For Want Of A Nail (Signs Of The Times, Two.)

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.

...

Why, why, why, why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't wanna fuck in the first place? Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked. Conservatives don't give a shit about you until you reach military age. Then they think you're just fine. Just what they've been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life... pro-life... These people aren't pro-life, they're killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it? They're not pro-life. You know what they are? They're anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don't like them. They don't like women. They believe a woman's primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state. ~George Carlin

I saw this a couple hours ago.

People holding up signs that say "Donald Trump is NOT weird."

Yes, yes he is, and I've literally seen years of evidence to back that shit up.

I stood there in my living room with my roommate in June of 2015 and watched Trump say, live on CNN that he "Didn't need God's forgiveness." From the Christian, Republican perspective I started out with, it should've ended right there. My then-roommate and I both went off about that shit for days, he's an African American Baptist, I'm a former Christian who doesn't identify as anything, religiously.

I sat through years of watching this dude, despite the fact that he was the President and living in the White House and could literally eat whatever the fuck he wanted and get the best food imaginable from anywhere on the planet, he ate Big Mac's and shit like that. I mean, fucking WHY?? I'm just an old guy with a basic type job and health issues and I DON'T EAT THAT CRAP because it makes me sick!

I mean, this dude is disgusting and obviously fat and literally shits himself and even though with his alleged money he could probably get help with all that, or certainly apply himself and exercise and take care of himself, he doesn't. It's easier to just lie about it, or something.

And there's people dumb enough or drunk on cultic loyalty or partisanship enough that they at least pretend to believe all that crap, and I know some people just do it for attention and money.

Trump said, live on Howard Stern, that he wanted to bone his own daughter...I literally heard this said. I wasn't a Howard Stern fan, but my buddy was.

And a couple days ago the son of a bitch went to Arlington National Cemetery and did a (illegal, mind you) campaign event and made that shit all about HIM. Motherfucker literally stood there, on the graves of war-dead, doing that stupid thumbs-up bit that he does.

Yes, Trump is fucking weird.

And it needed to be said.

And since he slimed his way down the golden escalator, I've seen Christians and Republicans agree with, do their own damn selves, or simply tolerate shit they used to say would bring on the torments of Revelation...and they did that, simply because Trump gave them permission to be bad people.

Which was apparently all they wanted, all along.

Anybody else had it with this bullshit, or is it just me??

You know what I want? I want a President that there's video of them doing normal shit. I want a President that I know knows how to cook their own food, that I can see has healthy relationships and that does things that I know come from basic everyday American culture of some kind. As the saying goes "For want of a nail..." I see Kamala can manage a pretty snappy salute, too. Yo,

If somebody puts effort into small things, it scales up.

You watch this video for a few more seconds and it's pretty damn obvious that Kamala Harris's husband, Doug, is right there in the kitchen helping out. I get that, that kind of thing is how I was raised and what my Mom taught me and what various girlfriends, my ex-wife and assorted other partners expected. I come from "If you want food, there's the kitchen, get it yourself." Likewise, If somebody's cooking and you wanna eat too, you help out. It's how most people function.

Where's Trump's Slovenian immigrant Not-Wife, again?? You know, the porn-model arm-candy from a few years ago that you never, ever see anymore??

If we're being honest I see way, way more objectively foreign-to-the-American-experience weird shit from Trump and his ilk than I've ever seen from...well, pretty much every Democratic politician in my lifetime. 

I mean I thought Bill Clinton was an absolute scumbag but he never went that far...that is, as far as pretty much every day of the Trump administration or any of his campaigns went, Bill Clinton was an unfaithful husband, but he and Hillary still had something that could recognizably be called a marriage, they were seen in public on a regular basis together and sometimes observed to be happy, and they had normal Christmas decorations and regular house stuff and shit like that.

The only time Donald Trump ever smiles is when he's being mean to somebody, and I've never seen Melania Trump smile at all. And Republicans, by and large, seem to want to be miserable bastards.

Hell, I've never heard of a liberal or even 99% of conservatives who could even close to match Trump's "Mutant love child of Liberace and Saddam Hussein" decorating style, or for that matter his desire, while being the President of America...to be a sniveling toady to people like Vladimir Putin.

I mean, for fuck's sake, you get out of Moscow and St. Petersburg and Vladivostok and go out in the rest of the country, Russia is basically a backwards 17th Century shithole. No wonder "Conservatives" love the idea of Putin's Russia. 

Current Republicans want America to be a place where you're defined by what you were born as. Our founders and pretty much every American President or other political leader (including all other pre-Trump Republicans) before Trump wanted it to be a place where you were defined by what you have it in yourself to be...or at least they said they wanted that.

But I'll note nobody who has a choice seems to want to live in Russia right now, except for maybe Alex Jones...and for all their hatred of America as it is, I don't see Republicans having the guts to leave.

That, too, should tell you something.

They'd rather inflict Trump on all of us, and they're mad that Democrats have gotten it together and it looks like Trump is gonna lose...again, mind you.

It's a sign of the times that people would try and hold up signs saying Trump is not weird.

But we can see not only that he is weird, but that he's dragged the entire Republican Party right along with him.

I'm serious, if this is what the Republican Party has come to it should not be this much of a fight to get rid of these fucking people.

We're either what we say we are, or we're not, America. It's time to cut the shit and get a grip.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You're either a better citizen, or you're not.

Слава Україна!

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.  ~George Orwell, 1984.

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

Bonus Content

Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. 

In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. 

~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.