Hammer Of The Blogs

I've enjoyed (most of) Michael Moore's schtick and work for decades, starting with Roger and Me, and undeniably powerful evisceration of corporate greed and lies. But his inane critiques at supposed "bubble" liberals have taken on the catechistic sheen of a mindless dogma, untroubled by critical thought or intellectual honesty.

There's no second-guessing Moore's unfortunate accuracy as a political prognosticator; he predicted Clownstick winning six months before it happened, when catfished pollsters and punch-drunk journamalists were veering between snickering at the folly and regaling the slow-motion collapse of his futile campaign. So much for the smart set, right?

But Moore has said his share of stupid, unhelpful shit as well. In Moore's view, liberals are in the bubble, as are New York and Hollywood. It's never the hallowed opioid havens of his sacred rust belt ghost towns that might need to listen to other people once in a while, or maybe get at least some of their "facts" from somewhere other than Fixed Noise and reality teevee.

No, it's always, always Moore's supposed ideological compadres that need to listen to....well, to be honest, I have no idea what precisely we're supposed to be hearing. Because countless journos have spelunked up 'murka's gaping asshole, vainly trying to get the perfect post-mortem from Real 'murkins. I've read far too many of them, and most of them make no sense at all (I just trust him), or rely on things we know to be flat-out lies (he's a great businessman with a history of turning things around).

Just as stupid is Moore's vapid assertion that liberals should watch Celebrity Apprentice and American Idol and The Bachelorette (as if, you know, none of them ever do). Leaving aside the momentary surprise that he left out Duck Dynasty and the various Real Housewives franchises, again I would ask Moore if he's ever suggested to "them" that they watch something that "we" supposedly all watch. I've never seen any of those shows, and I never will, though I am aware of them thanks to endless commercials and The Soup. Life's too short to actually sit through that mess.

If other people want to rot their brains on that shit, more power to them. But it adds nothing to the discussion, although it does explain the bizarre epistemology in play with that generalized demographic. They probably throw money they don't have at millionaire megachurches and televangelists, and trust the astrology section of their newspapers. Should we faithless heathens entreaty those ethereal demons as well?

Think about it, in the context of the five aforementioned shows, and how what those shows really entail dovetails with the electoral reasoning Moore implores us smug smarties to plug into, for some insane reason. Let's take those shows (are they still even on?) one at a time:

• Celebrity Apprentice:  Slightly well-known people, fallen on hard times, compete to start a fake business that they will never run, and are judged by a fake billionaire who pretends to fire them, one by one. Proceeds go to the Human Fund!
• American Idol:  Do they still do that thing in the first few weeks where they humiliate really untalented wannabes on-camera? Boy, that whole William Hung thing was just awesome, wasn't it? Good times. Aside from Carrie Underwood, have any of the finalists or winners really "made it", whatever "it" is these days?
• The Bachelorette:  I think I made the analogy at some point during the campaign that maintaining the belief that Clownstick is a good or even competent businessman is roughly equal to believing that the "winners" in these stupid hookup shows actually get married or even engaged. If I want to watch people fuck in a hot tub, I'll just go to XHamster or something. But Moore's ZOMG! She chose Thorn instead of Brick! fangirl gushing as a serious example of the sort of Real 'murkin decision-makin' that smug bubble-libruls must embrace is just embarrassing to read. Seriously, dude, take some testosterone supplements and eat a steak, before you find yourself on the same menstrual cycle as these suckers.
• Duck Dynasty:  Fake hillbillies who spout real jingoism. Their main selling point seems to be that they actually like each other and pray before dinner. [mimes jerkoff motion] Oh, and the patriarch has a side hustle going around to mega-churches and political campaigns spouting off about how fags are like dog-fuckers. He was at the Roy Moore rally the other night, so there's that.
• Real Housewives:  A bunch of botoxed, fake-tit cunts trying to out-cunt each other. Bitch I'll pull yo weave!

I've said it since the first season of Survivor, and my opinion has not changed one iota:  reality teevee is the most noxious, toxic spew to permeate the boob tube. It's ruined this country to an incalculable degree. It's certainly made some people visibly dumber, less lucid, less cognizant of the real world around them. It's (literally) mindless escapism, and nothing more. Your brain would be less polluted by watching keyboard-cat and log-fireplace videos all day.

What reality teevee does -- and again, though I really have never directly watched any of it, I've read reviews and critiques here and there over the years, been inundated with commercials and promos and news items about the various "winners" and "contestants", and hate-watched The Soup during the Joel McHale years, so I have a pretty good idea -- is culturally unhealthy and corrosive in the aggregate. It wallows primarily in these main traits:

• Cutthroat behavior and backstabbing.
• Public humiliation.
• Toxic behavior.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect is the rather obvious issue that it's not any more real than professional wrestling. Everything is in fact scripted and scrupulously edited toward a pre-planned outcome. The whole thing is meticulously staged, if at times to conform to flash polls and the like. Many of the reality teevee fans I know personally seem to watch at least several of them, all the time. The "seasons" are scheduled so as to be constant; there is no "off-season" anymore for this sort of hastily-crafted discount programming.

Imagine letting this crap through your eyes and ears to steadily erode your cerebellum for going on two decades now. What do you think that does to your perception of "reality"? Throw in the more recent epistemological conveniences of social media, and you have a sizable contingent of addled people who are being poked with a culture-war stick. They can pick which "facts" and "reality" suit them best, and since they have eroded their capacity to discern or care what is empirically "true," they simply act on pure id and volition.

In fact, this is an ideal situation for them. As mentioned in a recent post, this is also a contingent that routinely fetishizes the symbols and ceremonies of "democracy" as they perceive it, but they are actively hostile toward the actual principles of democracy, especially free speech that they disagree with, especially when it comes from uppity black folks.

So it's dismaying to see Moore throw in with the tedious rube-whisperer lectures of the likes of Mudcat Saunders and Chris Arnade and such. It's a sucker's bet; either you take seriously the reasons and principles why you believe in and agree with conventionally "liberal" ideals, and you try to find ways to bring other reasonable people into the fold, or you don't.

Someone who addles their brain with reality teevee, watched Fixed Noise for their "information," and hasn't read a book in years, is not a serious person. At all. That doesn't mean you write them off completely, but it does mean you don't waste the effort of crafting a significant part of your party strategy around catering to their dipshit notions.

In 2008, Barack Obama won by the largest margin -- by far -- since Reagan in 1984. The Democrats took a supermajority in the Senate, and a considerable majority in the House. Did you see any "important" or "influential" conservative "thinkers" imploring the rubes to maybe take a look across the aisle and see why Obama won? Did any of them crank out any sort of Listen, Conservative jabber?

Even the current "heterodox" conservative writers who do lambaste the base, such as Kevin Williamson and J.D. Vance, are not encouraging those folks to listen to ideas from the "other side" in order to synthesize some sort of magical winning coalition that can actually get shit done. They're simply telling the goobers on their side to get their shit together and start taking responsibility for themselves. They sure as hell aren't telling them to watch The Wire and listen to Beyoncé.

Look. None of this is to say that all pop culture is shit, and all the people who enjoy it are stupid. The problem is Moore's thesis that centers the most vapid pop culture artifacts as some sort of barometer for understanding the mindset of the average American. And the sad fact is that if Moore is correct in that estimation, then we are waaayyyyy more fucked than we can possibly imagine.

Folks are always taking those dopey Which Dukes of Hazzard Character Are You? quizzes on the Facebook and such. I have here for you a much simpler, quicker, and infinitely more accurate psych battery for you:

1. If you are angry about NFL players taking a quiet knee during the national anthem before the game, than you were about nazis in Charlottesville waving the flags of extinguished enemy nations, you are:
   A. an idiot
   B. an asshole
   C. a charter member of Cult 45
   D. all of the above
2. If you insist that protesting during the anthem is the same as protesting against the anthem, and therefore "disrespectful,", but you were unconcerned about a presidential candidate taunting a tortured combat veteran and heckling a Gold Star family whose son was killed in combat, you are:
   A. a moron
   B. a liar
   C. unclear on what the First Amendment actually means
   D. all of the above

Pretty simple, right? If there's one thing that's depressingly consistent about the rube contingent that infests and propagates and keeps this nation down in perpetuity, it that these shameless assholes fetishize the symbols of democracy to a creepy extent, while simultaneously expressing utter hostility to the most important principle of democracy, that of free speech.

They seem unclear on what the First Amendment actually means, and what it entails. It is meaningless if it doesn't protect unpopular speech. It is useless if it does not allow nazis to march peacefully in a college town, or athletes to express their concerns in one of the few ways a black man in a culturally prominent role can get the attention of white people.

I don't want to hear anymore bullshit about "disrespect" from someone who talked shit about whether John McCain is a war hero or not. I've said it before, but let's do it once more:  I've taken more than my share of pot-shots at Poor Ol' Straight Talk, especially when he summoned the Arctic Harpy as his running mate in '08 (probably by saying her name aloud five times in front of a bathroom mirror). But it was always about things he said or did in a political context.

The Vietnam War, the farther we get away from it, looms more and more as a moral catastrophe in the US' history, which is saying something. There's not much debate these days from any political position that it was strategically and morally indefensible in retrospect. And one might say something about the morality of dropping death from far above, frequently on defenseless rural villages.

But here's the deal:  when McCain was shot down in his bomber, both arms and a leg were fractured. When the Vietnamese pulled McCain from his downed plane, they crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt and bayoneted him. He was tortured for months before the Vietnamese decided to make a propaganda effort to release him, since McCain's father was the supreme Navy commander for the Pacific region. McCain refused to be released before officers that had been held longer; the enraged Vietnamese immediately re-broke both his arms, knocked out all his teeth, and tortured him mercilessly for months after. (David Foster Wallace describes all this and more in his famous essay Up, Simba, or you can read the rundown here.)

McCain certainly has plenty of faults -- he was a cocky, swaggering asshole who routinely endangered other pilots and shipmates, and after his release from the Hanoi Hilton, he treated his first wife horribly. And again, the war itself is and was morally irredeemable. However, none of those things detracts from the simple fact that McCain endured horrendous treatment that would break most of us, and much of that came after he conducted himself honorably by refusing early release from a literal torture chamber.

All of that occurred while Bone Spurs McHairpiece was going through his own "personal Vietnam" by supposedly fucking everything that moved within reach of him. For all of his flaws, John McCain has more honor and courage in the sweat on his droopy old-man balls, than Fuckface von Clownstick ever had in his entire miserable body.

So anyone who's taking that "disrespect" tack about professional athletes expressing their opinion about something that affects many of them on a very personal level, they can shove it up their ass, take it up with their disgrace of a "leader," a crazy old man who's still butt-hurt that the NFL refused to let him buy the Buffalo Bills, because he's a greasy shyster who never pays his fucking bills and screws over everyone who's dumb enough to do business with.

"And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it anymore, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing." -- Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, p. 293

Let's explore a small but important footnote from Tuesday's Two Hours of Hate in Satan's Asshole, better known as Phoenix. At the usual "fake media" attack point in Snowflake's babbling greatest-shits nonsense, he observed that there were several news cameras filming and recording the lies for the bafflement of posterity. He then asserted that because he was talking shit about them, some of them were stopping the filming, that camera lights were going out.

It doesn't need to be stated for the record that that wasn't at all true, right? And yet, despite him telling them to look, and presumably them doing so, and seeing that the cameras were not in fact being turned off, many people in the (admittedly small, perhaps even smaller than Snowflake's tiny wittle doll hands) audience, grumbled in agreement with their dark lord.

In other words, despite being able to see for themselves a very simple empirically verifiable fact -- the lights are either on or off -- these folks looked, and listened, and decided that whatever Snowflake said must be the "truth," simply because he said it. These people have lost their fucking minds. They are more than happy to drive off the cliff with him.

The carnage continues --  not only is it possible that Emperor Snowflake may be responsible for the breakup of Journey (and hey, how surprising is it not only that he has a "spiritual advisor," but that said "advisor" is willing to admit to that?), but his earthy rubes are "embarrassed" by him.

To which I would say to those rubes:  hey, the rest of us are embarrassed by you numbskulls, and I am truly sorry that I have only two middle fingers to wave in your general direction. As long as he's too stupid and weird to get anything meaningful done, he can stay for all I care, and the more it reminds these idiots that their dying towns are still dying, the better. Choke on it, assholes.

Here's some advice for the counter-maga protesters:  let the maroons have their little party, while they still can. Hold your own rallies tomorrow, or next weekend, and compare attendance counts. Take photos and harass them online. Our crowd is bigger than their crowd, that sort of thing.

Better yet, show up and harass your congress-critters, let 'em know what time it is, and that you won't forget in eighteen months -- in fact, you'll organize and mobilize and be back in greater numbers at the voting booth. Trust me, they are already noticing, and they are getting worried. Keep up that momentum and diversify your protest portfolio, and watch them run. Hit 'em where it really hurts, and keep hitting.

For the life of me, I have never understood the appeal of standing around in a public place with a sign indicating my opinion, as part of a greater group of like-minded souls. It just seems so....meaningless, a theatrical act of choir-preaching. Does it convince anyone of anything, has anyone ever changed their mind on something by observing a mob in the public square agitating for something or other? I know I haven't, and I'll bet you haven't either. I don't understand the point of candlelight vigils, either, so maybe it's just me.

I don't read much on Twitter, maybe check in on Richard Nixon and Nihilist Arby's once or twice a week, but this thread neatly encapsulates why we are where we are, how we ended up with a cartoon character in charge. They're not outnumbering us yet, not overall, but they are outnumbering us in many regions, and the ratio seems to be accelerating. Turns out that Idiocracy was not only a documentary, but it was wildly optimistic about the timeline. It won't take five hundred years at this rate, more like fifty.

I don't want Democrats to devise strategies to win over the dumb cow described in the tweet-thread -- I want them to discourage her from voting at all, not to mention breeding, driving, or pretty much anything else. We have to collectively decide we have had enough of stupid people, and start disempowering them as much as possible.

In my imaginary benevolent despotism, I would happily give her a decent guaranteed minimum income to not vote and not pollute the gene pool. There are too many of these mutants making decisions for all of us with their bizarre flat-earth epistemology, and the sooner we figure out a way for them to fuck off and die already, the better off the entire planet will be.

Is that "intolerant" and "elitist"? Perhaps it is technically, but we have to draw our lines somewhere, and I humbly submit for the record that an adult who is too stupid to recognize an elephant because it has red dirt on it is stupid about everything else. Seriously, I don't know how these fools remember to breathe. Bottom line is, you can't fix stupid, so we need to find a way to keep it out of the fucking voting booth.

At this point, Clownstick is leading 244 electoral votes to 215, with a handful of states left to call. Friends 'n' neighbors, it's going to be a squeaker from hell at best, and he's likely to win. The betting markets were 80-20 for Hillary yesterday; they are 80-20 Clownstick right now. I don't know what the fuck happened in the last 24 hours, but there ya go. Feingold and Bayh already lost their Senate runs, so that's gone. It's looking pretty rough right now. She basically has to run the table on the Rust Belt states, and she's behind about 60-80k in each of them right now.

It would be a good time to repeat the last part of the penultimate paragraph of the previous post:

And if Drumpf does manage to win, then it's all over anyway, not only because of the destruction he will wreak on the very foundations of this country, but because it would mean there really are enough self-destructive morons to tear it all down, just to watch it burn.

I'm not sure what else to say. Regardless of the outcome, it might be a good time to pick up a new skill or three, do some more and different writing, figure out some monetization strategies to supplement income enough to save up some discretionary income, look for greener pastures.

There's no need to statsplain the obvious confirmation-bias arguments, that people tend to believe what they want or need to believe, despite the facts. I honestly hope no one bothers with the hardcore maroons. There's just no percentage in it, and in fact, sometimes it has to be acknowledged that there are simply some people who do not learn the obvious and see what's in front of them until you break one off in their ass.

Look, when you say, essentially in the same argument, that people won't respond to facts, and that you can't convince them, you're admitting upfront that it's a waste of time to try to reach out to them. You might be able to sway them if they meet you halfway, engage with some semblance of intellectual honesty. Let the rest of us know if that ever happens to you.

Once the smoke clears, it might be a good idea for the little people across the political spectrum to consider just what their expectations are out of their party machinery, and if maybe there's another way. Technology has evolved so rapidly and massively, faster than our ability to keep pace with all its capacities, that it's likely that it can facilitate a political paradigm that does not require the current system of institutionalized bribery.

The grievances from Sanders supporters and Drumpf supporters are nearly identical in many respects, and mostly concern the lack of responsiveness from their elected officials. Part of this is obviously the usual chicanery and deal-making that has left a lot of people out, sending away their jobs without adequate replacement or retraining, decimating their towns and communities. But part of it, as we've seen consistently, especially with Drumpf voters but along the political spectrum, is that the people don't know what they want, or they think they do, but have no idea how it should be made to happen.

It makes sense that the largest swath of these discontented folks would gravitate toward the "none of the above" candidate, filter through his generic, anodyne nonsense to hear the self-affirming bits they needed to hear, and perceive any skepticism with outright hostility. Again, the defining characteristic of the Drumpf voter is to see opponents not as individuals with a differing viewpoint that may or may not have some validity, but as a threat, an enemy. This is a natural consequence of following a candidate who communicates mostly in authoritarian rhetoric and boastful, self-serving lies.

As violent incidents have increased at the Drumpf putsches, I have several times invoked the memory of Altamont, the infamous rock festival where security was provided by the Hell's Angels, with predictably disastrous results. So of course Drumpf now has a cadre of bikers promising to shut down protesters. What could possibly go wrong?

Between that development and what's already taken place, as well as the brewing confrontation at the party convention in July, the likelihood of the chaos that Loki-Littlefinger (heh) has sown thus far to bear fruit is increasing. It's looking more and more like Cruz will pull enough delegates to keep Drumpf from getting too close to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, and may even end up with a spread of 100-200 delegates, meaning a brokered convention.  You've seen the rallies -- do the Drumpfster divers seem like they're going to take that well?

But that is the ultimate intent of the trickster god:  to weasel his way into the process with empty promises and laughable rhetoric; to expose his opponents as frauds; to solidify his support into a hive-mind impermeable to reason; to throw the process into a state of unpredictability; to capitalize on the hostility.
 

Media critics who are well attuned to the entertainment aspects of the never-ending political anointing process have rightly compared Drumpf to the Norse trickster god Loki. This comparison proves to be more and more apt as the season wends on. (A more contemporary metaphor might be that of Heath Ledger's Joker; as Michael Caine points out, some men just want to watch the world burn.)

This year's political Loki has thrived on sowing chaos in his chosen group. The only common cause Drumpf has with the Republican Party is the desire to keep every cent he's made, and to pretend he strived just as hard for it as every hotel-room cleaner or construction worker who's ever worked for him. In the process, Loki/Drumpf has thrown open the rank hypocrisy baked into every bit of the party, from the privileged dopes who run the machine, to the platform they continue to espouse, a platform that is responsive only to the donor class and "fambly valyews" morons.

So when Anderson Cooper exposes Loki's lack of knowledge or principle -- or even basic consistency -- on the subject of abortion, what also is exposed is the ridiculousness of that policy itself. Drumpf is correct in his initial proposal that, in the event of Roe being repealed, women should be punished, as well as in his subsequent demurral that it is the medical practitioner, rather than the woman, who should be punished.

This is a prime opportunity to scrutinize the absurdity of the pro-life proposal, of the practical ramifications, of this bizarre obsession that these people have with this procedure, which has steadily declined in frequency over the last twenty years, and is at any rate being curtailed state by state through other means. The bottom line is that their mission is not only to curtail access to certain options for reproductive health and family planning, but ultimately to exact punitive measures on the people who utilize and/or perform those measures. They tend to avoid talking about it in such terms, preferring instead to harp on the inane "sanctity of life" argument.

By fumbling around with his inept, ignorant unprincipled pose on the subject, Drumpf has inadvertently exposed that entire movement for the farce it truly is. They want to imprison doctors or women or both, they need to specify for how long and on what charge. And calling for "states' rights" doesn't fly; the citizens of Indiana have the same fundamental rights as the citizens of California.

Remember Mark Burns, the huckster teevee-angelist hitching his pelf-powered gawwwd wagon to Drumpf's hair-don't? Well, apparently Burns was the opening act for the short-fingered vulgarian today, and took the time to implore well-known Christ-killer Bernie Sanders to convert to the one true belief, since everyone knows that we cain't haz a J-O-O fer preznit.

But wait, that's not the funny part of the story. This is the funny part:

Pastor Mark Burns, who spoke before Trump sat down for an interview with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, said that the Vermont senator needed to be saved.

[emphasis mine]

Ahahaha. Oh, this is too good. All his life, Chris Christie has thought of himself as an alpha dog, and comported himself as such. He's the sort of shameless pol who makes every backroom deal he can, fucks people over out of spite, yet consistently bills himself as the most honest person in whatever room he's in. And he seems to sincerely believe it.

But he cast all that aside, doubling down, throwing his lot in with Fuckface Von Clownstick. It's fuck-or-walk time for Fatboy -- if Drumpf loses, Christie is done, as done as Rubio. Hell, even if Drumpf wins, there are no guarantees. Christie's doing this for an AG or cabinet appointment, but Clownstick's ethics are entirely situational. He expects loyalty from others, but promises none in return. If someone with more standing gives Drumpf an endorsement, and wants the same thing Christie does, then too bad for Christie.

And it couldn't happen to a nicer guy, or be more hilarious to watch. You could see it in Christie's eyes the day after he declared his endorsement, looking like Drumpf had Christie's family squirreled away somewhere on a private island.

No more alpha dog; Christie is now basically Reek from Game of Thrones. You can just imagine the mewling, cringing "interview" between them. Hope Chris brought the extra-strength kneepads, and maybe a roll of breath mints for afterward.

Which in turn reminds me of something interesting that Jonah Goldberg (for realz, yo) said the other day:

I’m losing the will to rebut Donald Trump’s “arguments” because he really doesn’t make any. First of all, most of his interviews are rapidly becoming as journalistically adversarial as the infomercial host asking, “Mr. Foreman, is it really true I’ll lose weight and save money by using the George Foreman grill?”

This. You can't help but wonder what sort of befuddled retard waits in line to be herded into an arena, only to be treated to this bullshit -- some holy-roller Jew-baiting snake-oil huckster, followed by a live infomercial. They might as well have stayed home and watched a Honey Boo Boo marathon.

That's the power of the orange beast -- he turns relatively moderate politicians like Christie into soulless, emasculated butt-boys, while career hacks like Goldberg suddenly realize what they've been a part of all these years, and what it's culminating in, and are finally beginning to grow a pair.

Conservatives seem to be under the impression that some progressives, liberals, SJW types, etc., might be humorless prats. What would give them that impression?

The film's legions of defenders call it satire. Well, the overt argument of the film is that good breeding prevents social problems. The so-called satire proceeds from there, presenting the ridiculous consequences of what will happen if we don't rethink how society breeds. Satire isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card for all vulgar and illiberal ideas; it has to be pointed and targeting the powerful, not targeting vague notions of idiocy illustrated by Appalachia accents and trailer parks without consideration for what caused the idiocy in the first place.

The message is cheap and easy and doesn’t require us to meaningfully challenge power, much less ourselves. Instead, we direct our disdain at the pseudo-problem of not being adequately intelligent, as if such a problem operates independent of material factors.

I agree with the premise of Idiocracy -- and obviously, have used it here many times over the years -- serving as a convenient shorthand for the extreme dumbing-down of the culture at large, to such an extent that government and science are rendered useless, even harmful, by dumbasses so outnumbering intelligent people that they end up running everything -- straight into the ground.

Jesus H. Christ, it's like Nevada looked at the shitshows in the previous three states and said, "Not clusterfucky enough. We can do better." And by god they did. Wonder how many of the Trumpalos voted two or six or twelve times. It's not like anyone bothered to keep track.

Pro tip:  it's pretty simple to blow the competition out of the water when the ballot workers are in the can for you.

We like to tell ourselves that we have the freest, fairest election process anywhere, that it is the envy of all other nations. Come on. Has there been a single primary yet, from either party, that wasn't janky, that didn't have shenanigans? Coin flips in Iowa for the Democrats, compromised counting processes in Nevada for the Republicans. Jimmy Carter couldn't keep these fucking lowlifes honest.

And now Trump is signaling for people who protest at his rallies to be beaten for having the nerve to exercise their First Amendment rights. The slackjawed goobers who populate the rallies love it, because they, like he, are proud of their jingoism and authoritarianism. It's only a matter of time before one of these putsches turn into an Altamont, and shit will have gotten real. Even that may not derail Trump; the fact is that he has given voice to the most disturbing segment of American politics right now, not just because they come as nativists and racists, but because they're so paranoid, and so over the top about it. And no amount of factual information can sway them from their wittle feewings. It's like arguing with a bunch of pissy four-year-olds.

One of the most tedious features of political horse-race coverage is how inept it tends to be. Even the Monday-morning-quarterback hindsight assessments tend to be off, because they tend to be based on assumptions going in.

Last night's South Carolina primary is a good example of that. Conventional wisdom had it that "evangelicals" would go for Cruz, and instead they went for Trump. The media don't really know what to make of evangelicals, and when they ask them questions, of course the evangelicals spout a bunch of god-bothering jabber about their morals and values.

I saw a commenter somewhere -- a conservative Trump supporter, mind you -- recently say something to the effect that most of the southern evangelicals he knew had been divorced several times, used meth, oxy, and or alcohol, and usually could be found at a casino. He was not saying this disparagingly or admiringly, just in a matter-of-fact way.

Although I suppose I read a lot more non-fiction than most people do, my usual intake is about 50-50 between fiction and non-fiction. And I don't really make distinctions between "popular" or "unknown" writers as a barometer of what's "good" or not; if it's good it's good. So I've been a huge fan of Stephen King's writing for most of my life, since probably about seventh grade, 1980 or so.

One of my favorite short stories of King's is Survivor Type, a perverse little number about a drug-smuggling surgeon who survives a plane crash and finds himself marooned on a remote Pacific atoll with nothing more than his wits, his surgical tools, and some heroin. Because it is Stephen King, you expect the natural goo and gore of a man slowly devouring himself, piece by piece, going mad the entire time.

What might be less expected, but is barely subtextualized, is how the demented drug-smuggling doctor tries to convince himself throughout, first as he amputates and eats a foot, then the other foot, working his way up each leg until he's eaten everything below the waist, that he will pull through this, that he can survive, that as bad as it gets, it is still worth surviving, that if a ship somehow came out of the horizon and pulled this raving half-man aboard, he could still rehabilitate himself and move on with the rest of his life.

Which brings us to the much-publicized anti-Trump manifesto released by National Review the other day. It's almost too sad and pathetic to watch, this marooned half-man thinking that there is some deus ex machina out there providentially about to restore his loss.

In order to continue with its premise of completely ignoring Senator Bernie Sanders and his Trump-sized crowds, as well as providing constant coverage of every little thing Trump does, the corporate media has to come up with other things to cover. This week's model revolves around putting Trump's current main rival for the coveted Iowa caucus vote, alien-in-a-human-suit Ted Cruz, under the spotlight. The idea here is to build up Cruz and then pit him against Trump. Spoiler alert:  they're both assholes.

Only in an ADD culture that no longer bothers to distinguish between has-beens and never-weres -- you know, the sort of interchangeable "hey, weren't you in...." saps that appeared on Trump's dopey fake-bidness show -- would it even be mentioned that a doddering cosplay hillbilly, whose stupid show jumped the shark a long time ago, is endorsing Cruz. So Phil Robertson thinks Ted Cruz would be a solid imperial custodian because Cruz believes in God and is willing to put on face paint and go duck hunting? Big fucking deal. Robertson also is on record as saying that liberals follow Satan and are worse than Stalin or the Nazis.

His idiot brother, whose schtick on the show is apparently to make people think he has a steel plate somewhere in his head, insists that atheists don't exist because they use the calendar and spend money. Yeah, if they HAD PRINCIPLES they'd live without money or knowing what day it is. Anyone taking advice from these goobers on picking good political leaders should be disenfranchised before they hurt someone. Fuck these morons in the neck with a rusty spoon.

Here's a feel-good holiday fable involving a gun being used at a Waco Wal-Mart. Talk about coals to Newcastle.

A woman who fired a pistol as a suspect fled in a purse-snatching incident Friday outside a Wal-Mart store in Bellmead appeared at the police station late Friday afternoon to identify herself.

No charges have been filed against her, Bellmead police said Saturday.

Police plan to sit down with the woman for a more in-depth interview in the upcoming week, Bellmead police Detective Kory Martin said.

He said it appears, at least initially, that the woman fired into the air, not at the man.

Even for Texas, this is fucking nuts. Is this what we've fallen to, gunning down petty thieves in the street? Worse yet, she's just goddamned lucky she didn't hit one of the pursuers, an innocent bystander, a kid sitting in a car across the street, etc. This is a busy area in a downtown commercial district. Anything could have happened.

This is a textbook case of "the only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" thinking -- except, of course, this bad guy had no weapon at all, and while he's obviously a failed turd of a human being if he's purse-snatching little old ladies a couple days before Thanksgiving, again we do not have the death penalty for such crimes. [Ed. -- Yet.]

So what you have is some dingbat trying to be the hero of whatever revenge-porn narrative is on a loop in her head, a fever-dream mishmash of Making A Difference and Stopping A Criminal. The worst part of it is that she probably has no clue that life turns on a dime, an inch here or there, a second earlier or later, and that it is just the purest of luck that she didn't hurt or kill someone with erh incredible incompetence and negligence. This is not Starsky & Hutch, you stupid twat, this is real life, and people get killed when untrained, unqualified morons go around thinking they're Yosemite Sam or some shit.

That, not to mention most of the comments in the article, is bad enough. There's an interesting cherry on this particular cake:

The man accused of attempting to steal a purse from a shopping cart, Andre Dawson, 27, remained in jail with a $10,000 bond late Saturday under a misdemeanor charge of theft of property and a felony charge of credit or debit card abuse. Martin said if the purse contained a credit or debit card, it would have triggered the credit card charge.

Now that's just a perfect example of how the law has been perverted to become more absurdly cruel, to the point where people are up for charges on crimes they very clearly did not commit. Dawson didn't get away with the purse, so not only did he not have a chance to use the debit and credit cards, he never even found out such things were in the purse.

Again, it's hard to feel sorry for someone who picks on octogenarians, but such measures are clearly in place for no other reason than to give a hardliner judge an additional mechanism to completely shit-hammer a perp he just doesn't like. And if Dawson had physically harmed somebody, anybody -- the old lady, a bystander, a child, a stray cat -- it would make more sense. But he's a fucking dumbass who got caught in the commission of a particularly stupid crime, though not especially lurid in the overall scheme of things.

In the end, it won't matter -- this is Texas, after all, so Dawson will get tagged with a felony charge for a crime he had no chance to commit, while the shoot-'em-up dunce who will never know how close she might have come to killing someone over a fucking purse won't get charged with anything at all. This should be unacceptable, but hell, she'll probably still pack heat to the damned Wal-Mart, even though by all accounts she does not have a license to carry a concealed handgun.

It's no small indicator of what this nation has sunk to, when a nation of people whose great-grandparents came here fleeing various forms of violence and persecution, are much more concerned about Syrian orphans fleeing a government that drops barrel bombs on their houses, than the day-to-day dangers lurking in plain sight. I would be much more concerned about the fat fuck trying to make some bizarre "point" by taking his AR-15 to Target to buy Oreos, or the Helpy Helperton suburban dipshit indiscriminately shooting up a crowded parking lot over a relatively minor property crime, than some "durka durka Mohammed jihad" shenanigans. But try telling that to the yahoos in the comments section, who inexplicably feel safer knowing that there are armed idiots in the supermarkets just itching for an excuse.

Well, you can't say the headline doesn't try to warn you, but yeeeeaaahhh, I don't think any of us really needed to see Kim Davis' emails to know that she really is a narcissistic loon with a persecution complex. Ordinarily you might figure that at least some Kentucky taxpayers might resent their tax dollars going to keep such a clearly unqualified fool employed in any capacity.

But then, this is the state that, despite being one of the most unhealthy in the nation, overwhelmingly voted for a governor whose main promise is to dismantle Obamacare in the state. So fuck 'em. May they reap exactly what they sow.