ALL THE PREZNIT'S SCUMBAGS

In-fucking-credible.

PLAYING CATCH-UP AGAIN... SHOULD I BOTHER?

CNN's Jim Acosta masterfully calls out the rank hypocrisy of President Rotting Pumpkin Face -- as well as the rank hypocrisy of right-wingers in general -- when it comes to their laughable assertions that Representative Ilhan Omar is some sort of horrible anti-Semite. This, over statements no tougher than that which is spoken and written by Jews within Israel, itself, against the dangerously reactionary Netenyahu regime in Israel.

And to think, these right-wingers enjoy fantasizing about how they're the last stand for freedom of speech in the West! It's absolutely fucking ludicrous. Furthermore, it has been my experience that, even though most try to keep it hush-hush, when push comes to shove, self-styled right-wing "intellectuals" more often than not turn out to be closet Holocaust deniers, or else, at they very least, they have some very "interesting" ideas about the (ahem) "Jewish Question".

***

One of the dumbest ongoing debates in the world of politics surrounds the question of "What is more evil? Fascism or Communism?" The debate is idiotic because the answer is obvious. For a number of reasons, Fascism is clearly more evil than Communism, the main reason for this being that while it is possible for evil people to become dictatorial rulers of nominally Communist regimes, the evil of Fascism is baked right into the ideology, itself. It is simply impossible to have a just, fair, or "decent" Fascist regime. No one, not even Stalin, became a Communist because they wanted to do evil, whereas that is the entire point of Fascism.

Regardless of the debate's obvious stupidity, it will likely continue for years to come, and that's because of two reasons. First, because amateur political hobbyists love to compare body-counts (even though that's a tricky proposition, indeed). And second, because amateur political hobbyists have this weird psychic blind spot that prevents them from looking back any farther than the year 1900 for some strange reason.

Which is fortunate for them, because if they ever do decide to play the body-count game without such a fortuitous limiter guaranteeing their parameters lead to foregone conclusions, they'd be faced with the horrible truth that Nazi Party, the Soviet Politburo, and even Mao's Cultural Revolution were all pikers when compared to... the Western European Capitalism and Colonialism Project.

I mean, for fuck's sake, a recent scientific survey has found that the colonization of America, alone, led to such a vast amount of megadeath over a short period of time that it literally caused a mini-Ice Age! Which makes me worry that some gang of overly ambitious multi-billionaires is going to see the linked article and get inspired by it. Can smallpox infected blankets be looming in all our collective encroaching futures?

***

Speaking of right-wingers getting big ideas, check out The Night Wolves, a short documentary about Vladimir Putin's Russian biker militia fighting alongside more traditional troops in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

According to the directors:

The Russian motorcycle club the Night Wolves first made international headlines in 2014, fighting as a paramilitary group alongside pro-Russian forces during the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. Although the Night Wolves formed as an anti-Soviet countercultural group during perestroika, today they’re sometimes called ‘Putin’s Angels’, having embraced the potent mix of Orthodox Christianity, nationalism, hypermasculinity and Soviet nostalgia that drives the Russian president’s base.

Does any of this sound at all familiar to you? Well, it should. Remember when Trump posed for this ridiculous photo-op? It was only four months ago, when Trump threatened to sic "his" police, bikers, and other "tough guy" supporters on those Democrats who... um... don't like him and oppose his policies, I guess?

Oh well. I'm not saying Trump is copying his hero, Putin, here. I'm just saying it sure fucking looks like it.

JUST LOOK AT THOSE FACES...

On August 1st, in this very blog, I asked the following rhetorical innocent question: 

"If the Republicans were presented with the choice of voting for either any random Democrat or Vladimir Putin... how big do you think Putin's margin of victory would be?"

I didn't have long to wait for an answer. 

On August 5th, at one of Trump's bizarre, extended "Two Minute Hate" rallies in Ohio, these two gentlemen were photographed together, looking rather proud of their treasonous attire:

Of course, coming from a crowd like this...

...I suppose any and every type of psychopathical goonery is, at the very least, possible, if not entirely predictable.

M.O.A.R.L.O.L.

After Charlottesville, the Far Right promised to bounce back in a big way in what organizers dubbed "the Mother Of All Rallies", or MOAR for short, to be held on Saturday, September 16, on the National Mall in Washington DC.

The Twitter bots were out in full force in the weeks leading up to this event, propelling the hashtag #MOAR to near the top of Twitter's trending chart. Some of the more optimistic projections based on online engagement suggested a possible turn-out of close to a million participants.

And then...

THIS WAS THE TURNOUT

That's right... despite clear skies and the fact that it took place on a Saturday, just about three hundred people bothered to show up for the festivities. The sight of security personnel guarding the periphery prompted Mikel Jolette to remark on Twitter: “Jesus Christ this picture is Right-wing America. A bunch of paranoid people trying to protect a fantasy from a threat which does not exist.”

So, aside from the paranoid, what other sorts of people bothered to show up for this thing? Well, if you want to get a feel for what the organizers of this event were all about, there's no better place to start than their official website, (which you REALLY ought to check out for yourself, even if only for the lulz) where they declare:

THIS IS NOT A DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN RALLY. ITS NOT A LEFT OR RIGHT RALLY. WE CONDEMN RACISTS OF ALL COLORS AND SUPREMACY OF ALL COLORS. OUR PATRIOTS ARE OF ALL COLORS AND WE ARE UNITING UNDER OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS. WE ARE AMERICANS AND OUR COLOR SHOULDN'T MATTER.

All of which makes the photos they proudly display in their own website gallery sort of suspicious. I mean, if their rally isn't about "left or right", then why would they want to focus attention on a supporter wearing a t-shirt cheering Far Right Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet's tactic of tossing left-wing dissidents, labor organizers and others into the ocean via helicopter?

And if it has nothing to do with race or racism, then why showcase a bunch of goons flashing the increasingly popular White Power "OK sign" dog whistle?

So what are we to make of this humiliating turn-out, less than half the size the Juggalos achieved on the same day, across town? Are members of the Far Right still a little gun-shy following the public relations apocalypse of Charlottesville? Or was it just that this particular event relied too much on internet organization? Has the conservative movement's reliance on bot farm personas and literal A.I. propaganda bots come back to bite them in the ass by feeding their delusion that they're part of an organic groundswell when, in fact, many of their members are phantoms and shadows? I can't say for sure, but at this point, politically speaking, yer old pal Jerky's gonna take his small pleasures and minor satisfactions whenever and wherever he can get them. And so, in that spirit, I say:

"NYAH-ha!"

THE FAR RIGHT WAR ON FACTS

If your social media presence is in any way political, you've probably noticed one or more of your "conservative" friends linking to stories trying to push the notion that Snopes.com is nothing more than a hopelessly biased source of left-wing propaganda, and that anyone using their work to debunk lies or correct errors can therefore by justly ignored.

It's bullshit of course. Numerous good faith investigations conducted by a variety of groups using a wide range of metrics have found that Snopes.com is, by every measure, the LEAST biased source of information on the Internet.

But that doesn't stop the site's growing list of detractors, who persist in their attacks in the hopes that pure repetition will succeed where anorexic reasoning, non-existent evidence, and easily debunked lies are bound to fail. Which brings up the question of where all this Snopes hate (and there is an awful lot of it lately) is coming from.

The always entertaining smart-asses at RationalWiki describe the situation thusly:

Anyone who insists that their personal myth is fact, whether that be moonhoaxers, 9/11 truthers, or bigfooters, will insist that Snopes is wrong because everyone but themselves is biased against the "truth". FactCheck.org, a nonprofit website dedicated to, umm, checking facts, reported that Snopes was completely unbiased. This of course proves that FactCheck is also part of the conspiracy.

While the above is a pretty good general explanation of what Snopes is facing these days, it ignores the fact that the louder (and far more effective) attacks aren't coming from "moonhoaxers", Flat Earthers, or other assorted loonies; they're coming from the Far Right. And there's a very big, very important difference between these two cohorts. Because the loonies, while wrong, are at least sincere.

The Far Right's attacks, on the other hand, are purely tactical. They have nothing to do with disagreements over facts. Rather, these attacks are part of a strategy to undo the damage that unbiased fact-checkers are constantly causing to their organized (and often expensive) propaganda campaigns.

Right-wing attacks on fact-checkers like Snopes are a kind of gaslighting, or inoculation against information that comes from "outside" ideologically pre-approved sources. It's a form of applied, learned helplessness, a tactic used by cults large and small to keep their brainwashed subjects in line. For right-wing and conservative propagandists, an ideal paradigm would not include "unbiased" fact-checkers, as they so disingenuously claim, but rather no fact-checkers at all.

Let's look at a recent attack on Snopes by the alt right's (formerly) favorite self-loathing homosexual, Milo Yiannopoulos, entitled Snopes Caught Releasing Fake "Fact-Check" in Defense of Democrats.

The story, which originated with a handful of reactionary Twitter Trolls before Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller and Glenn Beck's The Blaze picked up on it, involves claims that Democrats refused to take part in a standing ovation for the widow of the Navy SEAL who died during Trump's bungled Yemen raid earlier this year. However, while the secondary targets of Milo's article were those Democrats, his main target, for all of the reasons listed above, was Snopes, which he says "pushed misleading facts to cover for Democrats."

Milo's article is short, so I urge you all to read it. Then I urge you to spend a little time in the comments section, beneath the article. Really root around down there... acquaint yourself with your enemy's distinctive aroma. It may come in handy some day.

After you've finished doing that, and have subsequently showered off the residual Garmonbozia, go ahead and read the Snopes article that so many Redcap Trumpnik cultists pretended to find so... problematic.  Go ahead and read the whole thing. I'll wait right here.

Finished? Okay, so here are a few questions I'd like you to ask yourself.

Firstly, do you think Milo's description of what the Snopes entry in question was trying to achieve--including his depiction of the claims made in the articles that the Snopes team was specifically addressing--was fair and accurate?

Second, who do you think comes off better in this face-off? Far Right propagandists Milo, Beck, Carlson and their assorted hangers on, who were trying to push an obvious lie and got caught doing so? Or the team at Snopes, who used perfectly transparent methods to catch said lie, then take it apart and expose it, and those who were pushing it, for all the world to see?

Finally, do you now feel that you are beginning to better understand why the rogue Deep State faction that I call the New Fascist International* is trying to delegitimize Snopes and other such truth-telling entities?

Consider, as a whole, Trump's three recent rallies: the Youngstown 2020 campaign rally where he accused previous administrations of being in cahoots with MS13, his disturbing appearance at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree, which he treated like a Trump Youth rally, and today's speech in front of an audience of Long Island law enforcement personnel, during which he encouraged police brutality.

To me, these precedent-shattering displays indicate that Trump is reacting to his legislative failures by doubling down on the only area where he's achieved any measurable success: the radicalization of vast segments of the population using a level of racist, divide-and-conquer demagoguery that we haven't experienced in most Americans' lifetimes.

And now we've got to contend with semi-official state propagandists enthusiastically engaging in North Korea style tone policing, monitoring and measuring people's reactions with a fucking stopwatch in order to shame them if they show insufficient levels of enthusiasm during Dear Leader's speeches? No. Fuck that noise.

Folks, we're not in Kansas anymore. And this isn't Oz, either. We're standing at the Gates of Hell, and The Donald is using one of those tiny, vulgarian fingers of his to repeatedly ring the bell. It only remains to be seen if he'll still be around by the time those Gates swing wide open.

*keep watching this space.

PLAYING CATCH UP ~ THE "QUALITY" OF TRUMP'S PEOPLE

If there's one thing Donald Trump wants you to know about Donald Trump, it's that Donald Trump likes to surround himself with nothing but the best people... just top quality, all the way. People like former Apprentice contestant turned inexplicably vicious minion Omarosa "Lil Bow Down" Manigault, whom Business Insider reports has recently taken to signing her correspondence as "The Honorable Omarosa Manigault". Yer old pal Jerky can't help but wonder how long it will be before we get to see these hyperbolic honorifics evolve into even more ornate forms? I'm guessing it won't be too long before we're dealing with "The Right Honorable Reverend Doctor Omarosa Manigault Lucifer Trump Esquire, the Third"... and I can't hardly wait!

I don't know about you guys, but when I picture "all the best people", the first thing that comes to mind is Trump supporters! Which brings us to the story of long-time Trump supporter (and Traditionalist Youth Network founder) Matthew Heimbach, who has been flitting about the periphery of infamy for years now, with the latest incident being when he was filmed violently shoving and shrieking at a black woman at a Trump rally... an incident for which he is now being sued. This being America that we're talking about, Heimbach reacted to being sued in the traditional, American way: by launching a lawsuit of his own... against Donald Trump! Why sue his hero? Well, it turns out Heimbach claims he assaulted that black lady (from behind, while she was texting) "in self defense" and "pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President." Only time will tell if the "Donald Told Me To" defense works, thus setting an intriguing--and, for Trump, financially devastating--precedent. Fingers crossed, y'all!

Next up in this parade of all the best people, we've got Hartford's own Steven Marks! This plucky go-getter was recently caught red-handed painting threatening anti-Trump graffiti , including "Bernie Sanders 2020!" and "LEFT is BEST!" and (this is the best one) "KILL TRUMP!" all over a bunch of elementary school equipment. "But wait", I can hear you saying, "I thought this entry was about Trump supporters!" Well, it turns out our clever friend Steven is a Trump supporter! And what's more, he was "only acting out of anger towards liberals and they are breaking major laws every day and being disrespectful towards our government"! See how it all makes sense when you just stop and think about it? What with all those thousands of phony self-inflicted hate hoaxes that the liberals have made up since Trump was elected, someone needed to step in and help even out the false flag hate crime deficit! We salute you, Steven! Good luck in court!

Okay, so it's probably true that the three examples selected above may not speak as highly of Trump's sycophants and fan base as he might have hoped... but unlike many of the people on this list of alleged donors to Trump's inauguration fund, they at least have the somewhat significant advantage of being actual, flesh and blood human beings. Our good friends at The Palmer Report are trying to make sense out of this mess, but it's one heck of a big mess to sort out.

You can almost hear that Crypt Keeper cackle...

Before I go, I've got one last question for you. Why do so many Republicans look like the family patriarchs from Southern Gothic horror movies? You know the type... those surreptitiously decadent, genteel types who turn out to be part of a long family lineage of incestuous baby-eating Satan-worshiping serial killers? I mean, just look at Mitch McConnell up there. I'd wager a good chunk of change that there's a trunk full of blood-spattered baby clothes in the attic of that fucker's Kentucky plantation house. 

SORRY FOR BEING AWAY! HERE ARE MY PATHETIC EXCUSES

The chief problem with “alternative history” is that for those unacquainted with the best scholarship on the subject, with no yardstick to measure the truthfulness or accuracy of the new historical perspective, the chance of entering an imaginative space dominated by the unreal is all too likely. A journey through the unreal is an unreal journey; the blind begin to lead the blind. In the case of conspiracy theories, the results of exploitation of history may be quite deadly. For many malcontents, history is a powerful spur to destruction; a fair account, on the other hand, helps us understand a little more. If you want absolute certainties, you’ll be prepared to believe anything.

- Tobias Churton

Gnostic Philosophy

(2003)

Folks, a whole lot of stuff has passed by without yer old pal Jerky bothering to comment on it over the past couple months. This is partly due to a certain degree of outrage overload on my part, combined with a feeling of helplessness in the face of what I have always understood, deep down, to be my own absolute flailing impotence against what is daily revealing itself to be a rapidly metastasizing, world historic evil.

I mean, let's face it. I had no power back in the 'aughts, when I enjoyed a daily reading audience measured in the hundreds of thousands; what hope do I dare harbor now that my readership rarely scrapes past the low three digits? In the face of the Trump administration, and the vast and well remunerated army of boot-licking, brown-nosing sycophants who populate the increasingly septic "conservative movement" mass-media juggernaut, I know that me and my little hobby blog are nothing. Useless. Tits on a bull. 

And yet, and still... this urge to witness. And to document said witnessing. To note particular instances of grievous trespass, and to share with my few remaining readers my take on these events. Even when my take is limited to humorous asides, or offhand comments. Even when it's all I can do to point at something and declare in a voice barely raised, but noticeably sad, disappointed, and incredulous: "Do you guys see what I'm seeing?!"

Like THIS for instance.

Oh, I suppose this all may come in handy for someone, on some future day, once they've got the power back up and running and have scavenged a sufficient quantity of foodstuffs to last them through the next Purge Month and they want to check out a virtual time capsule of what it was like back in the days before The Big League Kablooey, to be one among the growing cohort of terrified observers for whom being good at pattern recognition and having a broad knowledge of historical precedents were enough to make them Cassandras in their own time.

I mean, for Pete's sake, we're living at a time when the so-called "alternative" media is full of stories about the rising threat of left-wing violence when in fact the Far Right holds a decades-long near monopoly on such tactics. Meanwhile (and not at all unconnected), the National Rifle Association is playing a whole new tune. They've gone from saying they need guns to fight some future hypothetical tyrannical government, to saying they need them to fight anyone who criticizes an increasingly tyrannical government, here and now. 

Of course, I'm sure that my speculating as to whether this overnight change in the NRA's posture might have anything to do with the President's race... that would just be more evidence of my liberal, leftist, postmodernist, cultural Marxist race-baiting ways. I mean, just because the NRA have followed in the the smoldering hoof-prints of the Alt-Right, Far Right, and White Nationalist movements to become big fans of Vladimir Putin's Russia--to the point where their leadership is in bed with Russian mobsters--that isn't necessarily a de facto admission that the NRA is, at its core, a profoundly racist and anti-democratic institution... is it? I mean, maybe they're just really big fans of Russia's super-strict gun control legislation! 

Okay, so it's probably not that, but surely their newfound love for Russia is based on something other than the New Fascist International's re-branding of the once and future USSR as "the Most Powerful White Power in the World"... right? If you've been able to figure out this paradox, please leave the answer in the comments below, or email it to me, because I gotta tell you, I'm finding this one to be a real puzzlement. 

Okay, so, in the coming days, I'll be playing catch-up on some of the stories and events I wanted to comment on, but didn't, and sharing with you some of the more important and illuminating (in my opinion) news reports, research studies, and think pieces that I've come across in that time.

For today, however, I leave you with a little something that I read many years ago in an excellent book called Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, by reformed conservative movementarian Michael Lind, who got sick of seeing Far Right extremists mangling the meaning of the Constitution's second amendment. I think it's a fitting coda to today's somber, reflective offering:

The Second Amendment prevents the federal government from completely abolishing official state militias - nothing more, nothing less. Nothing in the Constitution prevents the federal or state governments, or both, from outlawing the formation of storm trooper squads on U.S. soil and limiting gun ownership to members of the National Guard. Members of right-wing paramilitary militias, of course, might claim a "natural right of revolution," of the sort invoked by the American patriots of 1776 (and by the Confederates in 1860-61), There is no constitutional right to revolution, however. There is, of course, a provision for instances where armed bands amass weapons and attempt to overthrow the federal government. The Constitution permits the death penalty for treason.

- Michael Lind

YET ANOTHER TROUBLING THRESHOLD CROSSED

If you thought American political rhetoric couldn't possibly get any more dangerously divisive, reckless, or incendiary, along comes the National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch to prove you more wrong than you probably thought possible. Take it away, Dana!

The Week's Paul Waldman explores some of the reasons why the NRA seems to have switched up their tactics. With Trump in the White House, they obviously couldn't continue terrifying their members with ominous warnings about gun-grabbing feds kicking in their doors, the way they did for eight years under President Obama... or, as he's referred to in the above video, "THEIR" President.

Instead, with the second amendment safe and sound under Trump, they appear to have decided to diversify their portfolio by choosing sides in the newly rekindled Culture Wars, thus effectively promoting firearm-based solutions to such "problems" as college students yelling at Milo Coulter, or late night comedians saying nasty things about "THE" President (as opposed to "THEIR" President).

Of course, in the grand tradition of right-wing mind blindness, some of our conservative brothers and sisters are saying that the only extremists here are those who see anything extreme in this ad! Here's Townhall's own pointy-headed Matt Vespa with a less than convincing explanation.

On Thursday, Ms Loesch appeared on FOX News' Tucker Carlson show to explain that she was talking about “fighting violence with truth, because truth wins out all the time." Which of course begs two questions: Who made the NRA the arbiters of truth? And why does the truth needs guns?

In closing, Huffpost video editor McJesse over at Twitter sez: "If you're gonna go after comedians maybe don't shoot in front of a blue background?"

@nra RT @McJesse: If you're gonna go after comedians maybe don't shoot in front of a blue background? pic.twitter.com/9LDm4rGx8D

— jpmovie (@jpmovie) July 1, 2017