The Disaster Movie of the Year IS... The Year 2020

Just when you thought it was safe to dive into the Sharknadoes once more...

When you consider this was a year full of tragedy and trauma and MURDER HORNETS, it's the kind of year that would make any documentarian cream their shorts to make a dramatic 2-hour retrospective aboot. And yes, even before the year ends, someone's done that!

Annus Horribilis doesn't even begin to cover it. 

The Long Night of trump's Denigration

THIS MOTHERFUCKER

photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Had Lafayette Park outside of the White House cleared on his orders. With cops using tear gas and rubber bullets, they pushed out what had been a disciplined and calm protest against trump's (in)actions on racial justice.

All so trump could walk to the nearest church - St. John's Episcopal - so he could stand outside it, holding up a Bible so he could get a GODLESS PHOTO OP as though he's doing The Lord's work destroying the First Amendment, and overriding states' authority with plans to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to negate Posse Comitatus and send military troops into our own cities with orders to "shoot all looters."

To quote El Kilgore in his article:

He did not enter the church, mind you; our president is not a church-goer. Nor did he explain the reason for this juxtaposition of hellish threats of violence against American citizens and a brief appearance in front of a place of worship consecrated to the Prince of Peace...

trump also did this on pure impulse. trump did not inform the church's bishop he was going there, did not ask permission, and most obviously exploited their faith against their will:

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde all but called the president sacrilegious for this gross political exploitation of her denomination’s church. The conservative evangelicals Trump cares about most, of course, won’t listen because they generally don’t think women should be eligible for religious leadership; some don’t even consider mainline Protestants like Budde real Christians at all. They do, however, love their Bibles, and some may bridle at this heathenish politician’s cynical use of the Good Book. Even if they believe he’s inadvertently doing the Lord’s Work, they don’t want him making it just another arrogant boast in his panoply of narcissistic hymns to himself...

The Shitgibbon didn't even know how to hold the Bible properly. He kept moving it around, waving it for display and not for genuine inspiration.

trump's little speech during all this staging called out for his followers to stand by their "Second Amendment" rights, which is a call to the gun nuts to go public again with their assault rifles for intimidation (and now, actual acts of violence). There was no mention of our citizens' First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful assembly, but as you can see with how trump used the police to crush a peaceful assembly outside the White House door, he doesn't give a rat's ass about OUR freedoms.

he only cares about his appearance: Staging himself as a bully and a monster, thinking that makes him a hero and a man.

The Democrats in the House of Representatives need to fight back against this wanna-be tyrant. The Republicans in Congress - especially in the Senate - need to be SHAMED into realizing they're backing the destroyer of American freedom. The Governors need to deny trump any excuse to send soldiers into OUR OWN NEIGHBORHOODS before they shoot us.

The Republican War On Everybody Else just ramped up to DEFCON-2.

We are one more trumpian meltdown away from DEFCON-1.

To every person who voted for trump in 2016, to every Moderate who refused to vote for Hillary, to every Progressive who mocked any support to Hillary: GO FUCK YOURSELVES. There is no GODDAMN WAY Hillary was ever going to be THIS bad. WE WARNED YOU. This is your nightmare foisted on the rest of us. And if you think you'll be spared the damage that's to come, you're likely going to be the ones paying first...

(Update 6/8): Thanks again to Batocchio for listing me on Crooks&Liars for Mike's Blog Round-Up. Sorry I don't post as often as I should.

All I Want for Saturnalia Is for Sanity And Goddamn Common Sense to Return

Tis the season to be drinking more hard cider to chase away the blues.

By the by, my twin brother recommends Redds over Angry Orchard.

This has been a year of madness and despair, against which only the slimmest slivers of hope have endured.

But we're getting to the edge of the cliff where everything and everyone goes over.

Congress is dead set on passing a deficit-heavy tax cut for the rich doomed to wipe out the social safety net and cause the same economic mess we had in the mid-2000s.

Republicans are about to elect a publicly confirmed sexual predator for US Senator from Alabama, lying to themselves about Moore's "spiritual pureness" all because they cannot abide a Democrat winning at all.

And trump. Gods help us. trump.

If it's not selling the whole nation out to Russia, it's his open racism and hostility towards diplomacy along with his immeasurable incompetency about to condemn the entire world to war.

His current push to formally recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capitol and moving the US Embassy there would spark hostile reaction across the entire Muslim community of the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America. It would seem the ultimate provocation against any peaceful solution to a problem that has vexed humanity for 2000 years.

Street protests by Palestinians would be the LEAST of our worries. Terror groups would use the move to rally more recruits. Allied nations like Turkey and Egypt and Jordan and even Saudi Arabia would cut off diplomatic relations or undermine all other US interests in their regions.

And I wouldn't doubt trump WANTS this. The Shitgibbon WANTS a war to prove his mettle as President Loser of the Popular Vote (and use the war powers of a Presidency to impose some twisted forms of martial law to make him Dictator). And getting the Muslims to react in violence would fit his Narrative.

This is supposed to be a time of Christian peace and goodwill. Instead we are roiling against evangelical hypocrisy, and un-Christian hatred and greed.

If ever we needed to return to the Pagan ways of Saturnalia - where you got drunk and gambled dice - now is the time.

Three Other Voices From This Thin Raft

I'm still trying to figure out how to continue expressing my rage at a nation where 62 million fellow Americans voted for an openly sexist, racist con artist to represent us to the world, but until then I have to find comfort from the others in the blogosphere who still have their voices and a keen understanding of the hell we're about to enter.

First off, there's Driftglass, who's been railing against an intentionally blind and self-serving media elite for decades now, and who had just written a long and beautiful argument about the media's folly allowing such a crook to dominate them (and us):

But messaging itself is not the problem.  The media is the problem.  And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we're going to go right on losing...

Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it's quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower...

If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.

If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels.  Email servers and Benghaaaazi.  A Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party".  Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!...

Ask a Trumpshirt if they remember any of this at all and they'll give you a dirty look, followed by a dozen "Yeah, but what about..."s, each of which will also be bullshit.  Then they will scamper away, because they have literally been conditioned by years of hate radio and Fox News and the Breitbart Collective not to remember anything from The Big Scary Past that is ideologically inconvenient.

In other words, if a dirty Libtard says it, it ain't true, and anyone who says anything I disagree with is obviously a dirty Libtard.  QED...

Then there's Rude Pundit, who like me was stunned by the result, spent time in the wilderness collecting his thoughts, and coming back today to discuss his insights (some of which, especially about the fucked-up electoral process, I agree with):

But lately, I've come around to another way of thinking. I wasn't wrong. Our election system is so innately fucked that it got it wrong. Right now, Clinton is up by nearly 3 million votes. That's 2 percent more than Donald Trump, with a lead that's growing with every precinct finalized. Yeah, yeah, she didn't win the presidency. But I wasn't wrong about the country. Nearly 54 percent of voters rejected Trump. And a plurality supported Clinton by far. Sure, that's way too many dumb fucks for any nation, but fuck you if you think Donald Trump has a "mandate" or a "historic victory" or some such shit. It's a goddamned embarrassment to say to the world, "Yeah, over here each person's vote is totally not equal..."

Trump won Petroleum County (yes, there is a goddamn Petroleum County) in Montana with a total of 278 votes out of 322 cast. Clinton won Manhattan's county in New York with 515,481 votes out of nearly 600,000 cast. In your precious list of counties won, those are each counted once.

I got nothing against the shit kickers and roughnecks of Petroleum County and I hope they don't have anything against us up here in the Northeast. But double fuck anyone for saying that 1 Montanan who voted for Trump is worth the same as over 1850 people who voted for Clinton in Manhattan. Your history-making is bullshit. Trump is the Loser-in-Chief, and he will always have asterisk after his name that'll drive him insane(r)...

Trump won because the Founders created a fucked-up system to make slave states feel wanted because conservatives have always thrown a fit if you don't just accept their ignorance. We can delude ourselves and say that "in their wisdom" the Founders created the Electoral College as a way to put the brakes on the election of a vile blithering idiot with dictatorial aspirations. But it's that very system that has gotten us to this point...

And then there's John Cole at Balloon Juice, who has a pretty blunt way with words:

If I read one fucking more thinkpiece, blog post, semi-literate tweet, or Facebook forward blaming whatever the fuck “identity politics” is for Democrats losing the election I am going to lose completely and totally lose my shit and climb a fucking bell tower. I don’t even know what people mean when they say identity politics anymore. So let me ask you:

Is it identity politics when you cater to white supremacists, the Klan, and neo-nazis to win an election?

Is it identity politics when you say white lives matter or blue lives matter?

Is it identity politics when you cheer building a wall to keep out rapey Mexicans?

Is it identity politics when you intentionally close voting districts in minority areas to suppress the vote?

Is it identity politics when you pass bills saying you can legally discriminate against the LGBT community?

Is it identity politics when you threaten a cop for wearing a hijab or try to rip the hijab off people in public?

Is it identity politics when you call for a ban on Muslims and claim that a government list of Muslims is a good idea?

Is it identity politics when your healthcare bills do nothing for women’s health but hand out Viagra like skittles?

Is it identity politics when children of color are disciplined more frequently and severely than white schoolchildren?

Is it identity politics when your #1 priority is passing bills telling what women can and can’t do regarding their reproductive health decisions?

Is it identity politics when the justice system systematically incarcerates minorities or when cities set up nuisance policing policies in minority communities?

Is it identity politics to insist that everyone say Merry Christmas?

Is it identity politics when you cheer stop and frisk in minority communities?

Is it identity politics when you claim “coastal elites” aren’t real Americans and that the heartland is where the “real people” live?

Is it identity politics to pay women less than men (and women of color even less)?

Is it identity politics to totally lose your fucking shit over a black Santa Claus or a black Jedi or boycott Rogue One because WHO FUCKING KNOWS THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING NUTS?...

I left the GOP because of their identity politics. I couldn’t sleep at night being aligned with warmongerers, homophobes, christianists, climate deniers, flat earthers, racists, xenophobes, and every garden variety bigot under the sun. The Republicans are the real party of identity politics- it’s all about stroking the few, the white, the privileged, and that’s all they have. They don’t actually have policy proposals or ideas, unless “Fuck ’em let them starve,” “Fuck ’em they don’t need health care,” “Fuck it, let’s bomb them,” “Fuck it, let’s put them in jail,” “Fuck it, the bible says so,” or “Fuck it, let’s burn it all down” count as policies and ideas...

I know where Cole's coming from: I'm also a former Republican driven away by the Culture War madness and their obsession with a tax-and-slash agenda that's been proven twice to be bad ideas (as though the third time or the thirtieth would be the charm).

Each one of those three voices are expressing the reality of the horror Trump and his fellow Republicans are going to inflict on the rest of us. All because of a rigged game and a broken electoral system. And none of this is going to get fixed until the entire thing collapses, ironically because these Republican policies are self-destructive and doomed to fail.

We can see this train wreck acomin' and nobody's going to be able to do anything about it until it's too late. And by then the body count of the innocent will be terrible to behold...