Dogs Of War (American Revelation XVII, Fourteen.)

 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

...

Give me back my broken night

My mirrored room, my secret life
It's lonely here
There's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That's an order

Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that's left
And stuff it up the hole
In your culture
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I've seen the future, brother
It is murder

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing (won't be nothing)
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it's overturned
The order of the soul

When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
I wonder what they meant
When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
I wonder what they meant
When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
I wonder what they meant. ~Leonard Cohen, The Future.

As I've mentioned a time or two on here, mostly years ago now, before I had ferrets I had dogs. Odie and Snowman, pretty much the Idiot Schnauzer Brothers, but the boys were both very good dogs.

I worked third shift all of both of their lives (I got them about four years apart, and they both lived to be about 14.) Dogs want walks, but dogs also like to not be on a leash all the time, the better to, you know...dog. Both of the apartment complexes I lived in, down in Mount Pleasant, had dog parks.

Halfway through my time down there, the city got a dog park. Dog parks were absolutely essential to helping my boys live their best life. In point of fact, I was one of the people who contributed to the fund to build the municipal dog park. I got a T-shirt for it, still have it, in fact.

And also, starting in about November-December of 2012 I was dealing with arthritis. You have no idea, after that, how much easier dog parks made my life. Yeah, when I lived in the trailer park my roommate would cheerfully help me with walking the dogs, or they had their chain in the yard...but still, if I was going to town and it wasn't hot or I wasn't going to be leaving them in the truck for too long, it was easy enough to just take the boys and go to the dog park. And it was little things like that, that made the life if the urban terrier worth living. They both had pretty good lives, too. 

I saw this last night, Donald Trump's Project 2025 has...of all things...abolishing dog parks as a policy plank. Just in case you ever believed that Republicans ever really wanted to get government out of your life. Motherfuckers don't just wanna control your life and make you miserable...they wanna shit all over your dog's day, too. 

In the summer of 2017 I found Snowman flopping around in the yard on his rope, he'd had a stroke and had to be put to sleep, At least I was able to get it done that day, so he didn't suffer. In May of 2020, Odie started having issues, I had a choice of two vet appointments and took the second one because it was at least on payday. He deteriorated very fast, and it was enough to make me wish I'd taken the first one. It turned out that he had cancer. My roommate had to help me take him to the vet.

It was fully two months after he was gone before I adapted to that dog-sized hole in my routine, but I'm kind of glad they're gone if this is how Republicans wanna treat dogs, much less dog owners like me. Dogs don't deserve this bullshit.

Fuck these motherfuckers.

And more than that, I find their rationalization that dog parks are somehow "Anti-child" ridiculous on the face of it...and not just because I've seen a hell of a lot of kids playing with a hell of a lot of dogs at the dog park...my own dogs had their kid friends too.

The people who come up with bullshit like that tend to have unseemly obsessions with birth rates and female fertility...and for that matter ages of consent both in America and other countries, as if they spank the monkey to the idea of being Lords ruling over serfs while having huge harems of (White) women and girls, so as to grow themselves some sort of new "Master Race." (As if they're not all complete fucking losers themselves.)

You'll also note that these are the same creepy ass weird motherfuckers who are against free school lunches (or education for non-elites at all!) not to mention against any steps to protect children from gun violence or limit the ability of violent mentally ill people to obtain semi-automatic rifles. So no, they don't give a good goddamn about kids except for how they can use them as a wedge issue to wreck other people's shit and suck all the joy out of your life. Seriously, if you wanna be miserable, have at it. It's a free country, but I don't have to, and I won't, not for your ego. Fuck you.

Like seriously who the fuck wants to live like that, and what's even the goddamn point??

Why do these fucking people want to be afraid and angry and miserable all the time?? I get that they want justifications to do terrible shit...but ya know I lived through the Reagan years and I served in the military in the 1990's and I remember the early aughts well enough...I mean, shit, I'm divorced. 

You can justify or plot plenty of bad shit without ritualistically giving up your own freedom and train-wrecking yourself in the name of immanentizing some kind of shitty right-wing eschaton.

It has nothing to do with God or religion, it's all about ideology and Power for their own sakes, and if you think these assholes wouldn't make their own Mark Of The Beast and make people take it, you're wrong. These motherfuckers made me start believing in Revelation a long time ago.

That's why I write about American Revelation as a topic, like, at all.

Meanwhile these motherfuckers want to get rid of everything from contraception and dog parks to mortgages, the National Weather Service and women's rights...for no better reason than to be shitty to other people and make it so only the very rich can afford to do anything, ever. Like does it ever occur to these assholes that Republican policies are already a non-zero factor in why less people are having children?? Who can afford it?? 

(Also who the fuck thinks 90% of us didn't grow up using the same bathrooms as female relatives-and thus being exposed to stuff like tampons-simply because we only had one bathroom in the house?)

But it's not just the kids...Republicans nowadays want everybody's life...even their own...to be as nasty, brutish and short as possible simply because they think it proves some kind of ideological point that exists only in their own fucking heads. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if these assholes thought having a cat was somehow subversive just because Ukrainian soldiers posing with cats became a meme.

And of course JD Vance seems to have it out for "Cat Ladies" for some reason anyway. I don't fucking get it...or maybe I just don't want to.

I mean, the basic idea of conservatism as I was taught it could pretty well be summed up as erring in favor of individual rights, but at the same time, if enough people want to have a dog park then we'll have one. For fuck's sake it's called living in a civilized society!

And yeah, I get it, Republicans don't wanna do that.

Of course, I get it, some of these fucking people are against any public good that's not specifically for the rich, or filtered through ideology or religion...no matter how small or even what it is. It's not about lower taxes, at least not anymore...it's about cruelty as ideology and a mania for control. It's about the peculiar combination of savagery, selfishness and servility that's come to define modern Republicans.

They'd be fine with being slaves, so long as they were a better class of slaves than some of the other slaves, or some shit.

And I'm tired of it. I'm not the only one, either.

Here's the thing, bro.

This is America and nobody has to put up with your bullshit, your hate, your perversities or your various weird hang-ups, and I'm gonna be honest, I'm old enough to remember when some of the shit I've seen Republicans say lately would've got a person beat up...by Republicans.

But that was then. Those old Republicans? They're dead or voting Democratic now. What changed? Well, if you ask me, it basically comes down to the fact that because a Black man said "Yes We Can" all modern Republicans (most of whom are actually reheated segregationist Democrats, rather than actual ideological Republicans...but they chased all of us out, so what does it matter?) can even imagine to say now is "No We Can't." 

Yes, that's how racist these sons of bitches are.

And they'd rather burn it all down than have that fact even be discussed.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

It's time to Be A Better Citizen, period.

And honestly, at this point, Republicans?

Bring it on, unleash the Dogs Of War.

You're going to lose, and your shitty ideology is going to end up on the ash heap of history, but not soon enough.

You think people don't like you now? Bro, I looked it up, around 50% of American households have or have had dogs at some point.

So yeah, keep fucking with people, and motherfuckers like Cat Turd and Chris Rufo are gonna find their heads stuck in toilets like high school kids who antagonized the wrong person, and Donald Trump? He'll end up in prison, probably howling at the moon on whatever drugs he can scrounge up in there.

This shit needs to stop, and it's getting to the point where I think the rest of us are gonna stop it.

And Republicans got nothin/' 

But they think that, in and of itself, is some kind of a gotcha.

Like I said, I used to be a conservative, and I can't even imagine why anybody wants to live like this bullshit.

Most of us don't...but these idiots are gonna have to find that out the hard way, I guess.

Слава Україна

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press

Thirteen

And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama