"Unity" Is Another Word for "Clean Up the Fucking Mess Republicans Made"

Republicans are returning to dickish form with the speed of a rabid chipmunk that got into the meth stash. It was to be expected. They should feel chastened, humbled even, by the events of the last few weeks. They should be offering a hand to Democrats, you know, the party that's not responsible for attempting to overturn the election, the party that isn't filled with assholes who took a shit in the Capitol, the party that didn't enable a twice-impeached president commit every depravity he could conceive of. They should have gone to the leaders in each house of Congress (who are both Democrats) and President Joe Biden (also a Democrat) and admitted that they fucked up before begging for forgiveness and saying that they are willing to get behind some shit. 

But they didn't because they're Republicans, and Republicans are always and forever motherfuckers. And fucking mothers is just what motherfuckers do. It's right there in the word.

Yesterday and even before, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (wow, it feels awesome to write both of those) spoke of the need for unity in the country. Harris ended her speech at the Inauguration concert by saying Biden will lead us "To do what is hard, to do what is good. To unite, to believe in ourselves, believe in our country, believe in what we can do together." Biden mentioned the word "unity" 8 times in his Inaugural Address.

So, of course, Republicans were instantly cockheads about it. Senator Rand Paul, who always looks like he just finished having his dog lick peanut butter off his balls, decried Biden's speech because "much of it is thinly veiled innuendo calling us white supremacists," which Biden didn't say, but Rand Paul sure heard because, well, it's true. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (pretty fuckin' awesome to write that, too) is shitcanning whatever brief moment of comity he felt after nearly being butchered by the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol and is now being very much himself in demanding the Democrats play nice on the filibuster. All of this is just the start, along with Senator Josh "Fisted Himself" Hawley blocking one of Biden's cabinet nominees and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy saying about the concept of unity, "You can’t achieve that if your focus is more on the Paris accord, ending the Keystone Pipeline." Even reporters have gotten on board with questions that are essentially "Oh, you're not allowing the GOP to run the government you just go elected to run. Where's your unity god now?"

Except Biden didn't say that he wanted to kiss the filthy GOP ass to get unity. He just wanted everyone to calm the hell down while he and the Democrats try to unfuck the country that Republicans under Trump ran a train on. He was pretty fuckin' clear on what he meant: "I know speaking of unity can sound to some like a foolish fantasy. I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real...History, faith, and reason show the way, the way of unity. We can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbors. We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward."

Unity ain't singing "Kumbaya" around the campfire. It's not being a dick while cleaning up the fucking mess that the GOP made and asking, "You wanna help out with this? Grab a fucking broom or sit the fuck down."

Lemme give you an example of this. I was having a socially-distanced visit with my pal Doug, who is an electrician. This was after the election, and I brought up how Biden was going to implement an actual national plan on dealing with COVID-19. Doug, who insists he's not a Trump-humper (and he's criticized Trump in the past), said he thought Biden's family would profit in some way from the vaccine and that all politicians are corrupt. I said that was a thing that Republicans generally say to excuse their much larger corruption. And he said, "What about Hunter Biden?"

Now, I could have lost my shit and attacked, except Doug would have just been hurt and it wouldn't have achieved anything. So, instead, I took a breath and asked what he thought he knew about Hunter Biden. And we went through it, point by point, calmly, with both of us listening to each other (even though I was totally correct). I'll write about that conversation another time, but the point is that this is what President Biden meant by "unity." Figure shit out. Don't scream at each other and walk away. And, frankly, it's Republicans who have done the screaming and walking. 

Yesterday was good. The push to wipe up after Trump's legacy of dropping his pants and frantically jacking off on everything around him has been great so far. But don't let yesterday's good feelings delude you into believing that Republicans have changed at all. Don't let the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment trick you. They are a pit of vipers, looking for an excuse to strike.

However, as someone who was opposed to Biden during the Democratic primaries, I've now reached a point where I'm glad it's him in the Oval Office. The man has been there and seen it all. He's negotiated with Republicans when they did so in good faith and when they did so in bad faith. And it's entirely possible that Biden has reached the "don't give a single fuck" age and point where he really means, "Unity with us or death to your party." Or that's just wishful thinking.

Martin Luther King Would Fuck the Insurrectionists' Shit Up (2021 Edition)

Throughout his too-short life, Martin Luther King, Jr. called "bullshit" on what was motivating racists who violently opposed the Civil Rights Movement and the work that King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference were doing non-violently. He saw through the rhetoric and called it what it was: lies. 

Here he is in December 1959 in his Address at the Fourth Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks had taken her stand by not giving up her seat a few years earlier: "There is great need for positive leadership from the moderates of the white South in this tense period of transition. Unfortunately today, the leadership of the white South is by and large in the hands of close-minded extremists. These persons gain prominence and power by the dissemination of false ideas, and by appealing to the deepest fears and hates within the human mind." See, King understood that lying and fearmongering were the tools of those trying to maintain their white power structures. 

That fear even bled over to other whites, ones who didn't believe what the racists believed but didn't act to stop them. King said, "There are in the white South millions of people of goodwill whose voices are yet unheard, whose course is yet unclear, and whose courageous acts are yet unseen. Such persons are in Montgomery today. These persons are often silent today because of fear of social, political, and economic reprisals."

And it's all, all, all just so fucking familiar, even now. 

King was a realist about how long it would take to achieve the goals of the SCLC and how difficult it would be. But he also saw hope in reaching out to those fearful whites: " In the name of God, in the interest of human dignity, and for the cause of democracy, I appeal to these white brothers to gird their courage, to speak out, to offer the leadership that is needed. Here in Montgomery we are seeking to improve the whole community, and we call upon the whites to help us. Our message to the white community is simply this: We who call upon you are not so-called outside agitators. We are your Negro brothers whose sweat and blood have also built Dixie."

Later in his life, King articulated in terms of morality the fight between Blacks who wanted to live with the same rights as white people and the whites who desperately tried to prevent that, and he warned that Black Americans should not imitate the immorality of whites in power. This is from his August 1967 Address Delivered at the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention, titled "Where Do We Go From Here?" King said, "What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. Now what has happened is that we've had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times."

Damn, that last sentence is such a brilliant explanation of how power is used against the powerless. This ideal of power that is moral has always seemed like pipe dream, but it always seemed possible until the last 4 years under this most immoral of presidents. 

So Martin Luther King would fuck the shit up of the racist insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the legitimate government because he had seen through the same bullshit that was used as justification for their uprising. It wasn't to protect the vote or the Constitution or any of that. It was because they believed the lies and they acted on the fear and they wanted to assert the immoral power of their whiteness. King saw them all for who they are: cowards who cannot stand a future where that shield of whiteness doesn't grant them the shield of privilege.

We Could Have Dealt With This Shit Years Ago If Republicans Hadn't Been Dicks About Their Extremists

I keep thinking about Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who became Barack Obama's first Secretary of Homeland Security. In April 2009, Republicans and conservative groups were demanding that she resign because her department had so deeply insulted right-wing Americans. See, DHS's Extremism and Radicalization Branch (Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division) in coordination with the FBI, released a report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," and it was pretty much straight up and down accurate in describing how nutzoid right-wingers, almost all of them white people, were becoming terrorists, driven to utter despair by the dual insults of the Bush-induced, severe economic downturn and the election of the first black president. To the writers of the report, those factors "present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment." 

What pissed off Republicans? Well, truth be told, it's because they recognized even then that their base was made up largely of assholes who were part of this toxic soup of racism and delusion. But they said that it was because, as then-House Minority Leader John "Human Ashtray" Boehner put it, "When you look at this report on right-wing extremism, it includes ... about two- thirds of Americans, who, you know, who might go to church, who may have served in the military, who may be involved in community activities." The report actually warned that religion was one of the driving factors behind right-wing extremist violence, as seen by, oh, hell, the murders and bombings connected to clinics where abortions were performed. 

The part that really upset ranting Republicans representatives like then-chief spokesjerk Michelle Bachmann and still-in-Congress Virginia Foxx and John Carter was that the report said, "Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities."

Carter, who was a big-time birther conspiracy nut and who voted last week to overturn the election results, whined, "One of the things they tell us in this report is very sad in light of what our Army has been going through, which is to watch out for returning, disgruntled military veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan in that they have the potential to be right-wing terrorists." You'll note that there is no call for greater mental health care or financial assistance to veterans.

For the complaining assholes, it's like Gulf War vet and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had never existed. And Napolitano apologized to veterans for any misunderstanding after Republicans lost their shit more, even calling a hearing where Napolitano ended up backing away from the report instead of shoving it down their fucking throats. It wasn't just in Congress, of course. Right-wing media and conservatives groups attacked, like the American Legion (motto: "Our halls smell like old ass"), whose leader said, stupidly, "I think it is important for all of us to remember that Americans are not the enemy." 

Yeah, except they are. And everything that's happened not just last Wednesday at the Capitol but all around this country for the decade plus since that report was issued has proved it true. We're learning that more and more American military veterans were part of the insurrection on January 6, including Ashli Babbit, the Air Force veteran who went full QAnon and got shot and killed for trying to break into the Capitol.

They were fucking right back in 2009. Here's another part about what drove the militia movement in the 1990s that was still going in 2009:  "Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties."

Want more? Here: "Prominent antigovernment conspiracy theorists have incorporated aspects of an impending economic collapse to intensify fear and paranoia among like-minded individuals and to attract recruits during times of economic uncertainty. Conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps often incorporate aspects of a failed economy. Antigovernment conspiracy theories and 'end times' prophecies could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition, and weapons." Pretty scarily on point, right? 

And there's a whole fucking section about how extremists used fear of undocumented immigrants coming into the country to recruit for militias and other groups. (I'm using "militia" because that's the lingo in the report. A militia is more rightly called a "domestic terrorist cell.")

I'll say it again: They were fucking right in 2009. We were fucking right when we on the left were yelling about right-wing extremists. But when Republicans and conservative dickheads lost their shit over the report, the new Obama administration backed down on DHS going after white terrorists. I guess they still had the naive hope that they could reason with Republicans, and this was a bone they tossed them. 

But let's be clear that Republicans threw a shit fit at the idea that their base was a bunch of violent crackpots, racists, and assholes. Wait, lemme clarify that. They were upset that they would have to admit that their base was a bunch of violent crackpots, racists, and assholes. So they fucked over the country to score cheap political points and show how they could stand up to the black president. That's how we got dozens of right-wing extremist attacks in the last 12 years. That's how we got Charlottesville. That's how we got Trump being able to be openly, wildly racist with no consequences for that until this past week. That's how we got members of Congress afraid of other members of Congress harming them. If Republicans had seen that report and said, "Yeah, wow, fuck, that's bad. We should act on it," how different might things be now. Instead, they took it and shit on it and handed it back and said, "Go fuck yourself with it." And then they shot down just about every opportunity to really do something about the white terrorists who are their base because to admit they were terrorists was to admit that their whiteness wouldn't protect them. 

Maybe now. Maybe at last. Maybe this dam finally broke.

So there should be no fucking mercy anymore for the Republicans who abetted this madness. It's all out there now, motherfuckers. You decided to sow. Now reap that shit and accept that you deserve to be tossed into the political trashcan. 

They Have to Acknowledge Biden Won Fair and Square

The nation cannot move past the events of last Wednesday without one simple, obvious step: our leaders have to say, clearly, with no equivocation, with no bullshit conditions, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 general election fairly and legitimately, with no voter fraud, no cheating, no Dominion machine fuckery, none of that. If the MAGA-huffing members of Congress and state officials won't do that, then they need to be sanctioned, censured, expelled and/or fired. 

There. That should be the bottom line before we talk about "healing" and "unity," two hopeful words that have been used as weapons of intimidation by Republicans desperate to shed their complicity in the insurrection at the Capitol. And I'm saying that all Republicans have been complicit, for, truly, to have been a Republicans for the last four years means, almost to a person, to have enabled Donald Trump, which led to the attacking shitheels to even get close to murdering legislators and the Vice President. 

Besides, the country already needed to heal and unify in the wake of this destructive fucknado of a presidency. Joe Biden was talking about it constantly. Instead, after the election, Republicans whipped their cretins and troglodytes into a fever pitch, telling them to shit on unity and piss on healing, with some telling them implicitly and some telling them explicitly that "war" and "combat" and "threats" were going to be needed to keep power. With perhaps a couple of particular dumbasses as exceptions (looking at you, Gohmert), it was a cynical ploy that either whipsawed against them or ended up exactly where they wanted it: with violence and coup and assassination threats hanging over anyone who would challenge the rabble's belief in Trump's fantasy victory. 

Yeah, you sons and daughters of bitches don't get to set the terms of how to get over this. You already failed the basic decency test, along with civics class. Prove you deserve anything more than condemnation and exile. So you motherfuckers gotta start by cleaning up the goddamn mess you made and say the truth: Trump lost. Biden won. 

The whiniest shit you hear from the MAGA/Q crowd (for, really, there is barely separation between them now) is that Democrats never accepted Trump's victory in 2016, which is utter bullshit. Yeah, we were pissed off about it because, you know, we fucking lost. We knew there were factors that influenced the vote, like Russian hacking and trolling and James Comey's big fucking mouth. We thought it was fucked up that Clinton won won the popular vote by millions but still lost. We know for a fact that Republicans pass laws to suppress the votes of non-white (and likely Democratic) voters. They've admitted as much. But the belief that there was actual machine hacking and other vote-changing or ballot-stuffing chicanery was limited to one corner of the Left, and virtually no one in Congress or Democratic leadership said anything of the sort. No one gave those things any oxygen. We did find it frightening that Trump denied any Russian interference and refused to acknowledge that reality because the interference was in his favor. It needed to be investigated. But he still won the goddamn election. And don't fucking talk about impeachment being the same thing as "overturning an election." Just fuck off with that stupidity.

The both-sides shit is psychotic. Tonight, in the debate over the symbolic resolution calling on Mike "Riding Bitch to the Bitter End" Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and get Trump out of power, GOP Rep. Lisa McClain compared Trump riling people into storming the Capitol to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking why there aren't more uprisings (which was about migrant parents uprising over having their kids taken from them at the border) and other supposedly intemperate remarks. McClain said everyone is to blame in order to appeal to a fake idea of unity, to letting this little kerfuffle at the Capitol that killed 6 people go because Maxine Waters said Democrats should harass Sarah Huckabee at restaurants. Except the difference is that, and let me make this perfectly clear so that even fucking indecent, ignorant shits like McClain can hear it: Trump. Is. Lying. All the Republicans are lying about the election. Democrats were reacting to real shit. Families were being broken up at the border. Black men and women are being murdered by the cops. We protest the real world. MAGA cretins are protesting a fiction. That's the motherfucking difference. 

Right now, as more Republicans start to realize that they'd better get off the Trump-tanic before it breaks in two, they need to understand that there is a price to heal, and they have to pay it. Tell the truth. Joe Biden won. You lied about the rest. Say it like the truth you know it is. Or fucking sink.

Oh, and sacrifice the Republicans who fanned the flames most, like devolved cockmites like Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, and the mightiest cockmite of them all, Ted Cruz. Purge the government of these bastards. Don't forget to kick out the Q nuts. And then we can get to the healing and unifying over destroying Trump.

Random Observations on an Insurrection

1. This was inevitable. Anyone even casually observing the last five years knew that the Trump reign was going to end in violence. Unless you willfully put blinders on and truly believe the bullshit fairy tale of "This is not who we are." This is very much who we are. We have always been a nation filled with racist, incoherent yahoos who are on the verge of violence and whose white privilege protects them in ways that no Black or Muslim person would ever be. Those yahoos just needed a leader to tell them to go and they were gonna go, and, in Donald Trump, they found their leader, someone who is as devolved and cretinous as they are, with the illusion of strength and courage and success, all lies, all fantasy. 

So when Trump asked his MAGA drones to show up in Washington, DC for a rally on the day that Congress would certify that Trump lost and Joe Biden won the presidency, what the fuck else would you expect to happen? And then he implored them to march to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting. Oh, sure, he dropped in the word "peacefully," but he also told them, "You have to show strength, and you have to be strong." Whether he intended violence or not (and I think he was desperately hoping for violence because that's the kind of bitch he is), the idiots who think Joe Biden is a pedophile and hundreds of thousands of votes just disappeared heard exactly what they wanted to hear: It was finally, at long last, go time.

2. It could have been much, much worse. The motherfuckers built a gallows in front of the Capitol building. They talked about hanging members of Congress. And if you want to blindly dismiss that as hyperbolic bluster, go fuck yourself. These fucking animals had zip ties with them. There were fucking pipe bombs found, as well as a cooler filled with Molotov cocktails. They fucking vandalized the joint, wrecking shit and scrawling "Murder the media" on a door. The intention was to harm people. They killed a member of the Capitol police with a fire extinguisher. Do not have a single iota of doubt: If they could have gotten their hands on a Democratic member of Congress or Mitt Romney or another Republican they see as disloyal to their Orange King, they would have murdered them. Christ, imagine if they got to Ilhan Omar or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representatives who they have been told are enemy agents. And if you think that's paranoid nonsense, then you put yourself in the shoes of the Senators and Representatives in that building, hearing the doors and windows break while a hooting mob of dullards who have been told that you hate them and their America come streaming down the hallway towards where you are. You'd have shit yourself in fear. They wanted to take over by force. They wanted a coup. This was an insurrection by people who believe a gigantic lie that is being cynically propagated by Republicans. You don't bring a Confederate flag into the Capitol unless you're making a pretty clear point about what you think of the United States government.

3. Every single Republican who ever enabled Donald Trump, and that includes supporting his campaign, voting for his judges and his fucking bullshit wall, voting against his impeachment and removal from office, separating families and caging children, going along with and encouraging his denial about how deadly COVID-19 is, and so much more horrible shit, cannot be allowed to weasel out of their complicity. This didn't happen without Republicans rolling their eyes at and waving off Trump's extravagant fuckery. They made a deal with the Devil, and that spike-dicked motherfucker is ready to sodomize some souls. So I don't wanna hear about how brave and patriotic Mitch McConnell's speech was where he said that Biden won and Trump lost. I don't wanna hear how Lindsey Graham redeemed himself with his call to speak the truth to MAGA cretins. Even Republicans like Adam Kinzinger, who has been outspoken in his outrage at Trump's refusal to concede, don't get a pass when they spent their entire time in Congress helping Trump.  I don't wanna hear about the conscience that the now-resigning members of the administration have suddenly discovered like a long-lost, beat-up teddy bear. No, fuck all of you. This didn't happen without your blithe acceptance of every bowl of shit Trump fed you. You anonymously spoke against Trump while being too fucking cowardly to go on the record. You should all have a large "Trump" carved into your foreheads so that for the rest of your lives, everyone will know where you stood when your country was falling the fuck apart. 

3a. By the way, hope you enjoyed when Donald Trump, Jr. declared that "This isn't their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump's Republican Party." Yeah, you're fucking owned by these grifters. 

3b. And, always, fuck Mike Pence.

4. What a bunch of pussies these MAGA cretins are. They started claiming almost immediately that Antifa (which is not an organization) leftists had infiltrated their nice peaceful march and caused the mayhem. Well, that'd be fucking news to Trump, who, in one of his now-deleted tweets, talked about what "great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long" they are, and that he loved them.  I thought the Nazi tattoos were a pretty good indicator of who was there. Jesus fuck, just own this shit, MAGA fucknuts. This is something your movement did. Stop trying to blame others for your violence. Goddamn, Black Lives Matter protesters owned their violence. And they were treated a fuck of a lot worse by police because they didn't glisten in whiteness. Half of Trump supporters are celebrating the violence and another half are saying, "Whoa, that's not my club." Sorry, but you're the Muslims now. Show them the picture of the fuckin' MAGA troglodyte grinning in Nancy Pelosi's chair and ask them, "Won't you condemn the violence committed by your fellow believers?"

5. If nothing is done to constrict Trump, whether through impeachment and removal or the 25th Amendment, then you can bet that shit is going to go crazy again on January 20, when Biden and Harris are inaugurated. That's the response to anyone saying that we need to look to the future. Punishing people is about the future. It tells others that there are consequences to their actions in order to stop people from doing this shit in the future, and those consequences cannot just be that, well, gosh, maybe they'll lose their reelection. Actually charge people with sedition, including members of Congress and Trump, not just the regular assholes who have had their heads filled conspiracies and lies from every piece of media they consume. Yeah, those pathetic fucks should be punished, but they are far from acting in a vacuum. (Right after posting this, Nancy Pelosi said 25th him or we'll impeach the motherfucker. Good on her.)

5a. Honestly, is there a single goddamn reason to leave Trump in office other than you don't want to bother with removing him? It's not like he's been doing the job.

6. And, in the future, listen to us on the left when we say that someone is a goddamned danger. We were right about George W. Bush. We were right about Trump. We knew the former was a vile dunderhead; we knew the latter was a maniac who couldn't handle the job and couldn't give a shit about learning it and whose followers were going to turn violent. We were right. Everyone who said not to worry was wrong. Everyone who said that there's no difference between Democratic and Republican candidates was wrong. Everyone who told us that Trump didn't mean what he said was wrong. Every media outlet that thought Trump was a joke was wrong. We were right, all of us sad Cassandras. And we'll be right in the future. 

7. By the way, Democrats won the fucking Senate. That happened yesterday with two Senate runoff victories in Georgia. And Trump's and the Republicans' failures continue as we had the highest number of COVID deaths on a single day yesterday. We have so fucking much work to do.

Trump's Madness Has Made Fools of Everyone Who Thought He'd Give Up on Overturning the Election

I'd like to say a hearty "eat shit" and "go fuck yourselves" to all the oh-so-clever pundits and politicians who assured us that Donald Trump was just throwing a little tantrum back in November when he first started declaring there were massive illegalities in voting in the presidential election and he really won. That starts with the unnamed "GOP official" who said, "What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?... It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave." Motherfucker, you were about as wrong as Lin Wood screech-tweeting QAnon gobbledygook where John Roberts eats or assaults babies or something. 

To anyone who once said this was about real concerns about voter fraud or hinky behavior by election officials or Dominion whatevers, including all the members of Congress who have decided to shitcan the votes of millions of Americans because they didn't vote for the right candidate, as well as the conservative media shit factory that takes pride in nuzzling up to Trump's waxy taint, he made fucking fools out of you. The moment Trump said, "I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state," the whole fucking pretext for any of this spurious shit was swept away. This was about one goddamn thing: Making sure Trump doesn't go to prison...oh, wait, I mean...Making sure that Trump stays in the White House.

The thing that struck me about Trump's hourlong crime spree over the phone with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is how wildly sexist the whole thing was. He shut down his own attorney, a woman with the unfortunate name of Cleta Deatherage Mitchell (no, really, the female "Cletus"). He  accused a woman who is a Georgia election worker of running ballots multiple times, or, as Trump dunderheadedly put it, "She stuffed the ballot boxes. They were stuffed like nobody has ever seen them stuffed before," which, to be fair, is so dumb that it's fucking hilarious. But, of course, it's not dumb to the woman, who has been smeared all over right-wing Nutsylvania, and thus has gotten the now-expected litany of death threats from the rabid MAGA mongrels. The only decent women to Trump are the ones who kiss his ass or the ones he sees as rape-worthy.

Trump was especially pissed off at super-organizer and force of nature Stacey Abrams, telling Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the lawyer for the office of the Georgia Secretary of State,  "Stacey, in my opinion, Stacey is as dishonest as they come. She has outplayed you . . . at everything." And, later, "And Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying these guys are dumber than a rock. What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell you." 

At his boring-ass, frantic, desperate rally in Dalton, Georgia (motto: "We're a decent piss break between Chattanooga and Atlanta") yesterday, Trump continued on his Abrams animus, ranting, "Stacey Abrams. What’s with this Stacey Abrams? Your governor and your secretary of state, they’re petrified of Stacey Abrams. What’s that all about?" After saying of Raffensperger that Abrams "took him to the cleaners," Trump finally said what he fucking well meant: "The Dominion voting machines employed in Fulton County. That’s the home of Stacey." 

And there it is. See, it's not just that Trump got beaten in Georgia. It's that one of the people who is most responsible for him getting beaten is a woman. A black woman. A black woman and the votes in a majority non-white county. That fucking galls the shit out of him. And he can't get his fellow white Republicans to go along with teaching that uppity black woman a lesson. His appeal to Raffensperger is racist and sexist, and that's the kind of shit that's worked for years for this motherfucker.

I could go on about tons of shit in the phone call and in the rally speech. I could talk about Trump's mobster mentality of cajoling Raffensperger and Germany by saying "you know that" the fraud is real. I could explain the bugfuck insanity of the exchange where Raffensperger said, "Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, they — people can say anything" and Trump really responded, "Oh, this isn’t social media. This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not; it’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less." I could dive into how Trump threatened and begged and appealed to Raffensperger's Republican loyalty. What Trump didn't realize is that he finally met some officials who didn't want to owe anything to him. Yeah, they may still be Republican motherfuckers, but they are motherfuckers who decided not to piss off the entire, huge work force that counted the ballots and ran the election. That shit matters, too.

Instead, as we await the outcome of the Georgia Senate races (after which I'm sure I'll update this), as we await the ratification of the Electoral College vote and the last official declaration that Joe Biden is the president-elect, I'll just say that none of what Trump is doing is the least bit surprising. Of course, it was always going to end with him trying to blow the joint up. It's what he's always done. He defiles everything by making sure that his name is attached to it forever, like his terrible buildings and, now, the presidency. We will have so much work erasing that stain. 

Haiku Review of 2020 (Part 4 and Last): Live Forever

Last round for 2020 in this year's haiku spectacular. Big thanks to the oh-so-many of you who sent in great little poems. This year, there were haiku from Europe, Asia, and North and South America. That's pretty damn cool. 

Let's give the year past the finger and turn our weary eyes to the hope that 2021 may be the first year to suck less than the previous one in quite some time. 

From El-Man in New Zealand

Hooray, he's leaving

Kamala, pass me the mop

This will take a while

From Sel in Jacksonville, Florida

If I had no couth 

I would piss on the snarling

masses of morons

From papadoo52 in Pennsylvania

The Rally

Trump cult gathers tight

Shit pours from Trump's anus mouth

Trump cult laps it up

From Becky in Chicago

Me before all you

That's not how a nation thinks 

I hate this country 

From JM in Chicago

2020: The

Year The Sirens Never Stopped

In My Neighborhood

From Jeff in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

We may never know

If our president is sane

Hope we never learn

From James in Minneapolis

Say his name: George Floyd

His last words were ‘I can’t breathe’

All cops are bastards

From Kevin in North Minneapolis

News Happens Here

My city on fire

Black man under a white knee

Will we ever learn?

From Skye in England

This year caught our breath

Jammed like a knee on the neck

Alone together

From Ruth Ann in Madison, Wisconsin

Sports/Democracy/Same?

Bubble confinement

Kneeling for America

Masked on the sidelines

From Fortune in Honduras

Calls Us A Shit Hole?

Fuck You To Hell, Rank Shit Stain,

And Your Failed Shit State

From Amanda in West Virginia

Mitch McConnell is

Worst hidden Reptilian

Velociraptor

From Opus 131

One day closer to

The end of the pandemic

My mantra each night

From Paul in Fairfax, Virginia

Three Deaths

Martha died in March,

Mr. Dec in September,

Ralph in December.

(From Paul: Martha was my 27-year-old neighbor who killed herself just as the pandemic was starting to spread; Mr. Dec my older, other neighbor who watched me grow up and died of an abdominal cancer; and Ralph my friend of 30+ years who passed away of colon cancer at the age of 64.)

The title comes from Bartee Strange's weird and wonderful album from 2020. Do yourself a favor and check it out.