Today in Reprogrammable Meatbag News

From me.
In March.
Of 2005:

In other words, another one. Another scandal. Another mortifying embarrassment. Another one. 

Yet another one. 

Yet another fucking one. 

And page-by-page it followed the same tired You-Must-Be-Shitting-Me Bush nomination playbook. Specifically, a lavish and mindless defense mounted by the infinitely reprogrammable Golem of the Religious Right: that Reliable Fucktard Militia, trained to hold themselves ferociously blind to facts of any kind – no matter how staggering -- that might conflict with the pronouncements of Dear Leader. Always painting anyone standing in their Shining Path as Christ-hating traitors at 100,000 decibels.

From me.
In August
Of 2006.

The day that the GOP stops kicking gays in the teeth, recruiting klansmen, demonizing muslims, lionizing monsters who blame 9/11 of feminists and the ACLU and calling people like me traitor for opposing my government...that’s the day I will be happy to beat my pronouns into plowshares and talk peace and compromise.

But of course, they can’t let the crazies go. First and foremost -- as Barry Goldwater prophetically warned -- because the crazies now run their fucking party, from crotch to crown. The gargoyles have taken the cathedral, and Falwell and Dobson sits upon the Throne, while the Hagels and the Grahams are now the “fringe”.

And second, if they ever did kick the freaks out, they wouldn’t win another election. Ever. Anywhere. Seriously. As I’ve said before, without their Christopath Legions and assorted other reprogrammable golem shock troops, the GOP would be the Constitution Law Party, squatting impotently in the swamps of Mississippi, muttering angrily about Negroes.

And at heart, Quislings like Brooks would much rather have a police state with theocrats, deficits, endless war and tax cuts than a democracy with incrementally higher marginal tax rates and his Party out of power...

Over the years (decades?  jesus.  decades.) I've shifted from "reprogrammable Golem" to "reprogrammable meatbags" since almost no one is familiar with the original story of the Golem anymore and, if anything, they confuse it with Golem-from-The-Hobbit and then things get all tangly because we do not share the same context.  But over all of this time (and the preceding decades when I thought these things and talked about these things but was not blogging about these things) my meaning has not changed one bit.

Which is why comments like this from people who should know better like Ezra Klein are deeply frustrating.  

I don't have the creativity to imagine the shitstorm that would've followed Obama saying he "fell in love" with Kim Jong Un because the dictator wrote him a flattering letter.

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 1, 2018

Of course the reprogrammable meatbags would have staged a White House-burning shitstorm if President Obama had ever said or done 1% of what Il Douche says  and does every day.

Because these are the same reprogrammable meatbags who lost their minds over Bill Clinton's impeachable blowjob and then shrugged off the hundreds of lies told by George Bush to stampede a grieving nation into the wrong war and then cover up the fact that the war was a disaster. 

The same reprogrammable meatbags whose deep, principled concern over deficits can be flipped on and off like a light switch depending on which party is in the White House. 

The same reprogrammable meatbags who were giddy with delight over the Bush Administration's torture regime, screamed themselves hoarse over the Kenyan Usurper's jackbooted gun seizures that never fucking happened, and then went back to giddy delight over stripping people of their health insurance, tossing babies in cages and on and on and on.

The real story, Ezra, is not that Trump has left you overdrawn at the adjective bank (Note to Ezra:  Job it out to me.  My rates are reasonable and I never run dry.  I do, however, sometimes write with a great deal of inflection.)

The real story (which, once again no one but the dirty hippies are interested in touch with a barge pole) is how the fuck did the Republican Party become a shitpile of reprogrammable bigots and imbeciles to begin with?

Here's a clue. Many of the people who spent their entire adult lives building this monster machine and deploying it to stomp the shit out of our politics, are the same people who are now out making a very fine living hawking slightly different versions of the same book.

Funny old world.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

From Wikipedia:

The classic narrative: The Golem of Prague

...
The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th century rabbi of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who reportedly "created a [g]olem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava River and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations to defend the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks" and pogroms. Depending on the version of the legend, the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or killed under the rule of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. The Golem was called Josef and was known as Yossele. It was said that he could make himself invisible and summon spirits from the dead. Rabbi Loew deactivated the Golem on Friday evenings by removing the shem before the Sabbath (Saturday) began, so as to let it rest on Sabbath. One Friday evening Rabbi Loew forgot to remove the shem, and feared that the Golem would desecrate the Sabbath. A different story tells of a golem that fell in love, and when rejected, became the violent monster seen in most accounts. Some versions have the golem eventually going on a murderous rampage.

The rabbi then managed to pull the shem from his mouth and immobilize him in front of the synagogue, whereupon the golem fell in pieces.[6] The Golem's body was stored in the attic genizah of the Old New Synagogue, where it would be restored to life again if needed...