Paulietics

Sean, let’s talk.

All those guys and gals that you’re facing every day? They have cameras. They’re reporters. They have ink by the barrel. (Google it, Sean!)

When you say something this fucking stupid, and then double down on it when they’re trying to give you a chance to realize just how fucking stupid you just sounded, they’re just going to have to assume you’re that fucking stupid.

Find a real job, Sean

Rampant stupidity, the death of common sense, and a complete lack of any rational perspective seem to be everywhere these days, not just in the hallowed halls of government.

Go figure, right?

You’ve all seen the videos from the United flight to Louisville. A few questions:

1. Do you people really, REALLY not know that everyone from age five up all have cell phones and the cell phones have cameras and video built in?
2. Do you really, REALLY think you can drag someone off of a plane without a dozen people recording it and having it up on the internet before you can blink?
3. Was this worth it to enforce an obscure corporate policy?
4. Were there absolutely no other, possibly smarter, solutions?

Tonight on FaceBook I posted:

Hey United Airlines, if you have the moral high ground here as Oscar seems to believe (seriously, duuuude!) then offer 100% refunds, no questions asked, for anyone who has already bought a ticket for one of your flights & now regrets it and would prefer to drive, take any other airline, or not go.

Show me how wrong I am.

What is the “Trump Doctrine?” From every bullshit word that comes out of his mouth and every irrational act that comes from his orders, the Trump Doctrine is defined in one word – hypocrisy.

He’ll definitely go down in the history books, if for no other reason than having his picture in the dictionary next to the definition of the word.

From October 23, 2014, when there was a black man in the White House:

From today, when he’s exhausted (despite his overwhelming reservoirs of “stamina,” which of course Hillary was so lacking in) from those three or four days this week when he worked a whole five or six hours:

If you’re a Trump apologist and you want to argue that “this is different” – please shut the fuck up, go play in traffic, and for God’s sake don’t reproduce! The world is already over its quota on morons.

So SCROTUS shot 65 Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria at a cost of about $90M and accomplished what?

The military airfield that was hit was back in use today. There are no reports of casualties or damage to any Russian planes or personnel, despite the fact that they were based there. Perhaps they bugged out after someone in the US government warned them that the attack was coming.

But…

For 24-hours, no one was talking about how almost every single person in the Trump regime is connected to some shadowy Russian connection that leads straight to Putin.

As that banner behind Dubya during that stupid speech fourteen years ago, “Mission Accomplished!”

This was a $90M dog and pony show, carefully orchestrated to have lots of flash and bang and just about 0.000% chance of any Russian assets or personnel, or Russian supplied Syrian aircraft, getting injured or damaged. This was the magician wiggling his fingers to get you to look there while he palmed the card over here.

This was the man behind the curtain pulling levers and pushing buttons, screaming into the microphone about how he is the great and powerful Oz!

Normal human beings deserve to be assumed to be honest until proven otherwise. This President has proven by his every action and every word that he should be assumed to be lying through his teeth until proven otherwise.

When he tells you that he just took decisive military action to avenge those 100+ women and children who died in the serin gas attack undertaken by the Syrian Air Force, but he’s still not allowing any of those Syrian refugees into our country, be skeptical.

Be very, very skeptical.

Another whirlwind day at work, being pulled a dozen ways at once, impossible deadlines, one brush fire after another to put out. Lots of stress, trying to “maintain an even strain,” trying to continue to be professional and polite, trying to remember to keep a sense of humor. Trying not to be an asshole.

Then the phone beeps with a news flash.

The stupid fuckers in the Senate invoked the “nuclear option.” With a few parliamentary procedural moves, all of a sudden over 200 years of rules and protocols are swept aside and it no longer takes 60 senators to approve a Supreme Court justice, just a simple majority.

There was a reason that rule existed, but these partisan pinheads don’t give a fuck about the country, the Constitution, or the people who live here. They care only about their corporate overlords, the rabid right-wing hordes who they live in constant terror of, and keeping their cushy, well-paying jobs.

Principles? Morals? Conscience? What fucking planet are you from?

So it’s back to the grind, trying harder to not be an asshole even though I’m now in a really bad mood because my country has been taken over by the marching moron hordes and their evil puppet politicians.

The the phone beeps with a news flash.

SCROTUS, concerned that foreign powers might not have sufficient respect for the size, length, and girth of his legendary penis, has ordered a missile strike on Syria “in retaliation” for the gas attack that killed over 100 civilians three days ago.

Did we blow up any of the chemical plants that were making this deadly and horrific weapon of mass destruction? Nope.

Did we blow up any of the planes that the Syrian air force was using to slaughter their own women and children? Nope.

Did we do anything to cripple or damage the Assad regime, run by a mass murderering dictator? Nope.

Did we do anything to get rid of Assad himself, to get him out of power so perhaps saner heads could try to save what’s left of their country? Nope.

Okay, but surely we changed our minds about that travel ban that keeps those Syrian women and children from coming to our country while fleeing the tyrannical madman that’s butchering them! Right?

I’ll repeat. What fucking planet are you from?

And we all try to keep calm and maintain an even strain and not be assholes to our fellow passengers in this ship of fools as the mad men in Washington shred the Constitution and lead us into yet another war that will cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of foreign lives and cause more generations to hate us and want to destroy us but it won’t matter because the evil fuckers in charge are guiding us toward the apocalypse and laughing the whole time.

But don’t act like an asshole. Be professional.

So Bannon’s been booted from the National Security Council, eh? Replaced with all of those stupid generals and intelligence agency heads who he had downgraded in his Day One power grab.

Was it because SCROTUS wised up to how he was being manipulated by this evil bastard? Hardly. Bannon had been pulling Trump’s strings and kissing his ass for many months and Trump’s too fucking stupid and blinded by his own ego to see WW3 rushing at us.

So what was Bannon’s Achilles heel? Could it possibly have been Twitter?

Bannon had manipulated His Cheetoness by telling him exactly what he wanted to hear, regardless of what the truth might be. Since when did the truth ever matter to that useless sack of shit?

But the useless sack of shit is addicted to adulation and feeding that ego, and Twitter is one of the main channels for getting his fix a dozen times a day. Reports are that the Trumpencritter finally noticed a couple hundred mentions of “President Bannon.”

We can’t have that! No matter that it might be the most truthful and accurate thing that Trump had read in decades, anything that keeps the spotlight from shining on that spray tanned visage of ineptitude has to be removed.

So maybe we’re getting the hang of manipulating this ignoramus ourselves. Maybe?

Here’s a suggestion for a story for us to get portrayed prominently on Faux News and Breitbart, just where Donny Boy will see it and believe it:

There’s a comet coming and there’s an alien spaceship hiding behind it, ready to take the true believers along with them. If you leave your body the aliens can take you with them as they pass by. Get some Nike sneakers, a $5 bill, dark clothing, a purple shroud, some applesauce…

Go ahead – Make America Great Again.

Lauren Kelley is the online political editor for Rolling Stone.

I’m not, but I’m opinionated and getting less shy by the day.

Which in turn got me to thinking. (I hate it when that happens sometimes.)

I grew up during the Cold War. I remember having “duck & cover” drills so we would know what to do in case of a nuclear attack on Kansas City. (I didn’t write the rules, I just had to live by them. I was seven.) We had D&C drills more often than we had fire drills.

But being seven or eight years old, I wasn’t terrified or worried. We had tornado drills as well, and I had seen them. That will scare the shit out of you! (In a good way to a certain extent. I still think that thunderstorms and extreme weather is pretty cool, so long as we’re not actually getting killed or destroyed by it.)

Tornadoes were real. Fires were real. Nuclear attacks, not so much.

But looking back on it now and having done some research and reading to get the point of view of an adult of the era, I wonder if my parents were as worried and stressed about it as I am about our current situation.

It’s too late to ask them now, but I suspect that we might be a bit more on edge than they were. Why? Just look at who was in charge then and now.

They had Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. We have Trump.

They had faith in their leaders. They believed that their leaders had the best interest of the country and the world in mind. They trusted their leaders.

We have no such faith. We know that our leaders (and not just Trump, but the whole crowd of billionaires and sycophants he’s surrounded himself with, plus all of the assclowns in Congress) care for absolutely nothing other than lining their own pockets and making sure they get re-elected so they can continue being “leaders.” We don’t trust our leaders to be able to not be felons or sexual predators.

In North Korea we have an egomaniacal,  unstable, and unpredictable dictator who has nukes and brags about how willing he is to use them if cornered or threatened. In this country we have an egomaniacal, unstable, and unpredictable SCROTUS who has nukes and has said that “all options are on the table.”

It’s no longer a case of who will blink first, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s now a case of who will flip out first. Not that it matters, we’ll all be royally fucked when it happens, no matter who pushes the first button.

Well, those of us still alive.

My beloved LA Kings lost and got eliminated from the NHL playoff race last night – but today is opening day for my beloved Angels, so it’s hard for it to be a bad day.

I was thinking about what it would take to make Opening Day a bad day. Something pretty horrible would have to happen to take ODJ (Opening Day Joy) away from me. And nothing horrible happened.

The Cheeto SCROTUS didn’t start a nuclear war with North Korea by either launching a nuclear first strike or by “accidentally” provoking the North Koreans into launching their own nuclear first strike.

The gutless wonders in Congress didn’t appoint Trump “Grand High Poobah and Emperor For Life.”

Ruth Bader Ginsberg didn’t die and leave the Trumpencritter and his band of evil elves (led by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, two wannabe Uruk-hai) the chance to stack the Supreme Court with uber-conservatives for the next fifty years.

President Bannon didn’t dissolve Congress and declare martial law.

So it’s Opening Day and all is right with the world.

Plenty of time tomorrow for these pathetic fucking demi-orcs to destroy civilization and return us to “the good old days,” by which it seems they mean the Stone Age.

A technical question today for those of you who use Twitter and might be more knowledgeable than I am about it (assuming that anyone is actually reading this site):

When dealing with assholes and ignorant, racist Luddites, I’ve always “blocked” their accounts. My understanding is this means that when they try to send me anything or read anything of mine on Twitter, they get a message that says they can’t do that because I’ve blocked them.

Many people instead “mute” the assholes and slimeballs. This means that they themselves simply never see anything posted by the person being muted.

When I’ve asked why muting is favored so much over blocking, I’m told it’s because it’s fun to envision the deplorable morons screaming and ranting and attacking, but never getting a response – because you don’t know that they’re screaming, ranting, and attacking. This is good (??) because they think they’re being ignored and get even more angry and frustrated, while you don’t even have to go to the effort of ignoring them or potentially getting pissed off enough to engage with their screeds.

Really? Maybe I’m more confrontational, but if I’ve got someone who’s targeting me and being a screaming, flaming asshole, I want them to get a message that they’re blocked every time they try to scream at me. I want to rub it in their face.

Am I missing something here?

We have traditionally welcomed April in with fools.

April must be feeling really peeved this year, much as The Onion feels. How can April celebrate fools when every day is a celebration of fools in our new dystopia? How can The Onion write satire and over the top spoofs when the headlines in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are even more bizarre?

I think April should put its foot down and suffer this nonsense no further! Let’s encourage April to join us in our quest! Together we can re-dedicate ourselves to the task of getting the Cheeto SCROTUS out of the White House and into a padded jail cell by May 1st!