Monday, February 29, 2016

Regarding Trump, the Media Has a Fundamental Misunderstanding of How Stupid Americans Really Are

On his show Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver finally did something that lives up to the Buzzfeed-type headlines of "destroyed" or "obliterated." Those words are usually applied to some mild criticism levied at a public figure or issue by some comedian and are almost always entirely inaccurate. However, last night, Oliver really, truly reamed Donald Trump, savagely ripping apart every myth about him like a horny rhino rampage fucking everything on the plain. It was angry and cathartic, with Oliver not just dropping the mic after he was done but tossing it over his shoulder like he was throwing out the trash. The Rude Pundit orgasmed multiple times and so will you.

It should be one of several things this weekend that, at long last, bring to an end to the abject monstrosity that is the Trump campaign for the Republican nomination for President. Seriously, what the fuck else can happen? Earlier on Sunday, Trump refused to condemn a white supremacist (who he later disavowed in the most dickish, dismissive way possible after pressure), as if one should have any answer than "Hell, yes" when asked, "Do you hate the KKK?" How could his unbelievably crass and borderline violent campaign not be over?

Except it won't. It won't even put a dent in his support, which is now approaching 50% of GOP voters. It's not like those voters didn't think Trump was a racist before. It's not like they care what anyone but Trump says about Trump's wealth or his honesty or his past beliefs. No, something else is happening.

The Rude Pundit wants to posit something here about the American people, not in the psychobabble of David Brooks on a behavioral therapy bender. Think of this as a sequel to last week's plea to voters on Trump. It's very simple, actually: A lot of the American people are stupid. And no matter how much you try to tell them that something is ethically awful, morally corrupt, or just plain bad for you, stupid people don't fucking care because they are stupid.

Sometimes, stupid works in your favor. Stupid people like to be part of crowds of other stupid people. It goes for movies, music, TV shows, and elections, among most everything in life. And if you happen to support the same candidate as the stupid people, then all blessings of success come your way. In other words, if you're popular, people want to jump on the popularity train. Back in 2008, everyone knew people who were just voting for Obama because they "liked" him, not because they understood a goddamn thing about his campaign proposals. There was no reason to question anyone's motives if they're on your side. Who cares why your candidate wins, just as long as he or she does win?

In a conversation on Friday, the Rude Pundit's Doorman pal said he was stunned at how popular Trump had become. The Rude Pundit replied, "Why do people still watch Adam Sandler movies? If he shit out Grown-Ups 3, it'd be a hit." He went on to talk about how Adam Sandler's career explains the reason why Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee. Sure, Sandler's had some box office duds, but that hasn't dimmed the brand of "Adam Sandler." In fact, his wretched shitpile of a film, The Ridiculous 6, is the most-watched movie ever on Netflix. It's not that Ridiculous 6 is any better than Pixels (or so this blogger hears); however, the latter film requires a price of admission while the former is, more or less, free.

So is voting. And if you're someone who always thought that "Trump" represented some essential marker of success that you could never be a part of, well, maybe by supporting and voting for Donald Trump, you can have that piece of "Trump" that you always wanted. That's something that goes beyond politics and into what we might call "transcendent." Why play the lottery? Because you think you might win. Why believe in God? Because you're betting on getting into heaven after death. Once faith enters the equation, you can no longer make a rational argument against it. You are now dealing with stupid people (and we are all stupid at different times in our lives).

The major media outlets appear to believe that they can dig something up to turn the Trump train around. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the unbelievable stupidity of Americans. If they media learns that, if they learn that things like "reason" and "logic" don't matter one bit, then someone might be able to figure out the contortionist jujitsu required to defeat Trump.

Or don't. At the end of the day, the Rude Pundit doesn't care much. The Republican Party is ripping itself to shreds at last. Trump ain't gonna beat Hillary. Surely, we're not that stupid. Right?

Shit.

Friday, February 26, 2016

Random Observations on Last Night's GOP Fisting Fest

At last night's Republican debate/hate-fisting fest, you could say, if you were so inclined, that Sen. Marco Rubio "won," if by "won," you mean, "Still had his pants on and his ass was relatively unspanked." Sure, why not? You could talk about the good jabs he got in on sentient stainless steel dildo Donald Trump, especially the upcoming civil case about "Trump University," the farcical con job perpetrated by Trump on his most desperate fans. You could nod in agreement when Rubio challenged Trump to explain a health care plan alternative to the Affordable Care Act. You could laugh along as Rubio accused Trump of his own mortal sin: repetition without awareness.

You could have a jolly time pretending that any of it mattered in the least. Because, see, in the world we are damned to exist in now, Rubio didn't lay a glove on Trump. Putting aside that it's truly hilarious that any Republican would criticize any other Republican for not having a credible health coverage proposal, and putting aside that Rubio gave a smug, dickish self-satisfied smile whenever he thought he got in a good line, like a home-schooled spelling bee champ who got the word right, Rubio accomplished virtually nothing beyond avoiding another week of headlines about how much Marco Rubio sucks at debating.

The content of the debate is meaningless since none of the candidates said anything that approached a workable, genuine "plan" on anything. Trump went on about his imaginary wall and immigrants, Ted Cruz batted at the phantoms of liberal hottentots storming the gates of his nice country, Rubio did his usual best to sound vaguely rational while talking about completely bugnuts shit, John Kasich responded to everything like he just got out of electroshock therapy (and had the haircut to prove it), and there is a rumor that Ben Carson was there. Let's not waste any time talking about how full of shit they all were other than to say, "Yeah, they were all full of shit."

Instead, look at this exchange:
"Trump: If people -- my plan is very simple. I will not -- we're going to have private -- we are going to have health care, but I will not allow people to die on the sidewalks and the streets of our country if I'm president. You may let it and you may be fine with it...

"Cruz: So does the government pay for everyone's health care?

"Trump: ... I'm not fine with it. We are going to take those people...

"Cruz: Yes or no. Just answer the question.

"Trump: Excuse me. We are going to take those people and those people are going to be serviced by doctors and hospitals. We're going to make great deals on it, but we're not going to let them die in the streets.

"Cruz: Who pays for it?"

It's not a stretch to say that Cruz is implying that he's fine with people dying "on the sidewalks and streets" as long as the nation doesn't have to pay for their health care. What passed for compassion at the Republican debate was stating that Americans should be able to stay alive. Greatest country in the history forever. That's the level of unrepentant fuckery at which we're playing here.

Trump really won because none of the candidates have even the slightest understanding about where Trump's support comes from. Rubio thought he could undermine Trump by showing how the supposed mogul's business dealings are shady at best and illegal at worst. Cruz tried to paint Trump as a Democrat in elephant drag, a fake conservative who would destroy conservative principles (which, apparently, involve immediately deporting children and letting poor people die while bombing other nations).

Both of their campaigns have fundamentally failed to grasp that Trump is in the lead simply because he's Trump. That's got little to do with Trump's experience or his politics beyond "He hates who I hate." It's just fuckin' cult of personality. People want to be with the dude who thinks he's a winner no matter how much of a loser he might be. You know how in high school there was a loudmouth dickhead football player who was verbally abusive and a buffoon but somehow had tons of friends and got all the tail? Yeah, that guy. That's Trump. Meanwhile, Rubio acts like an altar boy who's upset that he's the only one not molested by the priest. Cruz is the prick who wanted so badly to be the class clown but is just a cruel prankster whose asshole dad thinks he's funny.

So let's stop with the pretense that last night's debate did a goddamn thing. Republicans better accept their Trumpish overlord or get the fuck out.

The real story from last night is how fucking worthless Wolf Blitzer was as a moderator. He got steamrolled time and again, had no control over the candidates, pathetically attempted to keep things on track, barely asked follow-ups, and was a quivering, useless lump of flesh with white stubble by the end. On top of that, frightening Hugh Hewitt, who looks like a poorly-healed burn victim, attempted to get the candidates to agree to a "litmus test" of Supreme Court candidates on "religious liberty," which means something like "Don't make Christians follow the Constitution." How is that even a question at a supposedly "mainstream" debate?

Another disgraceful evening in the Republican primary season is over. Let's all have fruit salad and hang out with Polish workers and try to forget that the future of the nation might end up in the slime-encrusted hands of one of these ethical lepers.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

The Rude Pundit Gets His Rage On at the GOP Debate Tonight (Live on Rabble)

The Rude Pundit will be joined once again by Jeff Kreisler in a whiskey-fueled rage attack on the Republican debate tonight at 9ish p.m. ET on the CNN.

You watch the goddamn thing on your TV and tune the computer device to Rabble.tv so it's like you're on the couch as the meat in a Rude/Jeff sandwich, listening to us comment, cry, and cringe at the fuckery before us.

If you want to have a voice and comment online during the debate, sign up for free, free, free to Rabble. Or you can just listen and lurk.

We will try our best to avoid jokes about the lack of Bush on the stage.

Ten Bombshells in Donald Trump's Taxes

Yesterday, loser Mitt Romney said that there might be a "bombshell" in Donald Trump's taxes, like that he's not as rich as he claims (duh) or doesn't pay much in taxes (double duh) or something else that doesn't really reach "bombshell" status. However, there are other things that could be lurking within Trump's 1040.

1. Income from Trump-brand abortion pills, the only abortifacient where you tell your fetus, "You're fired."

2. Deduction for tanning as a business expense. Also, a medical expense.

3. Donation to Undocumented Immigrants for Climate Justice and Gun Control.

4. Medical deduction for thousands of unused bottles of Effexor and thousands of empty bottles of prescription Rogaine.

5. Research funding for "Micropenis extension technology." Also, "donkey penis attachment surgery." Also, Melania.

6. Claim for twenty dependents, all teenage Chinese boys. Also, adoption credit.

7. Schedule C for his self-published translation of Mein Kampf with pictures of Trump photoshopped at rallies at the beginning of each chapter.

8. Deferred combat pay for his time in prep school, which Trump described as "like I was in the military."

9. All campaign costs deducted for "job-hunting."

10. Income from trademarking the phrase "Donald Trump is a gigantic asshole." Also, "Fuck Donald Trump."

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Brave Republicans Are Scared of Gitmo Detainees

So it was that, along with the Department of Defense, President Barack Obama laid out yet another version of a plan to close the American gulag...wait...detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just 91 detainees are held there, nearly all without charge and all without trial, in legal limbo for at least a decade, most much more. The treatment of the prisoners has been used as propaganda for terrorist groups throughout the Muslim world (although that has declined as the population there has declined). Obama wants to close it because, at a minimum, it's pretty hard to say you have the moral high ground when you are doing something so blatantly immoral. And it really does cost a whole lot of money to the military, who'd rather use the hundreds of millions of dollars elsewhere.

Obama says that the United States is a strong enough country to handle whatever actual criminals still remain at Gitmo. Unfortunately, Republicans are beside themselves at the idea that we'd close Gitmo and, of course, are vowing to continue obstructing any effort to end the facility's existence. Call it a "profile in cowardice, in colors of piss yourself yellow and shit yourself brown."

For instance, House Speaker Paul "Devolved Gingrich" Ryan said that transferring any detainees to American soil is against the law (and it is), adding, "We will not jeopardize our national security over a campaign promise." Senators and future ex-presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz both said some variation on "Fuck you. Don't close it. Expand it."

On and on it has gone. Rep. Jason "Face of a Pig" Chaffetz offered that Obama's plan "is dangerous and makes our country less safe." Senator Pat Roberts tweeted a short video of himself throwing the plan into the trash, which is exactly as wimpy as it sounds. All of them make the case that this nation is too weak to house alleged terrorists in our Supermax prisons. It's pretty fuckin' embarrassing to live in that country. And it's even more fuckin' embarrassing that much of the nation agrees with the cowards because, well, shit, they're cowards, too.

At this point, Obama should just tell everyone to go fuck themselves and empty Gitmo, just as he should have recess appointed a Supreme Court justice last week. Take him to court after everyone is transferred and let the chips fall where they may. Pull a George W. Bush and declare that his obligations under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force allows him to ignore the shit out of the law. Let's take this to the deadlocked Supreme Court.

Otherwise, this black eye will merely continue throb as the cowards win again.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Senate Republicans: President Obama Will Plunge the Nation into Crisis by Fulfilling His Constitutional Duties

Let's put the latest Republican fuckery another way: By saying that then-Senator Joe Biden was right in 1992 when he said, "It is my view that if a Supreme Court justice resigns tomorrow or within the next several weeks, or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not — and not — name a nominee until after the November election is completed," Republicans are stating very clearly that George H.W. Bush should not have been able to appoint a Supreme Court justice in the last 7 months of his presidency.

Right now, Republicans are cackling like witches around a cauldron, snidely saying that their position on President Obama naming a replacement for very dead and now rotting Antonin Scalia is just following "the Biden Rules." Which would be a thing if the Senate had actually done something like not even consider a president's nominee for the Supreme Court, which it has never, ever done simply because it's an election year. Of course, in 1992, when some of the current GOP Senators were already in the Senate, they would have lost their goddamned minds if Biden had actually had a chance to go through with the "threat," which, as you'll see in a minute, was not even a real threat.

Look, we know at this point that Republicans are a caucus of motherfuckers, and when you're dealing with motherfuckers, you generally expect them to fuck mothers, as the Rude Pundit has said many times before. It's what motherfuckers do. They see a mother somewhere and they fuck her. It doesn't matter if that mother wants to be fucked. If she's near a motherfucker, she will be fucked. And right now, Senate Republicans are taking their motherfucking to a new level. If Mary herself were to saunter by, looking all mothery, they would fuck the shit out of her, making her a virgin no more.

Today, the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Mitch "Chin Pillow" McConnell a mighty letter announcing that they were gonna guzzle down all the nutzoid conservative jizz they could jack off. The letter, signed by committee chair Chuck "Watch Me Twitter Like the Village Idiot" Grassley, Ted "Punch My Fucking Douchebag Face" Cruz, Lindsey "Jezebel" Graham, David "Shit on Me" Vitter, and all the rest of the inbreds and morons, said that they will not hold any hearings on any goddamn Supreme Court nominee sent to them until after inauguration day in 2017.

And, of course, if any conflict should happen, it's totally President Obama's fault. Gurgled McConnell while downing the chowder on the Senate floor, "He has every right to nominate someone. Even if doing so will inevitably plunge our nation into another bitter and avoidable struggle, that is his right."

You got that? It's the Nigger President's problem, not the Republicans. If you remember, the Nigger President was to blame for the government shutdown because he wouldn't be a good Nigger President and accept, without any uppity questions, the budget extortion the Republicans offered. Why won't the President just acknowledge his position as a nigger? Why must he cause so much turmoil by doing exactly what the fucking Constitution of the United fucking States says he is empowered to do?

McConnell continued, with the kind of cockknobish twisting of reality that you generally see in porn involving time-traveling gigolos, "He can let the people decide and make this an actual legacy-building moment rather than just another campaign roadshow." How do you respond to that? How about like this: "You cunt crumbs brought up the whole fucking election. Own that dickishness."

We can hope that this causes some kind of outrage that catalyzes voters to throw these anti-American, ass-sucking freaks out in November. But Republicans are lucky that most Americans wouldn't know a constitutional crisis if it punched them in the tit and said, "Look! I'm a constitutional crisis!" Welcome to another moment of turmoil caused by Republicans refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of a Democratic president.

It's this simple: the GOP hates this country as it exists now. And it will do everything possible to contort it to their ugly vision of what it should be.

By the way, in 1992, Biden totally finished that speech by saying that he'd be glad to have hearings if Bush would work with the Senate on deciding who to nominate. In other words, it's the exact opposite of what's going on now. Not that facts matter when there are mothers to fuck and a Nigger President to put in his place.

Late Post Today

Obviously, the day jumped the Rude Pundit and beat him down. He's brushing himself off and will be back later with more Bidenesque rudeness. 

Monday, February 22, 2016

Note on the Election: Stop Being a Goddamned Idiot

The Rude Pundit keeps meeting more and more people who are willing to admit that they are entertaining the idea of voting for Donald Trump. Whenever he presses them for reasons why, it boils down to "He's a straight talker." What they really mean is "He talks like a fucking idiot for, indeed, I am a fucking idiot who refuses to acknowledge my own fucking idiocy." And the Rude Pundit is ready to grundle punch people for saying things like "He reminds me of Reagan because he's not a politician."

Let's put this as politely as possible: Motherfucking Reagan was the motherfucking governor of motherfucking California for two motherfucking terms. He motherfucking ran for the motherfucking presidency twice and lost before he finally locked up the nomination. He was as much or more of a politician than anyone else running this year. You can be too dumb to know it or you can hope everyone else is too dumb to know, but, either way, you're a goddamned fool.

Maybe it's a problem with getting older, but the Rude Pundit wants to believe that this year's presidential race is so filled with repugnant fucknuttery that it's worse than any other election since he's been able to vote, that it's just an indicator of the devolution of the American political spectrum. Since nearly everyone is being some kind of asshole or idiot about the friggin' election, let's go through how you can stop yourself from being an idiot in 2016.

1. The Trump/Reagan thing. Already covered.

2. You can't talk about any of the Republican candidates as the "moderate" one. Trump wants to outright torture and murder prisoners of war, in violation of just about every treaty the nation has with the rest of the world, starting with the Geneva Conventions. Yet Republican moderates seem to be breaking for Trump because of some belief that he doesn't hate the gays as much as other Republicans or some such shit. John Kasich is rabidly anti-choice on abortion rights, and he proudly signed a bill defunding Planned Parenthood in Ohio today. And Rubio? The dude who keeps a Jesus butt plug up in there 24/7? No. At this point, Trump, Cruz, and Carson get over 60% of GOP voters. That's right. The nutzoid shit-tossers are the majority of the GOP. That is motherfucking reaping what you've motherfucking sown. You're an idiot if you think there are moderates running.

3. You know who is closer to what we once considered a moderate Republican? Hillary Clinton. And you're a fucking idiot if you think she's some wild and crazy liberal. You're also a fucking idiot if your reason for not supporting her is one of these worthless "scandals." Other than more Trump bullshit, this is the area that has the most uninformed, knee-jerk idiots doing the work of the most sinister assholes in the whole election process. Yes, there are investigations going on regarding her email server, and most of the those are the kind that are automatically triggered when a question over classified documents comes up. And when someone said to the Rude Pundit this weekend, "You know, something happened at Benghazi that involved Hillary and we just don't know the truth," the ceiling had to be cleaned because the top of his head blew off. It's the same fucking thing over and over since 1991: Clinton equals evil. If they're really more evil than anyone else, they do a great friggin' job hiding the bodies.

4. Speaking of, at this point, someone could discover Donald Trump's secret strangled hooker burial ground and his followers wouldn't give a flying fuck. He could be caught in bed with a dead boy, a live girl, and half a sheep, and he'd still get at least 35% of primary voters. If you ever thought that Trump would go away quickly, you were an idiot. If you still think that Trump will burn out at some point, you're an even bigger fucking idiot. Trump has already taken out the seaside villages, and he's on his way to Tokyo. Your puny conventional weapons will have no effect.

5. One last thing on the status of the election today, a plea to Jeb Bush: "Hey, Jeb, the Rude Pundit here. You know, I think you're a poncy little Fauntleroy who never really wanted to run for president in the first place. So now that you're out, why not take off the shiny breeches and put on some big boy pants and stop being a fucking idiot and bitch for once in your pathetic life? Why not declare that you won't vote for Trump if he's the nominee? You don't have to say you'll vote for Hillary or Bernie. You could even say that you won't vote at all. Eke just a bit of dignity out of this ludicrous clusterfuck nightmare you were plunged into. Or just be the pathetic phantom of a man that Trump always said you were."

Friday, February 19, 2016

Ted Cruz Is Like God, His Campaign Says to Jews

If you're lucky enough to be like the Rude Pundit, you are part of Ted Cruz's Most Excellent League of Pray-Makers. Yes, you can sign up to get daily emails from the Cruz campaign's prayer team on how to beseech the good Lord to smite all Trumps and Rubios and make Cruz the president of Jesusland. Oh, but wait. It's not just for Christians. Now, you Jews can join in the fun. (And it cannot be emphasized enough that this is actually what was in the email.)

"For those of you who have participated in a Jewish seder, you’ll recognize Yahweh’s 'I wills.'
      I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.
      I will free you from being slaves to them.
      I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and might acts of judgment.
      I will take you as my people and I will be your God.

"Our Lord God is the same yesterday and today and forever. He is still in the business of redeeming His people...and, we pray, the United States of America. [ellipses from Cruz - this is all quoted in full]

"During our day of fasting and prayer, let’s ask God to confirm that Ted’s 'I wills' by God’s enabling grace are trustworthy and worthy of a vote. He recently sent the following to supporters:
      I will always be a consistent conservative.
      I will always shoot straight with you.
      I will run an honorable campaign.
      I will be a good steward of your support.
      I will work as hard as I can."

Yahweh, in case you need a reminder, is just a word for "God." So Cruz is implicitly saying that he is just like God, God willing. And you Jews should be Yahwehdamn grateful that Ted Cruz wants your worship. Oh, wait, no, your vote. Sure. Just your vote.

Man, where's a crucifix when you need one?

Thursday, February 18, 2016

In Brief: A Slap Fight Between Pope Francis and Donald Trump

As if this election couldn't get any stupider, now we have Pope Francis saying, quite clearly about Republican rage balloon Donald Trump, "A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian." A wise man might have merely ascribed it to the difference between being a religious leader and being a political leader. A self-assured man might have ignored it altogether and just allowed the Pope to have his say. A thoughtful man might have said that he would consider the Pope's words as he would anyone giving him advice.

But we're talking about Donald Trump here, so, obviously, he was a throbbing cockknob who jizzed out a response as soon as possible.

Essentially, Trump's press release on the Pope is as clear a demonstration of why Pride and Envy are sins as you'll ever find. He starts by saying that only he can keep the Vatican safe. No, really: "If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians." So Trump believes that the Pope should be thrilled at the prospect of the torture and mass murder of Muslims, which, to be fair, at one point in its history, Catholic leaders would have been delighted to have occur. But that's so 600 years ago.

Then, in what is one of the least self-aware things said yet by a man who doesn't think he's said things that he just fucking said, Trump continues, "For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I am proud to be a Christian and as President I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith." What the fuck are we supposed to do with that? A good chunk of Trump's support is predicated on the idea that another religion needs to be questioned and attacked and weakened and denigrated. But that'd be asking for a moment of reflection from Trump and his drooling drone followers. Also, the implication here is that Trump is going to defend Christianity as president, which seems pretty sketchy Constitution-wise, not to mention civil rights-wise, but there you go again with your "logic" and "facts."

Ultimately, though, this is all about the bullshit pandering to the mad evangelical vote that Republicans are forced to go after. Even worse, we now have an argument over whether Trump or the Pope know better how to follow the ideas of the fictional character, "Jesus Christ." It's like getting into a drunken brawl over the most effective zombie weapon. "Yeah, Duane, a machete is great, but the baseball bat won't get dull, you dumb fuck," you might hear at a bar before a bottle is broken.

You might feel like interjecting, "Zombies aren't real," but no one gives a fuck at that point because, at the end of the day, it ain't about zombies. It's about one loudmouth asshole trying to prove that he's the loudest and biggest inflamed asshole in the room.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Louisiana Probably Will Never Recover From Its Jindaling

We should come up with a sexual act called "Jindaling" in honor of former Gov. Bobby Jindal. It should be filthy because Jindal and the Republican-loaded legislature did ungodly awful things to Louisiana. It should offer no way out and do long-term damage because the mess that Jindal left behind when his term ended in January has put the state in a near unstoppable spiral of economic destruction. So let's add that up. Filthy...no exit...spiral...Got it.

A Jindaling is when you're no-lube ass-fucking someone in handcuffs while their head is in a toilet you just shit in and they can't say the safe word because you keep flushing. You could also call that "the NOPD special."

Every day, Louisiana learns of more financial fuckery that sinks the state deeper and deeper. For instance, on Monday, the deficit for this year grew from $940 million to $957 million because $17 million in FEMA money to help the state with hurricane relief won't be coming this year. And the state learned that it will have to pay $71 million in interest on a bond Jindal had used to balance the budget. The money from the bond was supposed to be used for construction projects, but Jindal played a "shell game" in order to declare that his bullshit conservative ideology on taxes was working. How many states must suffer before we put a stake in the heart of supply-side economics, before we cut off its head and stuff it with garlic? How many states must suffer from the rank egotism of governors with national ambitions?

Oh, and next year? Louisiana will have a $2 billion deficit. For those of you working the math out, that's a titanic fuckload for a state the size of Louisiana. When Jindal took office, Louisiana was like a pig in shit from Katrina relief money and high oil prices, flush with more cash than it knew what to do with, so, of course, Jindal cut taxes, which is the one fucking thing he could do short of setting the money on fire to do nothing but harm for the vast majority of his state's citizens.

Shiny new Governor John Bel Edwards addressed a special session of the legislature on Sunday, laying out a program of budget cuts and tax increases in order to try to close the budget hole. Without action, Edwards has said that draconian cuts across the board will have to take place, including cuts to universities that might cause programs and entire campuses to close, including the beloved LSU football program (which is really hyperbole because, if the Tigers don't play, a whole bunch of drunk people will have nowhere to go on Saturdays in the fall but to burn the capitol).

Among the proposals is a hike on the alcohol tax, which hasn't been raised since 1948. This being Louisiana, that'll bring in a shit-ton of revenue. Of course, all this talk of higher taxes has been welcomed by the state like a low-cholesterol diet. Republicans have put out an ad criticizing the proposals because motherfuckers will be motherfuckers. Polls show that Louisiana residents oppose tax hikes because no fucking shit.

So far, Edwards and the legislature have cut $60 million in existing government budgets. That includes slashing the budget of the public defenders, which caused the Plaquemines Parish office to close as of today. Indefinitely. Public defender offices across the state are facing the same fate, laying off staff and refusing cases, leaving poor defendants sitting in jail. Orleans Parish's cuts have prompted a lawsuit from the ACLU. Oh, and the state has threatened to stop payments to colleges for students who are getting financial aid in the form of TOPS funds (sort of a Louisiana Pell Grant). Yeah, a hike in the income tax on the wealthy is way worse than dicking over the poor and middle class.

Remember that the only reason Edwards won the governorship is because Republicans thought they could get whoremonger David Vitter elected (hell, his crimes hadn't harmed him in his Senate races). Otherwise, Louisiana would have elected another Jindal-type fucknut, possibly with a shorter neck, to continue the swirly fucking. They weren't looking for a savior. They just didn't like the skeevy dude who wore shitty diapers while getting punished by hookers.

So, obviously, there's already a movement to recall Edwards just a month into his term.

The Rude Pundit remembers a time when his state was stupid but not wantonly cruel. Now, whatever nobility of the working class kept the state somewhat sane has long been abandoned for the phantom promises of conservative dogma, a system of belief that requires as much blind faith as religion.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

The Trump Heresy on George W. Bush

At the 1487th Republican debate on Saturday night in some fuckin' place, South Carolina, the fuzzy combover with a belligerent leprechaun attached to it, Donald Trump, lost his goddamned mind over the presidency of George W. Bush. Asked if he still believed if, as he said in 2008, Bush should have been impeached over the Iraq "war," Trump demurred on the question itself, but used the occasion to continue what he had done at a previous debate: calling "bullshit" on the notion that Bush "kept us safe," using, you know, the worst terrorist attack in United States history as an example of making us particularly unsafe.

Trump committed the greatest heresy of his increasingly heretical run for the Republican nomination. He not only spoke of George W. Bush, but he raked Bush over the coals rather than adhering to a milquetoast, generic "mistakes were made by everyone." Trump laid it all at W.'s motherfucking feet: "Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake. All right?...The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran has taken over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake...George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East."

And there it is, the thing that Democrats are regularly excoriated for saying, that the United States bears responsibility for the clusterfuck that is the Middle East, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Now, yeah, you can say that it pains you to agree with Donald Trump, but you can turn that around and say that Trump is agreeing with the critiques from the Left (leaving out his incredibly destabilizing desire to "take the oil"). It was fuckin' beautiful because the filthy fuckin' secret that Republicans want to keep repressed in the minds of their base is that George W. Bush fucked the country up, fucked it up like a group of drunk Manchester United thugs catching a single Liverpool fan in an alley.

Republicans have spent the last seven years trying to erase Bush from voters' memories. They've convinced their base that whatever anger they have about the state of the nation, President Obama should bear the blame (although that's like blaming the plumber for your leak that's flooding the house). Now, Trump wasn't trying to say that Obama shouldn't have Republicans' idiot anger directed at him. But he was bringing Bush back into the equation, ostensibly to discredit Jeb and the rest of the GOP establishment. When Jeb said that his brother built "a security apparatus to keep us safe," Trump wrecked him with "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that...That's not keeping us safe."

Marco Rubio tried to jump in and say that he was glad Al Gore wasn't president on 9/11/01, which should have been immediately followed up with the question, "Do you really think a President Gore would have invaded Iraq?" Instead, Trump went totally Godzilla on the whole proceeding, taking a giant shit on Tokyo while burning down everything around him with his nuclear breath: "How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center -- the World -- excuse me. I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe, Marco. That is not safe...And George Bush-- by the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn't listen to the advice of his CIA."

Prior to that, Trump uttered the gravest heresy of all: he accused George W. Bush of war crimes. "They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction," Trump said as he watched Tokyo go up in flames. It's this part of his rant that has made the right-wing punditocracy lose their goddamned minds. He's a 9/11 truther, says torture apologist and Bush ball washer Marc Thiessen. How dare he say Bush was responsible for making us unsafe on 9/11, says some fucking piece of shit from the National Review. (Trump did pull back a little on Monday, saying he "didn't know" for sure if Bush lied.)

What Trump knows is that not only would his voters not abandon him, but that he alone was saying what they sincerely believe about the Bush administration but have been silenced by the GOP from saying it. The post-debate polls have showed no change in Trump's numbers. He is going to trounce everyone in South Carolina.

While Trump is still a frightening prospect who truly has no chance of winning on his platform of rank xenophobia and absolutely no concrete plans, his purpose in this race is clarifying. He is forcing the GOP into a reckoning with its most poisonous beliefs and with its suppressed past. It's about fucking time someone did, even if that someone is a gluttonous ogre who is the embodiment of the ugly depravity of capitalism.

Meanwhile, the ghostly figure of George W. Bush is campaigning for Jeb, and he looks for all the world like a man who is so lost that his soul is already damned and he's just waiting for his body to finally give out.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Dead Judge

It doesn't matter if dead Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia loved his family and was loved by them. It doesn't fucking matter if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was best buds with him. It doesn't fucking matter that he was smart or funny or that he had a great singing voice or that he could cook like your Italian grandma. It doesn't fucking matter if there were times that Scalia ruled on the side of liberals in free speech or warrantless search cases. None of that fucking matters. Because Antonin Scalia was a poison to the nation, a dick who was proud of how dickish he could be, and the thing that most of us on the left felt upon hearing that he was dead was relief and "Oh, thank fucking Christ." The only difference between you and the Rude Pundit is that you might have felt a little guilt after thinking that. As for the Rude Pundit? Fuck dancing on Scalia's grave. He's ready to have rough anal sex on it before the dirt even settles and then wipe himself off with the pages of a Bible.

Let's put aside Scalia's bitterly pissy dissents, where he sought not just to counter the arguments of the majority but to degrade them, mock them, and bully them. Let's put aside Scalia's place in the conservative party circuit, where he drank and laughed with the political power players and then pretend he'd rule fairly when they came before him. Instead, let's just look at Scalia when he was either writing for the majority or concurring with it, where his cuntistry had the fullest effect on the lives of Americans.

For instance, this is from his majority opinion in a 1995 case upholding a school district's policy of random drug-testing student athletes: "Under the District's Policy, male students produce samples at a urinal along a wall. They remain fully clothed and are only observed from behind, if at all. Female students produce samples in an enclosed stall, with a female monitor standing outside listening only for sounds of tampering. These conditions are nearly identical to those typically encountered in public restrooms, which men, women, and especially schoolchildren use daily. Under such conditions, the privacy interests compromised by the process of obtaining the urine sample are in our view negligible." That's right: Scalia was cool with students being watched or listened to as they piss.

Scalia's constant approval of the state's right to control bodies is genuinely fucking chilling and more than a little creepy, whether it was his support of anti-sodomy laws or his desire to outlaw abortion or his bizarre animosity towards LGBT people, mostly because their fucking offended him.

And then there's Scalia's much-vaunted "originalism," the idea that the Constitution needs to be interpreted based on its original intent in the 18th century. The snarling sarcasm machine could crawl so far up his own ass that, in the Heller decision that struck down the ban on handguns in Washington, DC, Scalia could write, "The 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined “arms” as 'weapons of offence, or armour of defence'...At the time of the founding, as now, to 'bear' meant to 'carry.'" Then, in the same opinion, after probing the meaning of the words of the Second Amendment like a a Martian with a fresh earthling anus in front of it, Scalia dismissed that inconvenient first clause: "the adjective 'well-regulated' implies nothing more than the imposition of proper discipline and training."

But that originalism gets tossed out the fucking window when adhering to original intent counters his cruel vision of the world. In his concurrence on Citizens United, the decision that took our already corrupted elections and turned them into cash orgies without a safe word, Scalia addressed the dissenters, who noted that the Founders were not fond of corporations and therefore would not have wanted them to have First Amendment rights. Offered Scalia, "Even if we thought it proper to apply the dissent’s approach of excluding from First Amendment coverage what the Founders disliked, and even if we agreed that the Founders disliked founding-era corporations; modern corporations might not qualify for exclusion. Most of the Founders’ resentment towards corporations was directed at the state-granted monopoly privileges that individually chartered corporations enjoyed."

Do you see what happened there? Scalia said that "modern corporations" are different from the corporations of the time of the Founders, so the Constitution should apply differently. The fuck? By that logic, you should be able to say, "You know, the Founders didn't know that the Second Amendment would apply to owning unlimited AR-15s with giant magazine. They understood muskets." Then you'd have logical consistency. Then you'd have a real judicial philosophy. Instead, Scalia pretended that he believed something about the Constitution that his decisions, time and again, demonstrated that he didn't. Big supporter of state's rights? Fuck that in Bush v. Gore, the decision that set the nation back decades. Belief in habeas rights in Hamdi? Fuck that when it came to Gitmo.

Time and again, Scalia sought to broaden the power of authority over the power of the people. It went hand-in-hand with his deeply-held Catholic beliefs, that you would be judged whether or not you went to Heaven or Hell. Surely, there is a special place down below for a man who wrote, as Scalia did in the 1993 Herrera case, that "there is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough) for finding in the Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction." Innocence itself didn't matter to Scalia, and he didn't give a happy rat's fuck if a death row inmate who Scalia thought was a perfect candidate for capital punishment was later exonerated. Shit, you could say that Scalia's decisions caused more deaths than all the serial killers in American history combined.

The Rude Pundit would like to think that Scalia is in Hell now, chained to a bed on his stomach next to William Rehnquist, who looks over at him and says, "Don't worry. After the first few times, you realize that getting ass-fucked by the barbed dicks of demons isn't so bad. Now, the red hot pokers, those'll wake you up." And then he gets to see a liberal take his place on the court.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

The Rude Pundit and Jeff Kreisler Are Screwing Around with Tonight's GOP Debate

Once again, the Rude Pundit and his co-conspirator, Jeff Kreisler, are going on Rabble.tv to snark and snap and shout sometimes at a Republican debate. Tonight's is on CNN at 9 p.m. or so (Who knows? CNN is just an asshole about that start time). And you can watch on your TV and then tune in your internet receiver to Rabble and it'll be just like the two of us are sitting on either side of you, making you feel cozy and then a little uncomfortable because of all the sexual tension.

Mostly, though, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be glad you weren't watching alone.

You can just listen in for free or you can sign up at Rabble (also free) and join the ever-expanding group of commenters. We read stuff live on the air and respond to you, too.

And we can all enjoy the sight of Donald Trump smirking as Jeb Bush trips on his own dick over and over and Ted Cruz feeds on the remains of Marco Rubio.

Friday, February 12, 2016

The Stupidest Moment of Last Night's Democratic Debate: Who Loves Obama More?

Last night, at the Democratic presidential debate in Milwaukee, in the midst of a generic, oh-they're-a-little-different back and forth between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator was asked to name two leaders who would influence his foreign policy. A bit predictably, Sanders said FDR and, for wartime rallying of the nation, Churchill. This led to the stupidest fucking moment of the evening, and it was stupid for both candidates.

Sanders' response led Clinton to say, "[T]oday Senator Sanders said that President Obama failed the presidential leadership test. And this is not the first time that he has criticized President Obama. In the past he has called him weak. He has called him a disappointment... it is a -- the kind of criticism that we've heard from Senator Sanders about our president I expect from Republicans. I do not expect from someone running for the Democratic nomination to succeed President Obama."

The Rude Pundit's immediate response was "Fucking really?" Has Clinton heard what the Republicans have been saying about Obama? There's a vast scorched wasteland of difference between Sanders saying that he disagrees with Obama on issues like trade (and, in fact, he didn't call Obama either "weak" or "a disappointment") and the Republicans claiming that President Obama is consciously attempting to turn the United States into a half-Mexican/half-Muslim free health care-giving breeding ground for rapists and terrorist who will fuck, behead, and regulate out of existence white Christian people and their noble businesses while aborting babies and tossing them on the floor to die before heading out to blow up Israel and the local mall after taking your guns away so you can't be motherfucking Rambo and save the nation from the depredations of a President Clinton or Sanders.

So, you know, just calm that "Sanders doesn't love Obama as much as I do" shit.

After Clinton finished, Sanders answered Clinton with a variation on "I have a black friend" and then said, bizarrely, "Well, one of us ran against Barack Obama. I was not that candidate." What the fuck does that even mean? That Clinton should have known Obama was going to win and not run against him? That Clinton didn't think Obama should be president when they were opposing each other for the same job? It's a nonsensical reply because Clinton was attacking Sanders for what he said about President Obama, not an untested Senator Obama. It's like comparing apples and a record of presidential accomplishments.

For both candidates, though, it was a worthless moment, an attempt to pander to African American voters, and a couple of completely unnecessary slams. Obviously, either one of the two is going to carry on and build on much of what Obama has done (mostly for good, but also for bad - see: drone war) while the Republicans talk about taking health insurance away from millions of Americans and deporting children.  To say that it matters by what degree Clinton or Sanders support President Obama is to try nuance if you're gonna use a pistol or a rifle to go after the asshole with a sledgehammer.

By the way, writing this made the Rude Pundit wonder: In 2007-8, you could legitimately say that President Bush had done things that were undermining the security and finances of the nation. How did Democratic candidates attack him? Did they say that he is evil incarnate and anti-American? The worst attack he could find came from Hillary Clinton in an April 16, 2008 debate with Barack Obama (when, yes, she was running against him). Clinton said, "I wish the Republicans would apologize for the disaster of the Bush-Cheney years."

These days, if a Republican said that about Obama, he would be seen as restrained and weak in his criticism.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Gitmo Is Still Wrecking Our American Soul (Part of the "Not Talking About Trump for One Fucking Day" Series)

(Note: The Rude Pundit has made the executive decision that if he spends every day reacting to whatever bullshit is coming out of the primary races, he will lose his goddamn mind and end up going on a 50-state killing spree. To prevent that, he will spend at least a couple of days a week not saying cruel things about Ted Cruz and not overexplaining how Democrats should calm the fuck down. In this way, he will stay superior to CNNMSNBCFox.)

Mohammed Bwazir was, by all accounts, a fuck-up from Yemen who stumbled his way from being a charity worker into becoming a soldier for al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan for a brief period of time. Through a series of not-wacky misadventures, he ended up at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002, held without charge, after being detained months before by Afghani and then American forces. He was debriefed pretty quickly, and a military tribunal decided in 2007 to recommend him for release. No, he wasn't the best prisoner - he went on hunger strikes regularly - but he was considered a low threat and of low intelligence value (even if he was deemed a medium risk for returning to the front for the Taliban, probably because he had no other way to make a living). In other words, he didn't really know shit, and there was no reason he should be at Gitmo.

Nine years later, just a couple of weeks ago, Bwazir was about to go onto a plane that would take him away from his prison since 2002, and he balked literally at the entrance. He didn't want to go where the State Department was going to send him. He wanted to go to Saudi Arabia or Indonesia or someplace where he has relatives, not the unnamed country in southern Europe he was being relocated to. He was brought back to his cell, still in the shackles he was wearing as he approached the plane. It was the first time any detainee had gone through all the processing necessary to get out of Gitmo before bailing at the last minute.

The State Department's special envoy to Gitmo, Lee Wolosky, said that they might end up having to force some detainees to get on planes so they can clear out the prison. "We’re not a travel agency. We’re not here to fulfill every wish and desire of a resettlee," he told the Miami Herald. "They do not get to pick and choose where they go. In certain circumstances, a detainee would be forced on to an aircraft in order to complete a resettlement."

Roll that around in your head for a few seconds. The United States has kept detainees, of which there are currently 91, in a legal limbo, away from their lives, their families, everything, for nearly a decade and a half. Mohammed Bwazir gave officials all the information he had, according to their assessment: "Detainee is assessed to be substantially exploited. He has provided numerous and detailed reports on his story and timeline, to include available paramilitary training and front line locations and personnel." The only value he might have had was whether he knew any of the other detainees, in the hundreds by that 2008 assessment. Yet it was still recommended that he be released.

Bwazir cooperated. The Department of Defense said he could be released. And we didn't even try to release him until this year. We kept him in a black hole where at one point he wanted to commit suicide in order to protest his detention. But there is the State Department envoy saying, in essence, "Fuck this guy. He should be grateful we're not dropping him in the ocean covered in chum."

Bwazir's lawyer said, "He’s been in Guantánamo so long that he was terrified about going to a country other than one where he had family." While at Gitmo, he has received very little in the way of job training or anything. We took him when he was 21 or so and now we want to put him back in the world in his mid-30s after spending his adult life so far in a prison for no reason, for having his number come up on a roulette wheel of the damned.

And we tried to send him somewhere completely alien. We obviously expected him to treat us as liberators and thank us with flowers and candy.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Note to Republican Voters Post-New Hampshire: Are You Really This Dumb?

Walking dick joke Donald Trump sailed easily to victory in the New Hampshire primary last night in the wake of a bizarro rally where he called Ted Cruz a "pussy." Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter that he was repeating what a woman in the audience yelled. He chose to say it, he smirked and practically jacked off while he said it, and so, yeah, he called Cruz a "pussy."

Truth be told, Ted Cruz is more of a cunt and a prick and a huge asshole, but let's be clear as to why Trump degraded Cruz. It was because Cruz was iffy on whether or not he'd allow the torture of prisoners through waterboarding. To Trump, this was an outrage because, as he says so often while karate chopping the air with his stubby hands, ISIS beheads people - Christians, damnit. So the crowds cheer when Trump says he's going to allow waterboarding "and worse" (although he won't define what "worse" is because he doesn't want to tip his hand to the enemy). That's what makes you a "pussy" in Trumpworld: The barest desire to not be a savage animal. Even Ted "Carpet Bomb" Cruz doesn't make the cut.

The results of the New Hampshire primary were fucking frightening because 47% of the GOP voters chose the crazy candidates: Trump and Cruz. That's more than the next four establishment candidates combined. In Iowa, Trump and Cruz together got nearly 52% of the voters, which, obviously, is more than all the rest. Right now, polls in South Carolina have Trump and Cruz taking the votes of 55-56% of Republicans.

So the only question to those voters is simple: "How fucking dumb are you?" And the simple answer is: "We're really fucking dumb, man."

Look, it's easy to see the appeal of Trump to angry white people who have been stripped of power and, rather than blame other white people, want to blame immigrants and Muslims and that Negro in the White House. Dumb people believe that blatant shows of power are the only way power exists. So if we're not sending soldiers to kill the fuck out of foreigners, then we must be a bunch of, well, shit, pussies. Dumb people like to try to connect themselves with successful people, like the lickspittles who try to get into the popular kids' circle at prep school. Dumb people do this even if the successful person is a raging hemorrhoid of a human being. And dumb people don't care if they are lied to, repeatedly, if the lies confirm their irrational and unshakeable biases and hatreds. That's the secret to the right-wing media and it's the secret to Trump.

Look at his victory speech last night, said to a room of slobbering cattle who would bend over and drop their pants if Trump said he wanted to brand their asses with a giant "T." Trump just makes shit up as he goes. "We're going to rebuild our military. It's going to be so big, so strong, so powerful. Nobody is going to mess with us, believe me, nobody. Nobody," he said. Do you, Trump voter, really believe that terrorists are going to be intimidated by a big military? Yeah, sure, some ISIS member is gonna think, through the haze religious fervor and amphetamines, "Well, I'm supposed to shoot up that mall for Allah, but I don't know. President Trump has sure made the military huge." You probably do believe that because you are dumb.

Or when Trump said, "I am going to be the greatest jobs president that God ever created." What the fuck does that even mean? And then he just went completely shit-tossing crazy: "Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5 percent unemployment. The number's probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42 percent." At the height of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was 25%. He's just pulling numbers from various reports, like he clicked through a few links after googling "real unemployment rate." If 42% of workers were unemployed, we'd've already lined up people like Trump to shoot dead and turn into a terrible stew.

And then there was shit that represents a fundamental stupidity about how the world of politics is different from the world of business. Trump said, "We're going to beat China, Japan. We're going to beat Mexico at trade. We're going to beat all of these countries that are taking so much of our money away from us on a daily basis," he said. Motherfucker, those are some of our biggest trade partners. Are you gonna levy tariffs? They'll tariff the shit out of our goods and wreck the economy.

These aren't policy disagreements. These aren't ideological differences over the level of taxes on the wealthy, for instance. These are just layers of bullshit on top of layers of bullshit to create a parfait of bullshit.

But none of this matters to Trump voters. Because they're that dumb. And Trump's rise is a hilarious failure for a Republican Party that wanted to make its voters dumb enough to vote against their interests. Well, those motherfuckin' chickens are home to motherfuckin' roost.

The GOP is so lacking in anything like a legitimate moral center that the most immoral asshole in the room is going to be your standard bearer. Congratulations on nearly eight years of delegitimizing the presidency and several decades of saying that government itself is bad. You've finally gotten your perfect candidate.

Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Wrestling with Race and Police Power in a Minor Case

The Rude Pundit has been wrestling with something in his brain since he first heard about it yesterday. Mocking Republicans and getting all worked up about Bernie and Hillary can wait until the New Hampshire results. We still have nine more months of that shit until we birth a new president. Instead, let's turn our attention to what seems, at first glance, like another incident of white police officers mistreating a black driver, in this case, a Princeton University professor, Imani Perry. The Rude Pundit wanted to call "bullshit" on Perry, but then his thinking brain started fucking with his animal brain.

Perry wrote about what was a genuinely scary moment: she was pulled over by the police in Princeton, New Jersey, for speeding and then arrested for what she initially said was "for a single parking ticket three years ago." She was handcuffed and put in the back of a squad car, not allowed to contact anyone until she got to the station, and handcuffed to a table while she was being processed in the station. She was also frisked by one of the arresting white male officers. She attributed her "mistreatment" to being black, adding in a Facebook post, "I cannot ever say definitively that this specific mistreatment was a result of race. But I can say that what I experienced was far more likely because my skin is a deep brown, my nose is round, and my hair is coily."

This here blog has been writing about the mistreatment of African Americans by the police when most of the Black Lives Matter protesters were still in elementary school. This here writer has been incredibly harsh on the police and their abuse of power. That doesn't mean that, as a white person, the Rude Pundit can't be called out as "racist" or anything else (he is called that on a regular basis). But when it comes to the way in which cops enact their authority on the bodies of black people, he has squarely allied himself with those African American victims. If you're so inclined, stick with him while he works a couple of things out here. If not, fuck it. Go read something else. Or call him "racist."

'Cause, see, the real reason Perry was arrested wasn't because of a parking ticket. It was because her driver's license was suspended. The law in New Jersey is pretty fucked up this way: if you don't pay even a single parking ticket, your license gets suspended. How do you know this is going to happen? You receive warnings if you don't pay your ticket, like this one:


You get two of those and then you get a letter telling you that your license was suspended. It's easy to overlook these in the stream of daily junk mail, but that's on you.

How does the Rude Pundit know about all this?

Because about 12 years ago, he was pulled over in a small, wealthy town in central New Jersey and arrested for having a suspended driver's license for an unpaid parking ticket. He was frisked on the side of the road, handcuffed and put into the back of a squad car, and handcuffed to a table while he was processed at the station. He couldn't contact anyone until he got to the station. Perry's right: it is fuckin' frightening. He was released when someone arrived to get him, never put in a cell (and neither was Perry), and got a court date. He went before a judge a month or so later, and the judge even looked at the Rude Pundit, baffled, and said, "This is for parking tickets?" To which the Rude Pundit gave a rueful nod. He paid his fine, got his license restored, and has made sure to pay his tickets. Lesson learned.

Perry is very clear that she is not comparing herself to Sandra Bland or other African American women who have died as a result of their treatment in police custody. But, she says, "I hope that this circle of attention will be part of a deeper reckoning with how and why police officers behave the way they do, especially towards those of us whose flesh is dark."

She believes that her "disproportionate policing and punishment" was due to her race. The Princeton police chief disagrees, saying that her treatment was appropriate and that, yes, she was arrested for a suspended license for two unpaid parking tickets. She received the same exact treatment that the Rude Pundit did for the exact same violation of the law. It's a stupid law, yes, and it needs to change, but there it is.

However...

As the Rude Pundit said, he is a white male. He can't even begin to imagine the fear of a black man or woman being arrested by white cops in this age of cases like Freddie Gray and Tanisha Anderson. How could Perry not wonder what might happen to her in the back of that squad car? Why wouldn't she feel panic? Why wouldn't she be outraged?

Yes, strictly by the law, Perry was in the wrong. But she lives, we all live, in this very wrong racial culture where an extra layer of extralegal repression exists. The department chief himself acknowledged this: "We are part of the larger law enforcement community in our current times in law enforcement. Therefore I understand how in this climate we can be perceived to be a microcosm of that." Mistrust is rampant.

In other words, it sucks for everyone in these situations. If we're not gonna do anything about that, then Perry has every reason in the world to be shaken up by what she went through, even if her arrest was legally justified, even if the police did absolutely everything right, even if you want to wave this off on the basis of "Princeton professor."

Perry is being attacked on right-wing websites and in the usual way on social media. But, then again, all of those writers and trolls think the cops did nothing wrong to Eric Garner. So fuck them where they type.

In this world, even when black and white people are treated equally, it is simply not equal.

Monday, February 08, 2016

Jeb Bush and the Gentleman Politician Death Spiral (in a Single Photo)


The Rude Pundit loves that photo from this weekend in New Hampshire.  Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush is holding South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as if it is a pieta for the death of an era as represented in the image of two late-middle-aged/elderly white men in an awkward embrace. This sublime moment comes as the nation is perhaps about to burn the Bush family's political hopes in the ground and salt the earth after. Then we can forget about Jeb and go back to pretending the Bush, Sr. was a decent president (he wasn't) and denying that George W. wrecked the nation's ass with his crazed gorilla fucking.

The picture up there shows an ending, one not coming fast enough, to the old power structure of a certain class of people who run for office, as if Graham and Bush are comforting each other as the glass explodes around them, the ballroom floods, and the motherfuckin' Titanic sinks one more time. "Oh, where are the gentleman of old?" that image wonders. "Whither have gone the grace notes in our foul symphony of politics?"

What you're really seeing in the screaming death yawp of the Jeb Bush campaign is the wrecking of a myth, that these men like G. Bush and Dole and McCain and even, yes, in 2000, W. Bush (the compassionate conservative, remember?) were paragons of moderation and judgment when, let's be honest, they were the same scumfuckers as the carnival barkers and mad dogs who are now tearing at J. Bush like alligators in the Everglades who snatch children who walk too close to the water.

The election for Bush was over the second that he let Donald Trump mount him and take him, like a lion on the grasslands. This was emphasized at the GOP debate this past weekend when Trump put a finger to his lips to shush Bush, and the son and brother of former terrible presidents shushed to let Trump speak. The audience booed, but the alpha dog had made his point.

Otherwise, the New Hampshire primary has become the latest sinkhole for the inevitable cratering of Bush. Sure, Graham was witty and charming campaigning for him. But by the time Bush was whining, "Please clap" to an audience after a lively-for-him rant about being decent and quiet and respectful as commander-in-chief, it was pretty much "Take Ol' Yeller out back" time for him.

Bush never got his "moment," that brief time in the sun when it looks as if the campaign is gonna go your way. Marco Rubio had it coming out of Iowa and then Chris Christie unhinged his jaw and devoured Rubio whole at the debate, which led to Christie's moment. Cruz, Fiorina, even Ben Carson had moments. Not Jeb. And he's angry about the whole fucking process, telling Politico about the eventual nominee, "I think of the surviving candidates, as you get closer to the point where it starts to matter a lot, I think there’s going to be a need to focus back to the point of rhetoric and how you say things. I think there’s going to be — there needs to be some discipline." Or, you know, sound more like him so he doesn't sound so dull.

By the way, this is the guy who kept a brain-dead woman alive for two years for his political gain. Let's never forget that from the supposedly sane candidate.

Meanwhile, Trump is gleefully pantsing Bush every chance he gets. It's almost ridiculous at this point, like the endgame of some long-held grudge. The Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Broward and Palm Beach counties, Florida, which is where the infamous stopped recount happened in 2000, pretty much wrote Bush's political epitaph last week: "Bush is soft-spoken. He takes time to warm up when he speaks. And he is a gentleman."

The thing about gentlemen is that we know that, for many, it's a bullshit disguise that hides something ugly or perverse, like "Oh, he holds the door for the ladies but likes to beat his children and masturbate on his cat." Now, even though it's just as much a show as the "gentleman" persona, Republicans wants someone "real." As in "reality." Or, you know, "reality TV." The closest they've got is the actual reality TV star and the wannabe TV preacher. They will chew up and spit out the gentlemen all the time.

And, to be honest, because of the Terri Schiavo debacle and because of his support for all your basic, terrible conservative policies (even if he isn't a total cockknob about immigration), fuck Jeb and all the white, male gentlemen in their political graves.

Friday, February 05, 2016

Believe It or Not: You Can Support Bernie and Not Despise Hillary (and Vice-Versa)

Let's be honest here about the presidency of either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton. It doesn't matter which one is "pragmatic" or "progressive" or "progressive progressive" or "pragmatically progressive." It matters about as much as a flea fart in a tornado. Because, see, neither of them is getting shit past a Congress that has at least one house controlled by Republicans. Hillary Clinton ain't gonna wiggle her nose and cause the obstructionist fucknuts to all of a sudden "want to get things done." Bernie Sanders ain't gonna wave a magic staff and cause "revolution" to overtake the hearts of the very assholes who have done everything in their power to halt the moderate-left agenda of President Obama. The Republicans ain't gonna compromise with any Democrat in the White House. It ain't in their nature.

And let's be honest: Any argument over who is progressiver is just fucking dumb, no matter who started it. Obviously, compared to the hellbeasts running on the Republican side, both Sanders and Clinton are progressive. To fight over by what degree is a waste of time and energy. It's fucking dumb that Sanders brought it up. It's fucking dumb that Clinton didn't just say, "That's fucking dumb" and ignored it. (Conversely, any argument on the other side over who is conservativer is just as fucking dumb. Don't worry, fellas and lady, you're all just terrible human beings.)

The Rude Pundit is leaning towards Sanders in the primary because Sanders' views on shit more readily align with his. That's it. It's the simplest comparison in the world: "Who is most like me? Okay, they've got my vote." By saying that, the Rude Pundit will be accused of supporting a gun-loving freak who lives in a fantasy world, even if none of those things are remotely true. When he was leaning Clinton, he was accused of supporting a Wall Street shill who was just fuckin' skeevy, which, again, there is not a whole lot of proof for any of that. And if Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, he will support her and vote for her because the Rude Pundit is not a fucking idiot. He has no problem voting for Clinton because the alternative is not to vote, which gives more support to a Republican, and fuck that noise with a sharpened chainsaw.

In the last week, the Rude Pundit has met at least five people who support various candidates (including, frighteningly enough, someone thinking hard about Trump). All of them said they couldn't vote for Clinton because:
1. "She just bothers me."
2. "There's something about her."
3. "She just seems like she's dirty."
4. "Blarg, garf, Trump." (shits self)
5. "You know she did something wrong."

Every single one of these voters is merely a tool of the Republican anti-Clinton machine which has worked tirelessly for over two decades to make sure that the name "Clinton" is tainted, even if there is no real reason for any of it. You want to know how to stop an asshole anti-Hillary Republican in their tracks? Ask them if they think Republicans would be investigating Benghazi or the email bullshit if Clinton wasn't running for president. The Rude Pundit asked a few, and all of them said, "No" or "Probably not." Well, there you fucking go.

That same feeling permeates the left: Something has to be bad about Hillary or why would we spend all this time talking about how bad she is? That's letting conservatives set the rules of engagement. To his credit, Sanders refuses to go down the road of criticizing her on the email fake scandal. But "Benghazi" is now in the lexicon with "Whitewater" as shorthand for "Scumbag Clintons." You can bet that if Hillary Clinton is elected, those motherfuckers will open impeachment hearings right after the inauguration because that's how vermin roll. You want to be a part of that, alleged progressive?

This is not to say that you can't find fault in things that Clinton or Sanders have done or voted on. Jesus Christ, they've both had long careers. Of course they're gonna do shit that pisses you off. While we're all handjobbing President Obama for the ACA signups and the unemployment rate, you still have to reconcile that with the TPP (or dismiss it and call anyone who mildly criticizes the president "racist" because you're just that special kind of asshole).

There are two fucking missions for whoever gets the Democratic nomination. First, prevent a Republican from getting into office. And we can argue until the cows come home, take a shit, and go to sleep about which polls prove which candidate can do that. But no matter what, you have to stop the Republicans from fucking this nation harder than Chris Christie on his wife's ass while she wears a Hillary mask on the back of her head.

And then the second mission is to take the Congress back, all of it, and it better be by a filibuster-proof majority. Otherwise, nothing is going to get done beyond executive orders and some foreign policy efforts.

Dispute each other, sweet BernieBots and HillaryBots (or Bernie Bros and Hillary...Harridans? What awful, sexist thing is it? It's all so goddamn stupid), but if you declare you despise the other candidate, you should ask who you're believing, especially when it comes to Clinton. You might be laying down in a bed of slime.

Thursday, February 04, 2016

Taking a Sick Day, Boss

Is it the Zika virus? The flu? A cold and he's just a pussy? Who knows? But the Rude Pundit feels like warmed over shit, and, frankly, he couldn't give a squirt of spider monkey jizz about the presidential candidates. (Other than "Fuck you with a donkey dildo, Marco Rubio, you Jesus-fellating gargoyle.")

Back later? Tomorrow? with more phlegmy rudeness.

Wednesday, February 03, 2016

As Obama Speaks, Too Many Americans Are Cowards About Mosques

Today, President Obama went to a mosque in Baltimore to say, in essence, "Yeah, all those assholes who hate on Muslims are just too goddamn dumb to breathe without Breitbart telling them how." It seems appropriate, then, to take a quick look around the country to see what the cowardly morons are doing when it comes to mosques being built in their 'hoods.

For instance, way out in Gillette, Wyoming, a town of 31,000 with less than three dozen Muslims, a mosque opened in December of 2015. The mosque is a converted house where the .1% of Gillette could worship, and, if you're gonna be a Muslim terrorist, you're not gonna exactly disappear into the population of a town in the middle of fucking nowhere, where, statistically, you look different from everyone else. Although, to be sure, the Rockpile Museum, with its new pioneer quilts exhibit, might be a prime ISIS target.

These fears caused one not-brave American, Bret Colvin, to start one of those Facebook groups of the damned, "stop islam in gillette !" with a goal of stopping "the islam invasion sponsored by...barrack obama." It's good to know that someone doesn't write in all caps these days. Or spell the president's name correctly like an ordinary Muslim might. Colvin views himself as a modern-day Crusader, ready to use the mighty sword of Zuckerberg to angrily stab the keyboard for the glory of Christ. Of course, now the group has over 400 members. Of course, people are commenting shit like "These Muslim maggots need to be gut shot." For his part, Colvin said, "The issue with the mosque is we didn’t know who was behind it, who was in it, where it came from."

Except here's the funny part: the mosque was built by the Khan family, which has been in Wyoming since 1906. They own 45 properties, mostly hotels, with 15 in Gillette. Indeed, the Khans are responsible for building hotels and bringing jobs to Gillette, and they have been for years. You can bet that they have far deeper roots in Wyoming than most of the people who joined Colvin's shitty Facebook group. Most of the members of the mosque are members of the Khan family, who now face harassment and threats.

But, wait, it gets even funnier: A "heavyset white man" from Gillette, with the nearly Dickensian name of Erich Schlup, knocked on the door of the mosque during a sermon because that's what the fuck you do when you don't understand something: you take a minute to learn. He listened to the sermon and came away with a different idea about the mosque and the Muslims in Gillette: "The sermon was - it's not entirely unlike what I've experienced when I've gone to church." Schlup's cousin is part of the anti-Muslim Facebook group, but Schlup won't be joining: "Everyone wants to be peaceful and coincide with each other. And how can we do that without understanding each other? So why not come check it out and learn a few things?"

Meanwhile, now that the mayor and others in the town have said that the mosque is here to stay (and, really, are you gonna piss off one of the biggest employers in the town?), Colvin has set his sights on keeping out the alleged 2000 Syrian refugees that are supposed to be resettled in Gillette.

Which would be surprising since Wyoming hasn't accepted a single refugee since 2012.

Fear and ignorance won't be undone by inconvenient facts.

Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Iowa: Who the Fuck Cares?

Now that the Iowa caucuses are over and the people of the state can go back to...what?...fucking their asses with corncobs?...it's time for us to parse the exhaustingly meaningless exercise in fake democracy. You have to wonder why there aren't mass suicides among the reporters who have been forced to live in the desolate winter hellscape of Iowa for weeks. You have not known despair until you have been surrounded by plowed corn or wheat fields, filled with dried dirt and patches of snow. It isn't quaint. It isn't charming. It's fucking depressing when gray dirt meets gray sky. So, sure, you can either caucus or go on a killing spree.

What did we learn? Well, other than that rabid religious twat mites will vote for whatever crazed fucker jacks off to Jesus hardest, we learned that delegates can be awarded by the toss of a goddamn coin. It would have been more fair to put up photos of Sanders and Clinton and let a monkey toss shit at one and declare the other the winner.

Otherwise, the Rude Pundit isn't going to justify this overwrought spectacle by searching for any meaning in the results. Yeah, it was fun to see Donald Trump act like he had just been punched repeatedly in the balls. Yeah, it's great that young people turned out to caucus for Bernie Sanders. Yeah, Chris Christie oughta feel like shit. But, really, all this pretense to believing that Iowa tells us anything other than which asshole is gonna feel awfully fuckin' smug for a week or so is a gigantic waste of time and effort.

If you wanna learn anything, look at what the candidates said in victory and pseudo-victory.

For instance, dickfaced shitsmear Ted Cruz, a man whose voice sounds like he molests rodents, went on a mad ramble of a speech, pretty much proclaiming his win of not even a third of the voters in Iowa was tantamount to the second coming of Christ plus the greatest blow job ever times a smoking gun Benghazi email. Enjoy some uncut batshit: "While Americans will continue to suffer under a president who has set an agenda who is causing millions to hurt across this country I want to remind you of the promise of scripture. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. Iowa has proclaimed to the world, morning is coming. Morning is coming. From day one this campaign has been a movement. For millions of Americans to organize, to rally, to come together." The word "joy" is not what comes to mind when the Rude Pundit thinks of Ted Cruz. "Ferret rape" and "child beating" seem more appropriate.

Cruz had opened his over half-hour long speech with "Let me first of all say, to God be the glory." That went along with third place finisher Marco Rubio saying, "I thank my lord and savior Jesus Christ, I thank God for allowing me the opportunity to come this far with each of you." Seriously, if Jesus came back and said, "You know what I really want? Some filthy scat play," Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would volunteer their faces for him to shit on.

Rubio's speech was even more pathetic than Donald Trump's brief "Well, shit" admission of loss. The demi-senator from Florida acted like he had been asked to prom by the hot captain of the football team. He said, "For months, for months they told us we had no chance. For months they told us because we offer too much optimism in a time of anger, we had no chance. For months they told us because we didn't have the right endorsements or the right political connections, we had no chance. They told me that we have no chance because my hair wasn't gray enough and my boots were too high. They told me I needed to wait my turn, that I needed to wait in line. But tonight, tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message."

Dude, you came in third. Apparently, pride is one of those sins that you can just forget about whenever it's convenient.

Well, it's on to New Hampshire and more fuckery. You can bet, though, that you will have never seen political savagery like Trump going after Rubio and Cruz for the next week. He will be dining on their viscera by Saturday's debate, which, you can also bet, he won't be skipping.

Monday, February 01, 2016

Ted Cruz Revises the Bible, In Case You Were Too Dumb to Get a Metaphor

The Rude Pundit receives all kinds of campaign email he never signed up for because, for whatever reason, he has been put on Hell's political spam list. Most of it is just Hillary Clinton saying, "I want you" or Rand Paul pathetically whining that he can still win if anyone would pay attention to him (Spoiler: he can't and they won't). So it's rare when something breaks through the white noise of begging and masturbation. But he got one today that made him take notice.

It's from the Ted Cruz campaign (motto: "To know Ted is to hate Ted"), and it's titled, "A Time for Prayer." See, the Rude Pundit totally forgot that he signed up to be part of Senator Ted Cruz's Super-Duper Prayer Team, and we've been receiving missives in the email telling us how to pray for Cruz to become president and smite his enemies with one jerk of the mighty cock of Christ.

Cruz's campaign takes verses from the Bible and edits them to make them Cruz-centric. It's sort of like how you go to your girlfriend's house and paste your face over the face of ex-boyfriends, her father, her brother, and her dog in her photos so that you are her everything. It's creepy and fucked-up and says more about you than you might want people to know. And the version of the Bible that Cruz uses is The Message, in which the language is dumbed down so that even your double-inbred cousin can drool over the pages and understand it.

This week's Super-Duper Prayer Team prayerlingus comes from Psalm 35, which is Old Testament David praying for some help from the Big Guy. Just to give you a flavor of the language we're talking here, this is Verse 1 in King James: "Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me." And here it is in The Message: "Harass these hecklers, God,/punch these bullies in the nose. The former is poetry. The latter is dogshit. Perfect for Cruzite reading.

So here's Cruz's version of verses 9-10: "But let [Ted and staff] run loose and free, celebrating God’s great work, every bone in [their] bod[ies] laughing, singing, 'God, there’s no one like you. You put the down-and-out on their feet and protect the unprotected from bullies!'" We're supposed to pray that God prevents Cruz from getting a well-deserved wedgie? A shit swirlie from the forces of Lucifer? Someone saying his outfit is "totally gay" on Instagram?

But it gets better (worse). Verse 4: "When those [out to trap Ted] try to knife [him] in the back, make [him] look foolish. Frustrate all those who are plotting [his] downfall." Swear to god, those bracketed parts are from the Cruz campaign, and they're replacing "me" (or David, who wanted help dealing with persecution by Saul and...you know, who the fuck cares) with Cruz. That's right. Cruz is now David before he became king. And the translation really is like it's written by psychopaths for psychopaths.

And then, using verse 19, we pray, "[We the Prayer Team, Ted and Heidi, and the entire campaign staff] will give you full credit when everyone gathers for worship; when the people turn out in force [we] will say [our] Hallelujahs." So the logic here is that voting for Ted Cruz is like worshipping God. That's not megalomaniacal in a truly frightening way at all. What's great is that Cruz's campaign thought its voters were too fucking stupid to get that these quotes could be metaphors for Cruz. Instead, they chose to literalize it.

The amount of nutzoid religiosity that has become part of the Cruz campaign approaches the absurd. Someone's gonna have to tell the Rude Pundit what Cruz even meant when he said, as part of his closing argument in Iowa, it's time to "awaken the body of Christ that we may pull back from the abyss." Where the fuck is the body of Christ? Didn't he ascend to heaven? Is it in heaven? Has Jesus been asleep all this time? And then he went on, "If we awaken and energize the body of Christ — if Christians and people of faith come out and vote our values — we will win and we will turn the country around," which clarifies things perhaps: So the "body" here is a group of people and not the actual body of Christ. That's pretty fucking confusing. Anything else? "I want to tell everyone to get ready, strap on the full armor of God, get ready for the attacks that are coming," Cruz said. Honestly, the Rude Pundit stopped at "strap on" and couldn't read any further for fear that the rest was a graphic description of Cruz getting anally violated for votes, which is how we got the Iowa caucuses.

By the way, the email is topped with a photo of Cruz and his family, including the daughter who hates his fucking guts. We all feel you, girlfriend, we all feel you.