Playing for Team Evil does a hard enough number on the body and the soul.
But playing for Team Evil while doing bottom-shelf, dead-eyed OnlyFans porn...?
From Raw Story:
MAGA men lured by influencer's yoga pants and 'unusual' pose: 'She isn't subtle'
A MAGA influencer has blended politics with OnlyFans, using the adult platform to court right-wing male followers in a striking new way, according to a report Thursday.
Get out now, kid.
...holy shit, there's an ICE thug at the pulpit.
Earlier this week a reader prevailed upon me for some assistance deconstructing a video his "independent" friend had sent him. The subject was the ICE protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota on Sunday, January 18, 2026. In it, a smarmy git named Rispo (link here if you're interested) took it upon himself to explain the First Amendment to us po' dumb Liberals with all the exaggerated exasperation he could summon. He then made the completely predictable leap from one protest on one day in one place...to this is just how all of these stupid Liberals dupes. The idea that the Left would dare conflate the noble heroes of ICE with fascism? With tyranny? It out Herods Herod!
Real MAGA fainting couch stuff.
So I thought about it for a minute, and the following is about 35% my original reply and 65% stuff I added in for texture, context and mouth-feel.
To start with, there are 3,500 to 3,600 houses of worship in the greater Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area. This includes churches of all denominations, mosques, temples and synagogues, so why did the protesters choose this one?
Simple. The pastor. From Newsweek:
Who Is David Easterwood? Protesters Say Pastor Is ICE Official
David Easterwood, who leads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in St. Paul, also apparently serves as a pastor at a church that was disrupted by protesters on Sunday.
Dozens of protesters entered the Cities Church in St. Paul during a service, with some chanting "ICE out" and "Justice for Renee Good"—the woman an ICE agent fatally shot in Minneapolis on January 7.
I would imagine the galling duplicity of the shepherd of the flock being in the pay of the wolves presented an irresistible opportunity for protestors to underscore the deeply anti-Christian hypocrisy of MAGA Republicans.
Second, are you familiar with the idea of "nutpicking"? Friend of the blog Matthew Sheffield taught me that term. Nutpicking is a tactic in which you try to present one extreme example as representative of an entire ideology or belief system, which is exactly what the git in the video is doing. Leaping from one protest on one day in one church involving a handful of protestors, to "This is how the Left..." blah blah blah. These are the logical fallacies of non sequitur, a straw man argument and threat inflation all rolled into one.
Third, this guy eyerolling the idea that "these people" conflate ICE with fascists automatically negates any judgement he wants to pass on anything. The ICE goons are fascists, as is the administration that rolled them out to terrorize the citizens of Minneapolis. The fact that he doesn't believe this flags him as a bad faith operator.
Fourth, yes, in this one case, protestors were infringing on the first amendment rights of the parishioners. So what? No one was hurt. No one was shot. It's called civil disobedience, which has a long and storied history. In this case it was motivated by the fact that the pastor of the church is also an ICE agent. Maybe the parishioners learned something they didn't know.
Fifth, if MAGA explainer git is so damn concerned about disrupting worship services, take a look at the effect ICE goons prowling around primarily Hispanic churches in Chicago had on church attendance and the level of fear and intimidation among parishioners.
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
Clergy sue feds over restriction on providing religious services to immigrants held at Broadview ICE facility
The group has attempted to provide communion for detainees at the facility but were denied, with officials citing “safety and security concerns,” according to the lawsuit. The group is suing the government, arguing the denial is a violation of the First Amendment.
The Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security used “shifting, contradictory, and often opaque communication” to deny clergy the ability to pray with detainees at the ICE facility in Broadview, including late immigrant activists Sister Pat Murphy and Sister JoAnn Persch.
The group attempted to provide communion for detainees at the facility in October as well as earlier this month but were denied both times, with officials citing “safety and security concerns,” according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court. The group accuses the government of violating federal law as well as the First Amendment rights of religious officials and detainees.
“A non-specific reference to safety and security is not sufficient to deny the rights of Catholic clergy and laypersons, or persons of any other denomination or religion, to practice their faith, especially as others have been allowed to do so at the ICE facility in Broadview since it became an immigration-related facility in 2006,” the lawsuit states. “The United States has a long history of accommodating such religious freedom and practice inside of prisons and jails, and there is no reason to deny them altogether at Broadview, where the vast majority of detainees have no criminal records.”
ICE agents wielding guns tried to intimidate my church. We will not bow in fear.When ICE agents descend on our neighborhoods, when fear spreads like wildfire, people of faith must be the living water that quenches it.
As a pastor, I consider the church not just a place of worship, but a sacred home − somewhere families gather to find comfort, courage and communion. For generations, our pews have held the laughter of children, the tears of grief and joy, and the prayers of the faithful.
Last month, the sanctity of our space was shattered.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered the parking lot of Downey Memorial Christian Church to take a man who was walking through our property. The agents were armed, masked and aggressive.
They tried to intimidate clergy and staff − people whose only armor is their faith and moral convictions. In that moment, our sacred space became a site of state-sanctioned fear and violence.
DHS authorized ICE to harass and intimidate churchgoers from Day 1 of this administration. It has come to churches to make arrests and stage operations. There is nothing sacred to these people.
Chicago’s faith leaders have been among the most salient groups voicing opposition to federal immigration enforcement efforts.
The Coalition for Spiritual Leadership, a Chicago-based Catholic and Christian community organization, led several gatherings at the Broadview ICE Detention Center, where clergy sought to provide religious services to people detained inside.
Notably, the Rev. David Black, senior pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, was struck multiple times with pepper balls by ICE agents while protesting outside Broadview.
Away from Broadview, ICE’s presence led some Latino parishioners to stop attending mass, according to the Rev. Juan Vargas, priest at Our Lady of the Rosary Parish.
“The (attendance) numbers have been lower but still strong,” Vargas said. “We would see 50 or 70 depending on any ICE activity in the area, which would cause a little bit of extra fear.”
Vargas added that some parishioners who typically attend the Spanish mass have opted to join the English mass.
“To them they feel a little bit more comfortable thinking there’s less of a risk,” Vargas said.
During mass, the parish’s ushers scope out the surrounding neighborhood for any signs of ICE, Vargas said.
For parishioners who opt to stay home altogether, Vargas has adopted a “reach-out” policy.
“The big push has been — reach out,” Vargas said. “If you have not heard from someone or miss someone, reach out to your neighbor, give them a knock to make sure they’re doing well.”
Immigration officers assert sweeping power to enter homes without a judge’s warrant, memo says
A woman who led an anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a Minnesota church has been arrested, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday.Bondi announced the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong in a post on X days after protesters during Sunday service entered the Cities Church in St. Paul, where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement serves as a pastor.
The Justice Department quickly opened a civil rights investigation after the group interrupted services by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” referring to the 37-year-old mother of three who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis earlier this month. Bondi
“Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP,” the attorney general wrote on X...
Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and prominent local activist, had called for the pastor affiliated with ICE to resign, saying his dual role poses a “fundamental moral conflict.”
"It was not immediately clear what charge or charges Levy Armstrong faces. Justice Department officials have said in recent days they were considering charging the protesters under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act."
The FACE Act prohibits physically obstructing or using the threat of force to intimidate or interfere with a person seeking reproductive health services or seeking to participate in a service at a house of worship.
The Trump administration has criticized the Biden administration for using the FACE Act to prosecute people for blocking access to abortion clinics and reproductive health centers, calling the cases an example of the “weaponization” of law enforcement.
The Justice Department’s swift investigation into the church disruption stands in contrast to its decision not to open a civil rights investigation into Good’s killing by an ICE officer. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week there is “no basis” at this time for a civil rights investigation into her death.
Administration officials have said the officer acted in self-defense and that the driver of the Honda was engaging in “an act of domestic terrorism” when she pulled forward toward him. But the decision not to have the department’s Civil Rights Division investigate marked a sharp departure from past administrations, which have moved quickly to probe shootings of civilians by law enforcement officials.
If you want to get instantly blocked by all your Never Trump allies who have now elevated the late Michael Gerson to sainthood, my advice to you is to remind them of Gerson's actual record.
His actual writing.
Not the way Peter Wehner' remembers it:
A beautiful writer with an even more beautiful soul
Not the way Christianity Today summarized it:
Gerson crafted the language of faith-inspired politics for president George W. Bush from 1999 to 2006. He fused a theological vision of moral purpose with a practical policy agenda—and in the process produced some of the era’s most memorable phrases, including “armies of compassion” and “axis of evil.”
Not the way The Wheaton Center for Faith, Politics & Economics memorialized it:
God’s Wordsmith: Michael Gerson Remembered by Peter Wehner, David Brooks, and Scott Baker
Because of course his Conservative friends and fellow travelers remember him as angelically humble and high-minded ... because the bile that poured out of his keyboard every week and into pages of the Washington Post wasn't aimed at them.
It was aimed at us.
More specifically, it was aimed at President Barack Obama, and it was fucking relentless. If you are interested in the details, back in 2019 I wrote a little over 16,000 words about it here, breaking down year after year of Gerson's baseless, scurrilous, often borderline-racist attacks on President Obama, and his slanderous attacks on you and me for voting for Obama. You see, according to Mr. Gerson, many of us were either idiots or idolaters or both for supporting him.
Two Faces of Obamamania
Some Obama supporters aren't the brightest of bulbs.
However, this is not a column about the late Michael Gerson, per se. His story just gets us where we are going, which is 20 years ago. May of 2005. This is about all those good, God-fearin', morally superior Christian Conservative men who held enormous sway within the Republican party while holding themselves willfully and disastrously blind for decades as to what was really going on with their Conservative evangelical cult and their despicable political regime.
It's about how so many of these God-fearin', morally superior Christian Conservative men had their Road to Damascus moment 30 years too late. How their recognition of the size and shape of the monster they had created only arrived, grudgingly, once that monster had grown large enough to cast its terrifying shadow on them personally.
It's about what savvy Conservative Evangelicals like Gerson, and Peter Wehner, and David French should have seen coming long before a Midwest bumpkin like me did. And despite the fact that these men of faith were so consistently and catastrophically wrong about the one thing they were being paid to opine about -- the one thing they had their noses pressed right up against for their entire adult lives -- they either retained their positions of influence and authority in the media, or, in the case of David French, actually gotten promoted all the way up to The New York Times.
All while those who had been sounding the alarm all along are still treated like crackpots and pests.
So let's take a little walk into the Forbidden Zone of the Before Time to see a world that some of us dirty fucking hippies had seen all along, and a whole lot of revered and highly-paid Conservative pundits and thought leaders held themselves heroically ignorant of until it was far, far too late.
From me, May 16, 2005:
Another exciting page from The Fucktard Bible
Chick Tract “Christians” and why Nick Kristof is an idiot.
Let me tell you a couple of mostly-true stories, and then explain why Nick Kristof is an idiot.
First: My Mom had spent a week at an ashram in Pennsylvania and was positively bubbling over with joy. It was a traveling summer, so after her face-time with Buddah, her sojourn took her west to visit family we have out there. This particular evening she was visiting with my cousin and his family who are deeply Fundmentalist. Every other phrase out of his mouth on any topic is “Well Praise the Lord!” or “God is good.” They’re in church every few days. Bookshelves are stocked with “Left Behind” fiction. The whole deal.
In other words, Right Wing Evangelicals who spend a good part of their waking hours relentless pushing their particular, ossified version of Christianity to anyone who comes within earshot.
So my Mom is over having dinner, and Cousin Fucktard and his family are practically stuffing Chick Tracts into her pockets…and she’s listening politely to their idiotic hard-sell drivel, because that’s what nice people do. Then came a lull in the conversation, and since the topic was God, she stared to share with them her deeply moving and ecstatic experiences at the ashram, and Cousin Fucktard immediately cut her off.
“Excuse me, Aunt Driftglass,” he asked, “but do these people believe that Christianity is the only True Faith, and have they accepted Jesus Christ is their personal Lord and Savior?”
“Weeell,” she began diplomatically, “they believe Jesus was a great spiritual leader. As an incarnation of the Divine. You see, they believe…”
And that’s when Cousin Fucktard cut her off again.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Sorry, Aunt Driftglass, but I’ll have to ask you not to talk about that in my house. We don’t approve of blasphemy here.”
And that was that.
Second: My brother and I were at our family reunion last summer down in the wilds of Missouri. It was Red State Central, and the 2004 election was heating up, and as it happened, Bill Clinton’s autobiography had just come out. My uncle – the patriarch of the tribe – held forth these opinions, and spoke for most of the family when he said:
There was no need to read anything from Bill Clinton’s autobio, “’cause Clinton’s just a liar. Lied about ever’thang.”
The reason every right-thinkin’, God-fearin’ person must re-elect George Bush was equally simple. Bush was “a plain-spoken man, and a per’fessed Christian.”
Period.
No engagement with factual reality of any kind. No discussion of policy or nuance, or comprehension that there even are such things. A level of cultural, political, historical, global and just-plan-factual illiteracy and detachment – and a smug self-satisfaction with being this pig-ignorant -- that was absolutely Medieval.
This was when I figured that Bush would probably win. Because these members of my family – and millions of other Conservative Evangelical Fundamentalists – have no higher reasoning functions with which you can engage. They don’t believe facts. They are cultists who have been relentlessly programmed to believe “Liberal = Satan” and “Republican = Christian”. Period.
Now on to this slice of simpleton cheese from Nick Kristof:
Liberal Bible-Thumping
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: May 15, 2005
Even aside from his arguments that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and that St. Paul was a self-hating gay, the new book by a former Episcopal bishop of Newark is explosive.
John Shelby Spong, the former bishop, tosses a hand grenade into the cultural wars with "The Sins of Scripture," which examines why the Bible - for all its message of love and charity - has often been used through history to oppose democracy and women's rights, to justify slavery and even mass murder.
…
This book is long overdue, because one of the biggest mistakes liberals have made has been to forfeit battles in which faith plays a crucial role. Religion has always been a central current of American life, and it is becoming more important in politics because of the new Great Awakening unfolding across the United States.
Yet liberals have tended to stay apart from the fray rather than engaging in it. In fact, when conservatives quote from the Bible to make moral points, they tend to quote very selectively.
…
"Can we really worship the God found in the Bible who sent the angel of death across the land of Egypt to murder the firstborn males in every Egyptian household?" Bishop Spong asks. Or what about 1 Samuel 15, in which God is quoted as issuing orders to wipe out all the Amalekites: "Kill both man and woman, child and infant." Hmmm. Tough love, or war crimes? As for the New Testament, Revelation 19:17 has an angel handing out invitations to a divine dinner of "the flesh of all people."
…
Bishop Spong particularly denounces preachers who selectively quote Scripture against homosexuality. He also cites various textual reasons for concluding (not very persuasively) that St. Paul was "a frightened gay man condemning other gay people so that he can keep his own homosexuality inside the rigid discipline of his faith."
…
Liberals can and should confront Bible-thumping preachers on their own terms, for the scriptural emphasis on justice and compassion gives the left plenty of ammunition. After all, the Bible depicts Jesus as healing lepers, not slashing Medicaid.
Apparently Mr. Kristof has never heard of the Presbyterians. Or the Unitarians. Or any of a dozen flavors of Protestantism that aren’t run by completely deranged big-haired Mussolinae (isn’t that the plural of Il Duce). Or the Liberal and/or Liberation Theologians of the Catholic Church. Or the fucking Jesuits. And he has never read any of the rich body of literature that has taken on the Christian Right over just these issues, over and over again, for at least the last twenty-years.
So since he has decided to plop himself down in the middle of this busy intersection as innocent of any knowledge of his own culture as a dung beetle is of ballistics, let me help the poor man out by hipping him to a few facts, the central two being these:
1. We are not talking about “Christians” generally, but that fiercely and proudly ignorant cult called Conservative Evangelical Fundamentalists.
2. Being “biblical literalists” – believing that the Bible is the “literal and inerrant Word of God” – means that Conservative Evangelical Fundamentalists are by definition unable to admit doctrinal or dogmatic error in the slightest degree. On a practically molecular-level they are incapable of allowing themselves to think even for a second that there are parts of the Bible that are historically absurd or physically impossible…or just poorly translated or misunderstood.
On no issue of any kind, to any degree large or small, are Conservative Evangelicals capable of or willing to engage at all. All discussion begins with the predicate that their beliefs are 100% correct in every detail, and that anyone who disagrees with them is either misguided and in need of conversion, or a minion of Satan in need of Armageddon.
Or to put it a little less abstractly, Jerry Falwell was a lying, hater-mongering, heap of wormy shit twenty years ago and no amount of engagement by anyone on any issue in any venue on any topic has succeeded in budging his fat ass one micron.
Ditto the rest of the Heroes of Evangelical Ignorance: Pat Roberston. James Dobson, Don Wildmon., Paul Wyrick, Randall Terry, Phyllis Schlafly…and so on with a list that extends well out past the vanishing point.
And for the record, Nick, we had a Democratic President who was as steeped in scripture as any one of these thugs; could out-cite them all and did engage them on the spiritual as well as the policy level. And do you remember how they reacted?
The howled for his blood.
The Masters of the Antebellum South looked to the Bible to justify their fascist Plantation States and generations of the faithful fought them from the pulpit. And failed.
Further generations confronted Southern Segregationists and lynchers in the same pulpits and with the same Good Book. And failed.
Another generation fought them over interracial marriage and property rights and voting rights and civil rights. And failed
We engage them now over a woman’s right to her own body. Over stem cell research. Over fucking Evolution. And we fail.
No amount of moral suasion has ever softened the hearts or opened the minds of these motherfuckers one iota; over and over again history has shown that it is only the naked power of a religiously neutral Federal Government coming down on their necks that ever forces them to quit abusing and murdering people their perverse faith has taught them to hate in the name of White Male Privilege and actually behave like Good Christians.
Which is not really surprising; Christians of all species have been talking right past each other for, well, around 2000 years. Same book, same language, same Savior...and you still get the Reformation, the Counter Reformation, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Anglicanism, Evangelicalism. You get schismatic warfare. You get internecine murder on a massive scale. You get the Inquisition, Salem, the Crusades and the likes of the Albigensian heresy (“Kill all. God will know his own.”)
So no thank you, Nick. I’ll go right along reading my Bible for a variety of reasons, but trying to engage a Fundy in a serious discussion about faith as opposed to simply enduring a set-piece, memorized-by-rote monologue is a fool’s errand. For your own edification, I urge you to sit down one evening over a beer with a couple of Jesuits and let them tell you about Evangelicals and how thoroughly reviled and discredited their inbred-idiot-cousin version of the Gospels is among serious theologians. How their Pop-Up Hate Book version of the Bible is laughed at by anyone not in their hillbilly cult.
Finally remember that the Bible is a Big Book. A whopping great, intimidating Moby Dick of a book that scares the crap out of most people who either don’t read at all to begin with, or read only monosyllabic Twinkie news with brides running away to Neverland to fondle young boys (I’m probably getting the details wrong. Following the Twinkie news is hard work.)
And like pre-IraqWar intel, it is cherry-picked by the Falwells and the Robersons of the world to fit their pre-existing bigotries…and always will be. They only see what they want to see so Nick, to save you a little time, let me summarize what the Fundies actually look at when they read the Good Book.
The Fucktard Bible
Old Tes’mint:
Gen’sis. God make everything on October 9th, 4004 B.C. ‘Round 9-ish.
Ex’dis. Chuck Heston saves some good Christians, some animals and his guns.
Buncha stuff
God killin’ people what don’t look like me, which is always cool.
God hates fags.
Bunch faggity poems or somethin’
God wastes Lot’s whole family, ‘cause he’s a fag or a libril or somethin’. Sooo cool.
Buncha other stuff.
New Tes’mint.
Jebus Kick’s Ass!
Stinkin’ Jews kill Jebus.
Buncha stuff
Buncha faggity stuff about “forgivin’ and camels and ‘the least of these.’”
Jebus Keeps Kicking Ass!
Buncha Letters.
Letter about God Hatin’ Fags, which is Excellent.
Buncha other stuff
Jebus Comes Back and Blows Shit Up and Kills alla them Librils and Queers and ay-rabs and Jews.
And Christ wept.
Here ends today's sojourn to the Before Time.
* [Prologue: If you have never read Jonathan Swift's excellent 1729 satire "A Modest Proposal" please understand that this missive of mine is delivered in that spirit. Onward.]
Sure, abolishing gay marriage may sound "controversial:, but hear me out.
The one thing the Centrist Big Brains and Never Trumpers with media platforms all seem to agree on is that Democrats lost because something something "culture". They're all very careful never to explain exactly what "culture" means, but they are all very clear that Democrats must dump the words and the people and who make "Americans" feel icky.
Example.
This is Bill Galston, nearly 80, completely out of touch reality and very hard to listen to since literally every third word out of his mouth is "y'know" on the Never Trump Beg to Differ podcast:
...the [Democratic] party is going to have to go through a hard process of dumping overboard the ballast that threatened to sink the ship.
This is Sam Harris, smug contrarian asshole who has been driven right 'round the bend by trans stuff, on the Never Trump Bulwark podcast.
The Democratic party is a... is a this very rigged, uh, Rube Goldberg device of death. Which is just, y'know, rigged to destroy, to... to cancel the reputation of anyone who touches the wrong gear or lever. And, uh, we have to... we have to tear it down to the studs. I mean it's just like this... is there... Actually has to be a purge of the activist class in Democratic politics. Otherwise, y'know, this... no one we put forward will be electable.
All lines on the pundit electoral map converge here: Democrats have to go all-in on peeling off some of the cow-dumb mouthbreathers who make up the margins in these very close elections. The goofs who have no idea how anything works, what anyone stands for, who pay zero attention to the news and who broke late for Trump this year by a wide margin.
You know, the clueless mopes Jay Leno used to interview during his "Jaywalking" bit.
The cast of Idiocracy.
The Kallikaks.
America's ambulatory, unprocessed Soylent Green.
We who remember All in The Family need to stop mentally shaking our heads ruefully at the millions of Archie Bunkers who now control this country, and instead bend every oar in the service of convincing at least some of those racist dum-dums to vote Democratic.
Because, for you Robocop fans out there, the Great Wad (as my friend, the late Harlan Ellison used to call them) does not admire the bespectacled kid working a night shift at a filling station while studying plane geometry:
They Great Wad hates that guy. Instead, they admire the asshole on the motorcycle who mocks the idea of being a "college boy" and takes what he wants by force.
Those are the ones we need to somehow bamboozle into the Big Tent. And believe me, I understand how uncomfortable this might make some of you. In fact, way back five minutes ago I wrote a lot about madness of credulous Liberals, who had been right all along, to allow themselves to be shoved into a corner (again) and control over the public conversation about what the hell had happened to the GOP ceded to the likes of recently-former Republicans like Rick Wilson and Charlie Sykes and Matthew Dowd and Joe Scarborough.
Ceded without the slightest hint of genuine confession or repentance or atonement. Ceded without any acknowledgment that we Liberals even existed, except as wild-eyed straw men impeding the fortunes of this new "Pro-Democracy Alliance" the Never Trumpers were somehow now in charge of. As this tiny handful of recently-former Republicans began to completely colonize the print and teevee media, I was told, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms, to sit down and shut up.
For God's Sake, driftglass, don't you realize that the Fate of American Democracy was at stake!
[Fun Fact: Turns out that handing whatever was left of the "Liberal" media over to a bunch of recently-former Republicans accomplished nothing. And yet there they still are. Still useless, still wrong, and still telling us what to do.]
So believe me when I tell you that I well understand your revulsion at the idea of pandering to meatheads for votes, but for God's Sake, don't you realize that the Fate of American Democracy is at stake!
And keep in mind that the attitudes of the bigots and imbeciles are set in concrete, so you can forget about changing them or persuading them with "facts". They're completely immune to that. Instead, just like Republicans, we need to focus on a few their odious prejudices and deranged conspiracy theories and pretend like hell that, A) we agree with them, B) they are very smart for believing what they believe, and C) we promise to make whatever they're mad at go away.
Also keep in mind, they have the memory of a mayfly, so it doesn't matter if we actually deliver on those promises. This is a great big hammer that foolish Democrats keep leaving in the tool box. In the New Politics, it only matters that the meatbags think you delivered on your promises. Donald Trump built a couple of shitty miles of his stupid wall, Mexico laughed at the thought that they were going to pay for any of it, and yet the meatbags think it was a huge success.
After all, if God hadn't wanted them to be greased, fleeced and decreased, She would not have made them chumps. Seen that way, not scamming them may even be sacrilegious.
We'd be doing it to Save American Democracy. And is there a nobler cause to be found in this broken old world?
But we have a lot of catching up to do, since Republicans have already picked the Hate shelves nearly clean, which is no surprise since they've been at it for so long that Hate has become the sole binding force that keeps their volatile coalition of bigots, imbeciles, gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, christopaths and grifters together.
Consider that, with Barack Obama, Democrats offered the Right a compassionate, polymath, scandal-free constitutional law professor. A family man with family values. With a strong, beautiful wife and amazing kids. A man who wanted to roll up his sleeves and help America get back on it's feet. And who obsessively tacked to the ever-shifting Fake Center in hopes of finding partners in fixing America's real problems on the other side.
What the hell were we thinking!? And a woman of color? That's twice as bad!
This is not what Republicans want in a black person. They do not want someone they have to look up to. Who is in charge of things. Or funny. Or smart. Or competent. Or articulate. No, no, no. Republican want a black man who knows his fucking place. Republicans don't want black folks gone; they want them servile and deferential. Bowing low to white power like they did back in the good old days.
And that's what they got in men like Michael Steele who happily groveled for Rush Limbaugh's approval because Mikey Mike knew his fucking place. Like grinnin', clappin' Tim Scott who went so far as to marry his "Canadian girlfriend" for a shot at the highest office in the land, running in a party that never had any intention of giving it to him. And now they have Byron Donalds right out front, smiling and lying and happily eating all of Donald Trump's shit and asking for seconds, and getting absolutely nothing in return.
No way we can match that.
Republicans have also already stripped women of their basic civil rights, and most of the white ladies didn't care. Didn't care that Trump was a rapist. Didn't care that he was besties with Jeffrey Epstein. Instead, what they know for damn sure and certain is that Obummer was a Kenyan mooslim, Hillary drinks baby's blood and had Vince Foster murdered, and Kalama Harris is tranny loving commie furriner just like her father!
So we can't compete with them for the incels, the bro-vote, or the self-loathing women. And unless we run Tony Montana next time --
-- the male Latino voters who bailed this time -- because a woman's place is either decorative arm-candy or in the kitchen making dinner and in the bedroom making babies -- are unlikely to return.
This election proved we can't compete with Republicans in demonizing Haitians or Puerto Ricans either.
Republicans in Michigan and Pennsylvania showed they could run anti-semitic ads in one state, and anti-Muslim ads in another, and cash in on both, so they pretty much own hating both of those groups.
And no matter how frantically our Never Trumper and Centrist "allies" insist that it's not too late to get in on that slagging transexuals action, Republicans -- led by Failed Botox-and-taxidermy experiment, Nancy Mace -- own that now too.
So who is left out there in the land of the free for us to target? Some group that the bigots and imbeciles already hate enough for at least some of them to consider hooking up with the Dems next time? The Irish? Italians? Canadians?
Nope. Sorry, but none of those get the blood boiling enough or fire enough berserk lightening into the amygdala to get the meatheads off their asses and to the polls for Democrats.
C'mon people, the answer is right there in front of us. Who do the meatheads both hate and about whom (and this is the important part) do they feel they're being cruelly oppressed by the Woke Mob and prevented from blabbing their hatred in public?
It's the Gays, stupid.
You think these assholes have evolved on that subject in the 20 years since Matthew Dowd and Karl Rove used it to help get Dubya re-elected in 2004? Are you high? Once again, wake the fuck up: these mopes still haven't gotten over Appomattox Court House, April 9, 1865.
The New York Times, February 24, 2004
Bush Backs Ban in Constitution on Gay Marriage
President Bush said today he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, declaring that such a measure was the only way to protect the status of marriage between man and woman, which he called "the most fundamental institution of civilization."
In an announcement fraught with social, legal and political implications, Mr. Bush urged Congress to act on the amendment quickly and send it on to the state legislatures. Quick action is essential, he said, to bring clarity to the law and protect husband-and-wife marriages from a few "activist judges."
"The voice of the people must be heard," Mr. Bush said in a brief White House speech that Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called an attempt to find "a wedge issue to divide the American people."...
Of course it was "a wedge issue to divide the American people." In the New Politics, there are nothing but wedge issues, because the meatheads we need to win elections do not give one tiny shit about anything else.
I tell you, out here in the Real World where I live, the meatheads are dying to go back being able to openly mock the "queers" and "fairies" and the "dykes". Go back to telling "fag" jokes in public without fear o censure or side-eyes from their fellow church goers, which is why Democrats must go after the Sodomites with as much zeal as we speak about climate change.
And it'll be so easy. Targeting gay school teachers. Railing against Hollywood's Gay Agenda ruining America. And you know it's The Gays who are driving housing prices out of reach of real Americans. And for gosh sakes, my kids can even enjoy watching Saw III without seeing commercials for gay couples doing laundry and pickout out furniture! What about a spirited campaign to have Anita Bryant, Robert Mugabe and Phyllis Schlafly put on American postage stamps? All the old triggers and stereotypes are still there, lurking just below the surface of oppressive Woke-enforced civility, and for once maybe we can beat the GOP at their own game.
And the first step is the abolition of gay marriage. And we need to go all-in on this. Some of us can get away with merely writing pseudo-scholarly contrarian articles in respected journals ala degenerate gambler Bill Bennett and high-class bigot William Buckley explaining how The Gays sap the moral strength of the nation. This will not be a problem: if the Times will publish Tom Cotton, they'll publish any filth as long as it draws flies.
Others will need to take a lower road: maybe going full Westboro Baptist Church -- waving the Bible and screaming about Leviticus -- if that's what it takes. But we all need to get behind this thing and push.
Or don't you care about Saving American Democracy?
Maybe we can even lure some of the Log Cabin Republicans into our Big Tent -- they certainly seem self-loathing enough to go for it.
Now I am not blind to the hardship this will impose on The Gays (Note to self I: commission a focus group the find out if beating up on blind people would win us any votes in Pennsylvania. Or hating handicapped people generally. Note to self II: Especially people with mental disabilities -- the meatheads are nearly as thirsty to reintroduce "retard" into the MAGA out-'n-proud lexicon as they are "fag".) nor am I unsympathetic, but sacrifices must be made. Remember, people, to impress the meatheads and get enough of 'em on our side to swing elections, purges must be done. Ballast must be jettisoned.
I understand that coming out loudly against gay marriage may disorient some people. I, for one, will be saddened to see the marriages of prominent gays and lesbians like Pete Buttigieg, Tim Miller and Sara Longwell legally annulled and their children taken away, but what choice do we have?
Personally, I enjoyed seeing Mayor Pete on Fox running rings around the hosts, and I'm sure that Miller and Longwell meant well when they insisted that the path to victory was for Dems to climb into bed with Liz Cheney, but let's look at the cold, hard facts.
Sending Mayor Pete to Fox News accomplished exactly nothing except impressing some liberals who were going to vote Democratic anyway. And let's face it, the Never Trump "movement" has also accomplished exactly nothing except salvaging the careers and bank accounts of a handful of elite misfits who were run out of their own party gby the monster they created.
It's all very sad, but sacrifices to the bigotry of the meatheads must be made. Tribute to the paranoia of the meatheads must be paid. After all, in this Kobayashi Maru moment, the Salvation of American Democracy hangs in the balance. And how selfish and self-destructive it would be to value the civil rights of the few over the Salvation of American Democracy for the many.
Look, we probably won't actually have to do most of this. Remember the thing about the MAGA memory being Etch-a-Sketch sketchy. We'll just need to promise to do it, then publicly emmiserate the families of a few prominent gays, then declare victory over the Gay Agenda. Republican voter are morons. They'll forget.
And if it should come to pass, after years of winning elections and successfully fundraising off of this stuff, that we must actually deliver on it, well, this Supreme Court is clearly ready and willing to ignore stare decisis, eradicate decades of precedent and strip away the civil rights of certain groups of American citizens. And if that's not enough. that same Supreme Court has granted the office of the president godlike powers and immunity from everything, so we'd have that in our back pocket too.
As I said, this would all be very sad, but surely a small price to pay to Save American Democracy.
Update: For the record, the graphic at the top of this post is not a parody. It's an actual relic from a Conservative ad from 2005.
The ad was produced by USA Next, a conservative group that supports creating personal accounts within Social Security and has aggressively criticized the AARP, which disagrees about the Social Security reform.
More here:
In February 2005, USA Next hired the advertising agency behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that attacked 2004 presidential candidate John F. Kerry. The group gained instant notoriety late in that month when they placed an advertisement on several conservative web sites and blogs. This advertisement depicted a large red 'x' over a picture of a soldier and a large green check mark over a picture of a just-married homosexual couple.
I just did a post about Jerry Falwell which you can reach here if you make it past the Scary Content Warning that Google slapped on it the minute it went up, and which was replicated on two of the 8000 social media sites on which we lil' folk must hawk our wares if we want to see any traffic at all.
As an experiment, I'm making the title of this post -- "Jerry Skids" -- a slight variation of the title of the flagged post to see it that's what triggered the warning from the Google Decepticons.
I also tagged the previous post with a lot of naughty labels, so I'll test that next.
Anyhoo, here's the note Google sent me:
Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines
(https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we
allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Jerry's Kids" was
flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers
because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2023/07/jerrys-kids.html. Your blog readers
must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.
We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If
you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content
to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated,
you may republish it at
https://www.blogger.com/go/appeal-post?blogId=11363027&postI d=6958696997669486806.
This will trigger a review of the post.
For more information, please review the following resources:
Terms of Service: https://www.blogger.com/go/terms
Blogger Community Guidelines: https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Or maybe they objected to my call to...
Plan Nine results: I have, step-by-step, altered a cat pic post to be an exact replica (except for this sentence) of the original post that Google flagged as violating community standards.
So lets find out what this does in 3...2...1...
Well, nothing happened. So, as the old programmer that I am, there remains one more test to conduct. Rather than starting with an innocuous post with a cat pic and gradually building it into a replica of the original, flagged post one "Update" at a time, what happens if I do it all in one shot, as I did with the original?
Well, we're about to find out.
Final results: Again, nothing happened. Theory #1 was that, starting with an innocuous post and building it up to community-standards-violating post was a way to beat the Google flagging system. Great theory, until I created an exact copy of the original post in one shot and nothing happened. So my guess is that either some troll told Google that I was up to naughtiness and, out of an abundance of legal department generated caution, they flagged it, or there is a glitch in the A.I. which causes it to be over-cautious so that *anything* with "Kids" in the header gets flagged. And maybe that has since been tweaked, but the flagging can't be undone except by a Google flunky who has better things to do.
Anyway, it's been a journey! I'm deleting all the test posts but this one so as not to confuse my future self as to what the hell I was doing back in summer of of 2023. Also, as fate would have it, my next post will riff on the original, flagged post for entirely different reasons that this now-completed experiment.
Meat Loaf endorses Romney in Ohio
In fact, you're humble scrivener wrote a little song about it.
Ahem.
Wingnut Base: Will you love me forever?
Mittens: Let me sleep on it.
Wingnut Base: Will you love me forever!!!!
Mittens: Let me sleep on it!!
It was a weird time.
And anyone who had been paying any attention at all, could clearly see the monstrous trajectory the GOP had already been on for decades, how far gone the GOP already was.
The world seems full of sexual predators these days. But I don’t think good men wake up one morning and suddenly start thrusting their tongue down the throats of women they barely know. You’ve got to walk through a certain number of doors before you’re capable of that kind of behavior...Then the obligatory glob of Both Siderist lube, without which Mr. Brooks would not be able to finish this exercise in autoidiotic asphyxiation:
We’ll call this the room of love...
In this regime, sex is special...
So a lot of men cross the threshold and enter another room, the room of the prospector...
In this room sex is a gold nugget, a pleasure, like any other pleasure, except maybe it’s better and the desire for it is stronger...
In the political world, for example, partisans of left and right rationalize their support for Bill Clinton or Donald Trump...Then, this creepy exercise hits its 800 word limits and draws to a merciful close:
Finally, one core problem is the collapse of the first room, the room of love...Shorter David Brooks: Casual sex (translation: The 1960s and the Dirty Hippies) puts you a hop-skip-and-jump away from sexual predation.
The Duggars Deliberately Covered Up Child Molestation in Their RanksChez Pazienza on May 22, 2015The schadenfreude would be absolutely delicious if the story weren’t so sickening. 27-year-old Josh Duggar, the eldest son of the Duggar family — the Christian zealots who parlayed their unwillingness to stop churning out children into a multi-media empire — now admits publicly to molesting several little girls when he was a teenager, many of them his own sisters. He was forced to come clean after an In-Touch magazine article, published earlier today, detailed a 2006 police report revealing that Josh had confessed his acts to his father, Jim Bob Duggar, but the family patriarch withheld the information from police for a full year. Five young girls apparently had their breasts and genitals forcibly touched and groped by Josh, both while they were sleeping and while they weren’t. According to In-Touch, the report had remained hidden until the magazine filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The investigation treated Josh’s crimes as felonies.
Trouble just keeps mounting for former “Sons of Guns” star Will Hayden.
I feel, as an atheist, about people like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher the way that Christians must feel about Fred Phelps. Look, being an atheist means you don’t give a fuck about what anyone believes in. I don’t think any of it’s real, but you can go ahead and do it. I’m not trying to destroy religion. I just don’t care about it.Amen to that.
-- Patton Oswalt, humorist
David Brooks, religious clown: Debunking phony Godsplaining from the New York Times’ laziest columnist
...But what to make of Friedman and Kristof’s seemingly milquetoast colleague, David Brooks? No shame attaches to him, though by publishing his pro-faith columns, he validates a stupendously (if surreptitiously) baleful Weltanschauung that should long ago have disappeared from our world. ... That those who have shrugged off – or laughed away – the comically outlandish claims advanced by the Abrahamic creeds about our world and origins as a species are the ones with the explaining to do. Should he not be called to account?
...Moreover, Brooks’ recent Op-Ed, “Building Better Secularists,” leaves me no choice, or, better said, offers me an opportunity I cannot pass up for commentary. “Building Better Secularists” is nothing less than an anti-religion writer’s dream come true, an essay remarkable for its utter and complete susceptibility to refutation and repudiation. The title hints that Brooks intends to teach us godless folks a thing or two. The result? He succeeds only in beclowning himself by authoring a sanctimoniously gaseous tract that befits not America’s august Paper of Record, but a highbrow version of Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ End-is-Nigh rag......The point is not than one or another religion is better or more correct, or more guilty or less guilty of producing “bad outcomes” such as the aforementioned, but that all are equally man-made, equally false, equally irrational, and equally capable of being used just as they have been used: as merciless ideologies of control and repression. All this immediately renders null and void the credentials of any journalist who would preach faith-tainted advice about how to live to rationalists.Brooks proceeds to list the challenges he demands be met if atheists are to prosper. Each of these challenges he presents in contradistinction to its religious equivalent....Let’s take them one by one...
