have to go after all these other rights, first, because Brown is the plank they all stand on.

Oh, I get it, their excuse is they're just kicking these decisions back to the states.

States that, minus a few large or generally well-intentioned places like the West Coast states or the Northeast...either don't have the resources to do this, that and the other thing because they don't collect shit in taxes or they're actively trying to kill their constituents half the time with malice aforethought because Republicans.

Yeah, that's about how far I trust the chucklefucks in my state legislature and not just the Republicans, some of the Democrats aren't that great either. 

Also, and speaking as a former conservative here, I've never particularly trusted state legislatures with my rights specifically because states have a history of doing very fucked up shit. And not just in the South. Usually, it's the Feds who reign that in.

 This morning I went to the Farmer's Market with my Mom, basic uber-liberal retired social worker who was a Democrat (and specifically a Clintonista) for 15 years before I became one. She doesn't follow politics, she doesn't bring that shit up. She hates it when me and Pat (her partner, your basic conservative "Joe Manchin style" Democrat, an Army Aviation retiree and also a retired social worker) talk about this stuff.

And she brought up the Roe Vs. Wade thing, not me. She brought up that next Republicans will go after LGBT rights, People of Color, civil rights and things like Social Security. And she...knowing that I used to be a Republican...a source of cheerful disagreement in earlier times...said "Don't vote Republican."

And she sure as hell ain't wrong.

We went to the Farmer's Market...a space full of hippies and weird people selling baked goods, produce and various other stuff, and it was of course a happy, diverse space filled with all kinds of people, Capitalism, in its modern incarnation, yo.

But there was this one guy in a Trump shirt walking around with his dog and doing nothing but glaring at everybody...

Like how dare we even exist.

And that's the thing, as bad as the religious nuts or the segregationists are or would make things, you could go somewhere else and get out from under their power. That's what the Great Migration and all that stuff even was. That's why Chicago is so hated by These Fucking People, because it was a mecca for Blacks who left the South and a source of both information and resistance. The Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, was the paper of record for Black people in a wide swath of Southern states.

And there's those who would happily do worse that people like Clarence Thomas, John Cornyn or Sam Alito, because they won't bother with legal process, they'll just murder people.

Stuff like this is precisely why the Founders enumerated all these rights for us in the first place and set up our government the way they did. You may not like the way things are going, or have been for awhile, but our Federalized system prevents one major problem, as the Trump years and bungled COVID-19 responses showed it dilutes authoritarian horseshit: Autocracies, dictatorships and monarchies are very, very efficient at getting things done, especially killing people.

There's fucking people out there who are literally itching for just any old excuse to kill people, who literally do see any opposition to their evil bullshit as some kind of "rebellion" and anybody who disagrees with their fanaticism of the moment and their murderous hatred as an enemy to be enslaved or murdered, and increasingly these fucking people are just going completely mask-off and not even bothering with their shitty selfish religion and other assorted justifications.

And anybody who falls outside of that is expected to just meekly shuffle off and die quietly in the Outer Darkness. Time will come, I'm warning you, when that includes most conservatives, too.

And when these fucking people meet too much resistance to own the whole country, and break off a piece of America for themselves, that's who's going to dominate that space, the fucking wannabe murderers.

Because once these fucking people get their own space, nobody's going to have the guts to stand up to those who want to be killers.

But remember, it was basic Republicans who gave these fucking people and their racist hate a goddamned national platform in the first place...because they thought they could control these people and they'd crawl back under their rocks after they were done voting Republican.

But as you can see, those people didn't do that, instead they became Senators. And now people who think the Senators don't go far enough are actively going after *Republicans.*

And it will get worse.

Vote these fucking people out, all of them. And then be prepared to defend yourself.

It will come to that.

Either we all have rights, or none of us do. That's the whole damned point.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

Слава Україна!

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

RIP Roe (Death God Rising, Three.)

The moment stretched into eternity as both men brought their weapons to bear. He saw the man's eyes. It was a young face there, immediately below the emergency light, but the eyes . . . the rage there, the hatred, nearly stopped the Colonel's heart. But Bondarenko was a soldier before all things. The Afghan's first shot missed. His did not.

The Archer felt shock, but not pain in his chest as he fell. His brain sent a message to his hands to bring the weapon to the left, but they ignored the command and dropped it. He fell in stages, first to his knees, then on his back, and at last he was staring up at a ceiling. It was finally over. Then the man stood by his side. It was not a cruel face, the Archer thought. It was the enemy, and it was an infidel, but he was a man, too, wasn't he? There was curiosity there. He wants to know who I am, the Archer told him with his last breath. "Allah Akbar!" God is great 

Yes, I suppose He is, Bondarenko told the corpse. He knew the phrase well enough. Is that why you came? He saw that the man had a radio. It started to make noise, and the Colonel bent down to grab it. "Are you there?" the radio asked a moment later. The question was in Pashto, but the answer was delivered in Russian. "It is all finished here," 

~Closing moments of the battle of the Soviet laser installation, From the novel Cardinal Of The Kremlin, by Tom Clancy.

Today, the right-wing dominated SCOTUS voted to repeal Roe Vs. Wade.

This is almost certain to throw our entire legal and political system into chaos, and balkanize and break the United States of America...which is of course the entire goddamned point.

California isn't going to do what Idaho says, Alabama isn't going to follow New York's lead...almost no matter what, because of cultural differences and regionalism. Federal laws, the Federal government as a neutral arbiter and the basic concept of liberal democracy (small "L" small "D") are all that holds this shit together. Hell, the only reason Clarence and Ginni Thomas could get married was because of Federal and SCOTUS court decisions!

Somebody has to govern for all, to keep everyone's interests in mind and things balanced, or things stop working and the whole thing starts to fall apart. As soon as someone actually starts governing zero-sum and taking away other people's rights, shit is going to fall apart and the United States is going to cease to be United, period.

Hell, Texas is already threatening to secede, and one hell of a lot of people (mostly liberals) said "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out." 

Not one word about the millions of people in Texas who won't want to live under some variant of nominally-Christian-Fascism. 

And that's a problem. Americans are already not a unified culture or people and the only people to even try to address this has been the Right, and they've done so in the worst possible way, by simply trying to impose some version of "White" culture on everybody...but since nobody can even agree what that is, it didn't work. We are a nation of laws, and not men, for this very reason.

Take that away, as SCOTUS "Conservatives" have now done...in the service of ideologies none dare expound on in public...and the central thing that binds us all together goes away.

Republicans have, at least since the mid-1990's, acted as if they only answered to the 20% of the population that always votes (R) no matter what. Conservatives...both the original kind and the current version...have been on the losing end of all this "Culture War" shit basically forever, because conservatism simply isn't popular. It was never intended to be, it's conservatism.

Or at least, it used to be.

This whole current mess is about two things:

#1 Have you noticed how the pace of all this crap has gone into lightspeed since the 1/6 Hearings started? "Conservatives" are absolutely terrified that they might be held to account for insurrection against our government...and since they made sure to have at least one SCOTUS Justice...more probably two, balls deep in the whole damn thing (Because they're Republicans and fuck you, that's why) they've got to grab what they can, while they can, now. That gets a lot harder if Alito and Thomas get arrested for sedition and/or treason.

It's not really about Trump, it's about the fact that Republicans, at all levels nationwide, were involved in 1/6. If he, or even some of the people involved go down...likely the whole criminal enterprise comes crashing down.

#2, See #1 and it's all...from all the crazy gun shit lately to the Roe SCOTUS ruling to the whole Trump thing...about breaking America in two in order to create a safe space for These Fucking People's bigotry. That's all it is, nothing more, nothing less.

And this is absolutely a subject over which many parts of the country and even parts of different states will have literally irreconcilable differences...and not necessarily where you might think, either.

I've lived in some part of Northern Michigan or another for 35 years, with relatively brief interruptions for military service or work. I mean, fuck, it is utterly impossible to explain to anyone who has not lived here for 35 years the sheer White-bread Caucasity of Northern Michigan in 1987 or 1992, just for example. If you ran into a Black person at the mall here back in 1992...there was a 90% or greater chance that they either were an Airman stationed at Wurtsmith Air Force Base (or an Air Guardsman deployed to our local Air National Guard station) or married to somebody who was.

Now there's damned little difference between here and Mount Pleasant where I lived for 18 years...or Saginaw, for that matter. There might not be quite as many Black people or Latinos here as down there, but there's a lot of them and they're sure not going anywhere.

And nobody, I mean nobody, wants to go back to the way things were in 1972, much less 1963. It's the 21st goddamned century, and the only fucking reason that a third of this goddamned country has any trouble with that is because people keep coddling or tolerating these fucking people's prejudice.

And that holds true whether it's relatives merely rolling their eyes at their racist aunt on holidays instead of telling her to shut the fuck up, or Congressmen and political leaders who refuse to call this shit out because then so-and-so might not talk to them at tonight's Elysium (Sorry, couldn't resist the Vampire: The Masquerade reference.)

Too many of us White people value comity with others who happen to be assholes, over the rights of our fellow citizens or even members of our own families. But as far as those people are concerned there is no "Us." There's no comity or consensus to uphold, And they have repaid us with nothing but bad faith and continually trying to rip this country apart.

Which is a thing they have now established a legal framework for doing, by simply ensuring that Constitutional rights and legal precedent don't mean shit, and that anything not specifically enumerated in a law somewhere is technically fair game for some asshole to just kick over for no greater purpose than simply being an asshole because they think it's funny.

Yes, that is exactly what this "Own The Libs" bullshit is, same with all these other infinitely goalpost-movable right-wing catch phrases, and absolutely nothing is safe. In fact, it's simply a matter of how you phrase things. 

If the Right, for example, decides they want to ban civilian ownership of firearms all that a Right-wing US-Successor-State government would need to say is "We need your guns to fight the Black people, Democrats, and Liberals!" 

And the motherfuckers would likely gladly hand them the fuck over. 

If the cynical manipulators running this whole mess wanted to bring back slavery all they'd have to do would be run a slick ad campaign telling their followers they can "Own The Libs" by being slaves, and offer some vague promise of something something Gazpacho for it. I guarantee you, some people would do it.

Some people's entire identity is wrapped up in all this Republican shit. But I'm here to tell you if you pull the thread a little bit with such people, 60% of the time they're not somebody who's ideologically or by natural inclination a conservative (in any "small c" sense.) They're usually somebody who two generations ago would have been a Segregationist Democrat...or who would have valued comity with the same.

But historically this shit tends to get away from the people who started it, and it ends up eating them, too. The Republican Party of Goldwater or Nixon, who authored the "Southern Strategy" is dead, as is that of Ronald Reagan. The Republican Party as reorganized around MAGA and Trump is already trending the same way. 

It can and will get worse. Look for ideas being literally marketed that will do exactly that.

Our founders set up our system the way they did for a reason, to try to prevent that kind of shit.

If you want to know what the importance of our Constitution, the ideas of Precedent and Rule of Law, and the entire idea of a baseline of Truth mean to civilization...it's that they prevent exactly that kind of crap.

And that's why the right wing wants to get rid of all that stuff, and if they can't do it legally they'll just overthrow or sunder America, start a civil war or a right-wing insurgency and make sure everything literally comes down to a fight, because they'll win some of them, even though they lose others. 

If they get their asses kicked they'll just cry persecution, manipulate global public opinion and try to get the rest of the world to force a settlement so they get some of what they wanted. With Russia in their corner it'll at least partially work.

And if it does, if these fucking people break off a piece of America for themselves, it will never stop because these sons of bitches always have to be at war with somebody. Putin will have the bipolar world of the Cold War back...and whatever part of America these motherfuckers control will be taking orders from Moscow...because that's who their patron is. 

And more to the point, with Putin and his oligarchs and thugs otherwise cut off from the West, if they want that taste of Western life that they really crave...because even they don't really want to live in Russia...they have to break off a piece of the US and the plan has to succeed. It's all they have.

But SCOTUS and the Catholic Radical Right just handed them the key and we've left a lot of shit laying around in the open...I've already seen a lot of obvious Russian bots beating the "Blame Democrats" dead horse when it's plainly obvious who actually did this shit.

The Right and the Russians would gladly feed us all to their death god, just because they think it's funny and "Fuck Democrats and/or 'RINO's."

And if they can break the USA even a little bit, that increases proportionally the amount of damage they can do to the rest of the world, an America at say 75% capability can only help Ukraine 75% as much and likely not without straining itself in so doing.

The modern Right is a global movement, dedicated to forcing its own shitty vision on the entire planet. If we go down, the rest of the system balkanizes. If we collapse completely, no one else is safe at all.

 Do you get it now? Do you see what the stakes are?

This can't continue, and We The People have to be the ones to step up and do something about it.

That spell it out for you?

It's not just about Abortion and it never was, it was never about Life.

It was always about Power, for the very few.

Part Two

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Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

Facing It (Death God Rising, Two.)

My black face fades,

hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. 

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke. 

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

The Texas GOP officially no longer recognizes the United States government, according to the platform they passed at their convention last weekend, where a sitting US Congressman and his staff were assaulted.

Think about this for a second.

How any of this would work for one of the states most dependent on Federal dollars, and which has a large chunk of the United States Armed Forces garrisoned within its borders...not to mention millions of people who are just fine with being Americans...or who desire to be...I have no idea.

But the truth is that the Right has become so dominated by fabulists, fascists, religious fanatics and various barking mad lunatics that there's nothing much else left at this point...and soon, there won't be anything else at all. 

Like, these fucking people are so high on this "Own the Libs" horse shit that I don't even know what they think they're trying to do...and neither do they. Right, Marge?

Left on its own and cut loose from the Union...with III Corps, all those Air Force wings and Navy training wings, NASA and all those federal employees gone...not to mention all the money they spend and all the straight-up Federal funding, what's left? Then you've got the brain drain from people leaving. Texas would very shortly become a Banana Republic, but with no Bananas. 

Basically, Putin's Russia, but presided over by drug lords and oil companies...and locked in a state of constant conflict because so many of these fucking people just want to shoot somebody. There's only one problem with that; Nobody else who lived in Texas besides the corporate overlords and the drug lords would be able to afford to buy even a box of 5.56mm shells before long, if there were any to be had.

But the truth is, it doesn't matter. Lunatic dreams are a nightmare reality for the sane.

The truth is, these fucking people are trying to immanentize some kind of shitty right-wing eschaton. You want to see how that works out in real life, look at what's become of Russia.

Putin is literally blending Soviet iconography with Christian imagery, this image is from the Wikipedia page for the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces...as I've said so many times, he's trying to have both the Cross of Christ and the Hammer And Sickle...and that only ends one way:

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. ~Matthew 6:24

I didn't say it, the Word did. Is that this "Reality has a liberal bias" stuff I keep hearing about?

And no, they didn't think it through. At least they didn't think it through past "I'll get to shoot some Mexicans and then everything will be fine" level of thought process. Change out "Mexicans" for "Ukrainians" and you have what's going on in Russia.

And people wonder why I say that the world these sons of bitches want is basically the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia but with an Applebee's and a mall. I say that, because that's exactly what some of them have been telling us, for years.

If you believe in democracy and freedom or having the right to do anything without these fucking people or some Transcendent Fascist State that they create, or hostile fascist neighbors, crawling up your ass about it...these fuckers think you should have to fight for that right, simply to be left alone! Again, how the fuck is this "Conservative?"

And how's it even working out, given that the Ukrainians are still hanging on, and things are still not going well for the Russians....and what the New Soviet Men have accomplished has been at the expense of vast amount of casualties.

And think about it, each of those self-propelled howitzers costs around 17 million Euros. The Ukrainians just had to buy a dozen of them, to help defend their country. If there was no war, how many children could have been educated, or refugees resettled, or poor people given a better shot at life, or sick people made well...with that 204 million Euros?

But it's either that, spend the money and do the fighting and the dying...or somebody else from another country gets to determine where those Ukrainian children live, what they learn, etc. etc. In case anybody's forgotten what Communism or Totalitarianism means. 

That's the kind of world these monomaniacal sons of bitches want to live in, and to make you live in it as well.

And not only that, then they think you should be "Grateful" for having to lick some wealthy person's boot. Hannity basically came right out and said this yesterday. "Be grateful the wealthy buy yachts?

Fuck you, dude.

Then they have the nerve to call this "Freedom?"

These people fucking hate the rest of us, including their own supporters.

If they hate their own supporters and want them to die of a perfectly well preventable illness, what the hell do you think they want for you or me?

Certainly, if you believe in Democracy more than these fucking people's chosen figurehead-of-the-moment, they'll hound you relentlessly.

But the truth is, Trump himself is nothing more than exactly that, a fat gilded pig on a leash at the head of their line, he's an opportunist, an appropriated symbol of these fucking people's fascism.

They'll find somebody worse, and it's going to start, soon.

These fucking people's blood religion, their death god, demands no less.

We need to face the facts here, and do something about this shit.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; 

I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

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Part One

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

Death God Rising, One.

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

...

In Natal, apartheid is a deadly cancer in our midst, setting house against house, and eating away at the precious ties that bound us together. This strife among ourselves wastes our energy and destroys our unity. My message to those of you involved in this battle of brother against brother is this: take your guns, your knives, and your pangas, and throw them into the sea! Close down the death factories. End this war now! ~Nelson Mandela, speech at a peace rally, February 25th, 1990

Over the weekend, Dan Crenshaw and members of his staff were confronted and some of them physically assaulted by Proud Boys at the Texas GOP convention.

I warned you that when these fucking murderous sons of bitches got started, they'd start with Republicans.

And sadly, that's not even the most fucked up thing I've seen since Friday night.

Adam Kinzinger's family received a threatening letter in the mail, all wrapped up in Christian-speak if you don't consider that the motherfuckers started off by calling his wife a "Cunt" and then they threatened to kill him *And* his family, because Kinzinger, as a Congressman and US Air Force (IL Air National Guard, specifically) officer, is (as he damned well is supposed to be) loyal to the country and the Constitution rather than to Donald Fucking Trump or some bullshit political movement.

But in the end, it's not and it won't be Trump. Hell, he'll probably be swallowed up by the maelstrom he created just like the rest of us will. The core value here is Fascism. Governance by murder, social control by killing people. Do you fucking get it now?

It is not possible to be "Conservative" or "Christian" or "Republican" enough for these sons of bitches because none of those things were ever even the point, or the goal.

I've been warning people about this shit for years, most explicitly since the start of the Pandemic. Imagine an America divided into fascist and anti-fascist successor states...and imagine what life would be like for those non-fascists who end up on the wrong side of the line, wherever that is. Think about that for a second.

Today, disgraced former Missouri governor Eric Greitens dropped an ad promising "RINO Hunting" and showing what appears to be a SWAT forced entry and delivers his spiel while he's carrying a shotgun.

This is literally call for violence against Republicans, after a weekend full of both threats and real violence against Republicans by violent fascists.

Juneteenth and fucking Father's Day and these sons of bitches couldn't be bothered to take the weekend off, in fact they just ramped it up. I'm serious about this. I've been seriously trying to get people to listen since the Spring of 2020.

These motherfuckers don't want a "Christian nation." They do not want a more conservative country. 

They want the goddamned killing fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, with a mall.

And they will have no particular ideology or religion other than Death. They will lift up prayers to the Death God. They will worship him with orgies of murder. Given these people's obsession with purity, no one and nothing would ever be safe.

Understand this, and internalize it, and be prepared to defend yourself because that's where this is going.

And they are...exactly as I've been saying they would be...starting this shit by going after other Republicans, mainly those who are not fascists, so far. It will very quickly escalate to those who are not fascist or violently racist enough. These people want to hash out Republican Primary Season by...well, by making it a literal hunting season on their own, with no bag limit as Greitens himself helpfully points out.

Republicans, these fucking people have already taken your Party...now they want to kill you, unless you tow a very specific line...and no, you don't get a choice what the Party Line is, the Mob will decide that for you.

Yes, this movement is fronted by, led by and mostly composed of clowns. But that doesn't make it less dangerous, that makes it worse. 

For historical comparison, Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was a quack peddler of medical woo woo bullshit before he went into the business of autocracy and mass murder. 

I saw what the fuck those people did as a peacekeeper in Bosnia, and when I found out that the Christchurch mosque shooter, Brenton Tarrant, a few years ago used a goddamned Bosnian Serb marching song in his initial livestream, for the first time in years my mind flashed back to that. 

When I heard...and later saw the evidence...that he'd chalked the names of Christian battles against Islamic forces and the names of leaders from those conflicts onto his weapons, I thought of the violent fanaticism...and frequently also hedonistic behavior...of my ex-wife and the members of her Pentecostal church. This whole movement is, to put it bluntly, filled with stupid people who think life is about either fighting or fucking.

And when you have shit like the Texas GOP explicitly saying that it doesn't recognize the United States Government...and how does that even work? Mind you, a Republican who should be a Republican's Republican, a combat-wounded US Navy veteran who lost an eye for this country...was assaulted at the convention that produced this garbage....that's what it's about. 

The political maneuvering is aimed to create the atavistic environment in which these fucking people can satisfy their most base urges and no one will care.

And it will get worse.

Why?

Because if you think above the level of that fight-or-fuck response...whether you're a Christian Right lawyer, Army veteran and Never-Trump Republican like David French or the uber-liberal transgender college student he's Retweeting, you're the enemy as far as these motherfuckers are concerned. 

They simply don't want to relate to life any other way, and no one told them they had to because it's more profitable to feed their darker urges. All too often, we don't teach people anything anymore.

And remember that there's a very cynical clique of political manipulators and wealthy individuals who've twisted conservatism and broken the Republican Party to get these fucking people to basically act worse than animals. More to the point, they did this shit because they think they'll get money. Like the damn money would be worth anything with America as a failed state?

The Republican donors and ideological hacks think they're going to end up like Putin and his oligarchs in Russia...well, how has that worked out? 

Russia is a soup sandwich, economically trashed, losing a war against Ukraine, and a whole bunch of the oligarchs are dead or fled because they didn't think any of this through and they thought they could control the Dragon right up until it turned its head their way and ate them.

And meanwhile, while an even smaller clique of Evil lives it up in Moscow or some bunker in the Urals, high off the hog more than you could ever imagine...most Russians go without, their military has destroyed itself, and a generation of Ukrainians has been forced into fighting for their country, their freedom, and their very lives and right to exist as a people.

And the whole way the modern world works...which largely came to be through the actions of Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton...is up for (rather violent) debate again. History is never a settled matter.

It'll go the same way here. 

Our cynical manipulators will lose control, too, and be put up against the wall themselves, by the mob they created. What that mob intends for the rest of us, you can only imagine, or maybe it's better if you don't...

Unless we all step up and stop this right now, before it gets out of control. 

If you want to live in peace, sometimes you have to fight to protect that peace. Freedom isn't free, and peace is far more than the mere absence of conflict. By the same token, conservatism is about more than the simple absence of liberalism. Both philosophies must exist, and coexist, in order for a society to function. If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

That's not the world the modern Right wants to live in. Again, they want the Killing Fields with...whatever thing they think is some kind of ideal of life added in. Does that quite spell it out for you?

And whether we like it or not, the time is fast approaching where the only way to even begin to deal with this crap is to keep smacking these fucking people right in the mouth until they stop doing this shit.

They need to be told no, those who are guilty of crimes need to be punished, and we have to say "Never Again" and fucking mean it.

Force is all these people want or understand. These fucking people, most of whom don't know the first thing about what war is, somehow came to believe that war is some kind of ideal state of existence.

And I am here to tell you that most of these fucking people would not survive the world they're trying to create. Do you think the white conservative racists following this Christ-less Christianity would for one second allow a brown-skinned Israeli-born woman with a name like Sigal Chattah to be in a position of power, much less interpreting the law, no matter how much anti-Black racism she spews?

Again, force is all these people understand.

So let us give them all they want. 

The only way we're going to stop this bullshit is to hound these people relentlessly, so they can't catch a break, until they reject the desire to burn down the world, stop trying to tear down civilization and stop wanting to shoot down their neighbors for no goddamned reason worth mentioning.

And so that those deceivers and hangers-on hoping to ride this tiger to power see no profit in feeding it.

Freedom and peace, don't just happen. Civilization and society are an ongoing work in progress. People have a right to be free from ideology, threats of death, and violence.

Sometimes, you have to make it work. And these people just don't want to. They'd rather call innocent people the sons of the devil and threaten to kill them.

Time's coming, and very soon, when there will be more than threats.

We're going to have to do something about this, NOW. Because if we don't, the armies of darkness will march all over the face of the Earth. 

The Death God is rising, and people who literally use their guns as objects of worship can't wait to bow to him.

If you don't understand that, you'd best start trying.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

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For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. ~Matthew 24:27

 

Polishing The Golden Turd (Age Of Asmodeus, Part Two.)

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

I keep seeing and hearing stuff like this.

Some fucking people literally care more about having cheap gasoline than they do about having their own freedom.

Let me ask you this? What the hell good is cheap gas if the Police State can shoot you in the face for no reason, just for leaving your house? There's this picture I saw from the George Floyd protests and attempted suppression thereof, that stuck with me. Little teenage white girl, still holding grocery bags. She'd been shot in the forehead, direct hit from a "non-lethal" round fired from a grenade launcher.

Because the cops were mad about some of their own being held accountable for an obvious murder committed under color of authority live on fucking camera, a situation literally so egregious at the time that it basically seemed to light half the country on fire, and justifiably so.
Because these fucking people don't want equal protection under the law, or law and order. They want to be able to interact with the rest of the world from a position of alleged superiority, with the rest of the world bullied into cowering submission.

And the only way to change that kind of shit without violence and under the color of law your own damn self is democracy. 

Spoiler: If these fucking people ever get what they think they want; A Putinist dictatorship under the Hammer And Sickle in control of some or all of America with political dogmas forced on people, nationalized everything/Soviet style, and prices of gas, food etc. kept low by artificial price controls...except for where the government decides to try to starve troublesome peoples into submission...

Yes, the "Come And Take It" people with the M16's on their shirts will indeed have armed men come to them and take it form them and they will give it up with a stream of warm urine running down one leg. 

If they don't simply get arrested, taken away and "Disappeared" for even having a gun, because in those kind of countries, access to weapons tends to be limited to elites and those who, one way or another, are willing to risk death either for criminal activities or rebellion.

Actually...there's a lot of much more democratic countries where only more well-off people usually can afford to meet (purposely high) requirements to own a firearm legally.

It will, in fact, end up that the only people with guns are the government and those who are actively trying to fight for their own freedom, organized criminals who may or may not be in bed with the regime, rival successor governments fighting the fascists, and whatever foreign dictatorship sends soldiers to provide "support" only to eventually shoot down incompetent fascists the second they're not useful...and then take over and institute their own rules.

Which, by definition, will not favor your dumb ass.

In fact, in such situations, the common people tend to get forgotten first, while the foreigners, the people with the guns, the powerful and the religious fanatics help themselves to the people, wealth and resources of a nation without so much as even bothering to pretend to ask first. 

If, for example wannabe homophobic mass-murderer/"Pastor" Mark Burns were to get the kind of power he wants, to just start killing gay people...how long do you think it will take before "Gay" = "Having something that Mark wants" so then he has you killed and takes your stuff?

That's how authoritarian/non-democratic countries and Fascist states and tin-pot dictatorships work.

And, mind you, while we're faced with multiple potentially existential crises this is the kind of crap that American media and pop culture put out there.

I've been to the Middle East twice (Egypt in 2002, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in 1994-1995) and Turkey (OK, Incirlik Airbase) once. Unless you're in an extremely Westernized, secular country like Israel or Turkey (and even then likely in the city) or at a private party at some posh pad in Dubai or Kuwait City...or have the money to pay some serious bribes, nobody looks like that. I'm 100% fucking serious. Most of these countries are either Muslim by law and tradition, or secular countries with large Muslim populations (and in the case of Israel you can add Jews and various Arab Christian sects, who are all (Well, the men are, anyway) surprisingly agreeable on how women should behave.

Sure, there's some places in the Islamic World where certain people might be technically able to dress like those ladies in public...but most likely if you're in Dubai and you're not at some rich-people party at the Burj Khalifa and you run into the wrong cop, there's a good chance you'll get arrested, or at least harassed. Seriously, even most wealthy people in the UAE don't dress like that, at least not in their own country. That's literally what the condos on the French Riviera are for.

And to some degree, all of those countries have one level of authoritarianism or another. With the exception of Iran, all of the Gulf States are monarchies. Trust me, only the elites get the condos on the French Riviera and to dress however they damn well like, even some of the time. As screwed up as it all was, the Revolution brought some degree of democracy, albeit Islamized...to Iran.

And trust me, nobody in places like Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, or the UAE...much less Iran...wants to live under the Radical Islam-lite system that Saudi Arabia has (and a whole bunch of Saudis either go elsewhere, or would love to replace that with something much worse. The only reason MBS hasn't gotten much shit for his modernizing reforms is he's a brutal killer, that spell it out for you?)

In point of fact places like Bahrain and Dubai are where the Saudis go for drinking, sexual escapades and shopping...and all this is tolerated because it's a safety valve that prevents people from blowing up the country and there's big money involved for all involved in making the trade.

But The "Reality TV" people don't tell you that type of stuff. 

They don't tell you about all the moral and other compromises that living under radical authoritarianism or whatever harsh religion involve.

Why? Because then you don't get to feel like some member of the jet-setting elite while you sit there in your recliner in your MAGA hat with your beer and Grizzly Wintergreen Tobacco watching the big-screen TV you bought with last year's tax money.

Because if you knew how the rest of the world really was, you'd have some degree of knowledge and be more difficult to manipulate with vapid conservative political...and pop culture...bullshit.

And it's all bullshit. Seriously, this is how much contempt these people have for you. All that money and all they can do is throw these gilded, polished turds at We The People.

Seriously do you think America would be what it is now if so many people had this blinkered, privileged, sheltered mentality all along? Could we have won World War II with so many outright lazy, selfish fucking people?

I'm not so sure.

Freedom isn't free. It takes work.

Letting somebody else...especially some braying jackass...do the work of life for you while you drink liquor until you fall down in the street? That only makes you a slave, sooner or later.

But those who desire the Age Of Asmodeus or consultations with Dis Pater over their stock portfolios? They don't give a damn if you're forced at gunpoint to attend church three times a week or flogged in a public square...or simply shot...for being gay or fighting back against fascism...or worked to death by some greedy corporation. They definitely won't give a damn if the proletarians are murdering each other in the streets, so long as said proletarians clean up the mess and show a decorous face to Authority.

And they sure as hell won't give a damn if you're sent to die in battle against the regime's smarter, better-equipped "liberal" enemies in some never-ending bullshit war.

Because they won't be, and they'll get to have that Dacha in Sochi or that posh apartment in the Burj Khalifa...and you won't, ever. Seriously, this is the grift that the Russian oligarchs had going that Putin blew up by invading Ukraine.

And this, absolutely, is the future modern "Conservatives" want.

Either you believe in democracy and freedom...for all people...or you don't.

Cheap gas ain't no good without the freedom to go wherever you damn well please.

It's that simple. Get with the program, or get the fuck out of the way.

Part One

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For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. ~Matthew 24:27