Category: Politics, Religion, and Social Commentary

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the performative screech-monkeys of the entire wingnut outrage-industrial complex are shitting themselves raw over the mere existence of Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and I am so fucking here for how he’s kicking their tiresome asses in response.

El-Sayed is so good at this. listen to him tee off on that doughy pantload, Couchfuck McGee.

“is that Peter Thiel’s boy, with that Ohio charisma he’s got? I think we’ve had enough of him. the last thing that he said that made any sense was Hillbilly Elegy — after he said that Donald Trump had no business being president of anything. that was the last time he made sense, and then he decided to suck up to power. but that’s exactly what this is about. you got Republicans who will do anything for power and money, including corrupt their office.”

as I’ve said before, Abdul El-Sayed sounds like one of us. he’s snarky as fuck. he does everything we’d want him to in that clip but refer to JD Vance as ‘that doughy pantload Couchfuck McGee.’

we’ve all seen the video of Abdul commenting on Dear Leader’s diaper-filling habits, but let’s play it again, because it’s oh-so-satisfyingly good

Sky News reporter: “[Trump] says you’re full of shit.”

Abdul El-Sayed: “at least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office.”

Abdul also wins at social media.

“I know it’s complicated for you, habibi. I’m happy to teach you how this works at our next debate…if you’re not too much a coward to debate me.”

‘habibi,’ by the way, is the Arabic word for ‘my beloved’ — and El-Sayed is employing it sarcastically, in the same way southerners say ‘bless your heart.’

but he’s not just a snark factory. he’s thoughtful. listen to him explain how the dumbfuck exercise videos farted out by Piss-Drunk Pete and Bobby Brainworms are just a hollow version of masculinity.

you asked me about like Pete Hegseth and RFK, that, like, they’re trying to speak to this particular group of people, and it ends up trying to like, again, just create one more performance that is like, the way to be a masculine person. and you know, as we’ve thought about it on the campaign, [lifting weights] is something that I’ve always done — but a lot of what I’m trying to do is be like hey, look, being a man is not about how you show up at the gym. it’s like how you show up for your family. it’s about how you show up in your community.”

El-Sayed gets it. you show up — for your family, for your community, and for your country. do you think Piss-Drunk Pete or Brainworms have ever shown up for anyone but themselves? of fucking course they haven’t.

as always, the moral rot starts at the top. Dear Leader loves only three things in this world: money, power, and his own porcine self — and not necessarily in that order. he’s the fucking president, and not once has he ever put his country ahead of his own greedy self-interest.

you know who else gets it? New York City’s islamocommunofascist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

If it looks like an Amazon delivery and drives like an Amazon delivery, then it’s an Amazon delivery, right? Not according to Amazon. Big companies like Amazon have built a vast network of subcontractors who deliver their packages while shielding them from accountability. It leaves our workers unprotected and our streets less safe. It’s time for a change. I’m proud to support the Delivery Protection Act to crack down on exploitative subcontracting and build an economy that works for everyone.

Mamdani, too, is so fucking good at this. it’s like he was made for standing in front of a camera.

but Zohran’s not just a pretty face. he wants to build a better world, and level the playing field for everyone. that’s why, as he explains in that video, he’s backing legislation that would force Amazon to stop reclassifying their drivers as independent contractors, which enables Amazon to weasel out of providing them benefits such as healthcare.

you know who else is good at this? Wisconsin Rep. Francesca Hong.

reporter: “were you prepared for this intense pushback you received, especially from Republicans, framing you as far too extreme for Wisconsin?”

Francesca Hong: “what’s extreme is Congressman Tiffany, a long-time DC Congressman, has voted against the interests of Wisconsinites over and over again. what’s extreme is that he’s an election denier. what’s extreme is that he continues to protect Epstein and pedophiles.”

Wisconsin Democrats really biffed it when they failed to pick Hong to be their candidate for Governor in yesterday’s primary. don’t make me come over there, Wisconsin, and explain how badly you just fucked up.

Democratic Socialists like El-Sayed, Mamdani and Hong — they’re not just twenty-four-seven charisma generators. 

they get it. they get what’s wrong with America: government is broken. politics is broken. late-stage capitalism is broken. none of that shit works for We the People any more.

and if you needed any more proof that everything is fucked all to shit, did you know that Fishin’ Trip Sammy Alito has been enriching himself off the cases he’s been ruling on?

The supreme court justice Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9m from his fossil fuel interests between 2005 and 2024, a new review of financial disclosures shows.

The findings come as the supreme court prepares to take up a case in which the oil companies Suncor Energy and Exxon asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against fossil fuel producers for the climate-warming effects of their products.

what kind of shithole country allows this to happen? what kind of shithole country looks the other way while corrupt judges rake in the dough like it’s going out of style?

this is the kind of fuckery we used to mock tinpot third-world autocracies for. congratulations, America, you’re some penny-ante kleptocratic backwater. we’re number one!

it’s bad enough that Fishin’ Trip Sammy goes on all-expenses-paid luxury vacations with the oligarchs who tell him how to vote. now we’re finding out that Sammy’s been fattening his own wallet all along.

how fucking broken is that?

Republicans are scared shitless right now. they know that their policies totally fucking suck, and that they’re going to get creamed in the upcoming midterms — and so they’re lying their fucking faces off about the Democratic Socialist agenda.

“they’re crazy enough, yes. they want to cancel Thanksgiving, they want to cancel Christmas. look, these communists hate America. they hate capitalism. El-Sayed is also an Islamist, as is Mamdani, and look, you’ve seen the green-red convergence, where the communists and the Islamists, they want Sharia law, they hate Jews, they hate Christians, they hate capitalism, they hate America.”

shut the fuck up, Esteemed Senator Fidel Cancun. none of that that shit is true, and you fucking well know it. well, except for the part about hating capitalism. so we’ll give you that one, beardo. ace job, Ted — you got one right. take a victory lap.

El-Sayed, Mamdani and Hong grew up in this world that no longer works for We the People, and they’re fucking well tired of it. they’re tired of Republicans who work only for their oligarch overloads. they’re tired of watching Preznit Fuckwit and his felonious family rob this country blind. they’re tired of useless Democratic establishment lumps like Chuck Schumer writing one strongly-worded letter after another. let me tell you where you can stick those letters, Chuck.

Democratic Socialists like El-Sayed, Mamdani and Hong have decided that if anyone’s going to fix this shit, they themselves are going to be the ones to do it.

they’ve earned our support.

fuck yeah.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Anyone who knows me knows that I love Joe Biden to a fault.

I love him beyond politics, beyond policy, beyond whatever reasonable emotional distance we’re supposed to maintain from people we don’t actually know, because over the years Joe found his way into something much softer and more personal, perilously close to the place my father left behind when I lost him in 2011, an absence no one has ever filled and no one ever could, but one Joe has managed, without ever really knowing me, to make feel a little less empty.

And I haven’t wanted to think too hard about any of this.

I’ve seen the headlines. I’ve read the updates. I’ve known about the cancer, known that it’s stage IV. I’ve read the words metastatic and treatment and progression and let them pass through my eyes without allowing them all the way into my heart, because I’ve wanted to keep Joe exactly where I know him best: sharp as a tack, funny and warm and wonderfully loquacious, leaning in to hear somebody’s story, smiling behind those aviators, asking questions and remembering details and making the person standing in front of him feel, impossibly, like the rest of the room had been asked to wait outside.

I’ve wanted him preserved there, not in amber exactly, because Joe has never felt remotely still to me, but in that particular living light in which I was lucky enough to know him.

Then Hunter said his father’s cancer has metastasized into his bones and further, that he’s in a lot of pain, and the distance I’d been keeping from all of it disappeared.

God, those words.

I can barely bear them.

I don’t want to imagine the faint creak of a mattress as he shifts because one side aches more than the other, Jill beside him knowing from the movement what he will never need to say aloud, the small domestic choreography illness imposes on people who have loved each other long enough to recognize suffering by the way somebody reaches for the nightstand.

I don’t want something as ordinary as standing up or crossing a room or settling into a chair to exact a toll from him, and there is something uniquely excruciating about hearing all of this from his son, because underneath the medical language and presidential history and public concern is something painfully simple: a son is watching his dad suffer, and there isn’t enough love in the world to make the trade every child would make without hesitation.

Give it to me instead.

Whatever is hurting him, give it to me.

Let me carry it for a while.

And there is anger in that helplessness too, hot and irrational and completely uninterested in being reasoned with, because I understand perfectly well that cancer doesn’t conduct character interviews before choosing a body, that decency doesn’t confer immunity and goodness has never been some celestial insurance policy against suffering, but there is still a furious part of me looking at this kind, empathetic, deeply decent man who has already buried a wife, a baby daughter and a beloved son and asking the universe what the hell else it thinks it is entitled to take from him.

He watched Hunter struggle too, and, being Joe, spent years wishing he could take every ounce of it from his son and shoulder it himself.

He had every reason to let all that accumulated sorrow ossify around his heart until nothing else could get in, and somehow he did the opposite, somehow stayed soft and open and porous to other people’s pain, somehow took the most devastating chapters of his own life and used them to learn the language of somebody else’s grief.

Hasn’t he carried enough?

And even now, when the broken places belong to him, this is what Joe says:

“Cancer touches us all. Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support.”

God, that man.

We are strongest in the broken places.

Of course that’s what Joe Biden would say, because he has proved it over and over again, turning the places where life wounded him most deeply into the very places from which he could reach another grieving person and say, without platitude or pretense, I know. I’ve been here too.

And now he’s thanking us for lifting him.

I saw a video of Joe outside an Italian restaurant recently, and God love him, he was moving slowly, slower than I’d ever seen him move, and with Hunter’s words now lodged somewhere I couldn’t dislodge them, I found myself watching him with that terrible hyperawareness that takes over when someone you love isn’t well, studying each step as though vigilance itself might protect him.

Does that hurt?

Is he tired?

How far is the car?

I wanted the sidewalk to become shorter, wanted someone else to hold the door, wanted the people around him to give him enough space to simply get where he was going without having to be anything to anybody for five damn minutes.

But someone called to him, and Joe turned, because of course he did.

There were folks waiting, and he reached for their hands and listened to their stories and looked into their faces, and when Joe Biden looks at somebody, he has this extraordinary way of making the rest of the world wait its turn.

That’s when I lost it, crying for the better part of an hour because even now, even when every step may be exacting a price none of us can see, somebody called his name and his instinct was still to turn toward them.

That is the thing about Joe Biden that has moved me for decades and still moves me now: he shows up, to Mass week after week, for his family, for the country he has spent nearly his entire adult life serving, for strangers standing on sidewalks and grieving parents and frightened children, with the same instinctive decency whether there is a camera pointed at him or not.

There really isn’t a public Joe Biden and a private Joe Biden. There is just Joe, the same warm, curious, talkative, deeply empathetic man whether he is standing in front of a bank of cameras, leaning over a rope line, sitting across a table, or pulling a crying loudmouthed woman from Jersey into a hug because he can see that she needs one.

I know because the first two times I was lucky enough to meet him, I wound up crying in his arms, and each time he did exactly what Joe does when another human being is hurting: he pulled me close, made everything feel steadier for a moment, and left me feeling better than he found me.

My father taught me what it meant to feel safe because a good man simply existed somewhere in the world, what sacrifice looked like when it wasn’t a speech or a sentiment but a life, what service looked like when nobody was applauding, what love looked like when it showed up in grocery stores and doctors’ offices and school plays and all the million trillion ordinary places where a parent quietly constructs a childhood around the people depending on him.

There are still moments, fifteen years later, when some little part of me forgets for half a heartbeat that I cannot go find my dad. I cannot get in the car and drive to him. I cannot call him. I cannot walk through a door and see his shoes on the floor or hear his voice from another room or ask him one stupid little question just to hear him answer. There is no place on this earth where he is still physically waiting for me.

And God, that still hurts in a way I do not know how to make smaller.

Joe never replaced my father. Nobody could, and nobody ever will. But grief is strange about resemblance, and sometimes another good man touches the exact place where the first good man left an absence, and for one fleeting second the ache changes temperature.

When I was lucky enough to have been invited into the Oval Office, which is a sentence I still have to pinch myself saying aloud, I got to tell Joe about my dad.

I was standing there in that room I had watched on television with my father when I was a little girl, close enough to see the photographs on the tables and the light coming through those windows, close enough to hear Joe without a microphone between us, and I told him about the teenage boy who came here from Lebanon believing in America, who spent fifty years serving it, who raised five children after our mother left, who taught me that when life knocks you flat you figure out what comes next and then you do it.

I told Joe that my father believed in the promise of this country, and through tears I told him that he embodied that promise too, and when my voice finally gave out and the tears took over, Joe pulled me into his arms for the third time.

There was something almost unbearably beautiful about that moment, because I had spent years carrying these two good men in adjacent chambers of my heart, one the father who made me and one the president who kept brushing against the place my father’s absence had left behind, and there I was in the Oval Office, crying into Joe Biden’s shoulder while telling him about Dad, feeling for a few impossible seconds as though I had finally introduced them.

And now Joe’s son is telling me his dad is suffering.

There are certain doors grief leaves unlocked forever, and Hunter’s words walked straight through one of mine.

I’ve admired Joe for decades, and if there is one person in public life I’d want my kids to study as they grow, it’s him, because I can think of few better lessons to hand them than the life of a man who never confused strength with cruelty, never mistook decency for weakness, and understood public service as exactly that: service.

And this weekend, I saw that contrast rendered almost obscenely clear in two photographs posted side by side: Joe Biden on one side, living with stage IV cancer and looking like a million bucks, carrying himself with that same quiet dignity and fundamental human grace he has always possessed; and on the other, that stupid, evil piece of shit who occupies the Oval Office now, looking like absolute fucking garbage.

One of those men is enduring a brutal disease and still radiates a decency Donald Trump couldn’t manufacture if you gave him another eighty years and every finishing school in Europe.

The other is Donald fucking Trump, a malignant, morally putrefied abomination of a human being who has spent years mocking Joe, demeaning him, sneering at his age and treating another person’s vulnerability as carrion for his own ravenous cruelty.

Looking at those photographs fills me with a rage so visceral I can feel it in my teeth, because Trump cannot fucking hold a candle to Joe Biden, not as a president, not as a public servant, and certainly not as a man; Joe, sick and carrying suffering none of us can see, possesses more dignity in one slow step across a sidewalk than that vulgar, venal, empathy-bereft piece of human garbage has managed to summon in his entire miserable life.

And I hate fucking living with the knowledge that someone as abhorrent as Donald Trump even exists, let alone that he gets to occupy the office Joe Biden honored with such reverence, because there is something almost intolerably perverse about watching cruelty rewarded with power while a man whose instinct has always been to comfort, to serve, to reach toward people is being asked to carry this too, and I cannot change any of it, cannot make the world fairer by wanting it hard enough, cannot reach inside Joe’s body and wrest the cancer out with my bare hands.

So all I can send toward him is every bit of love I have.

I hope treatment gives him back pieces of himself in increments, a day that begins with less pain, a steadier step, an appetite, a deep and dreamless night of sleep, until one day he realizes there are more things in his day that feel like living than like being sick.

I hope there are moments when the room around him is so full of familiar voices and laughter that illness is forced, however briefly, to become the least important thing in it, long dinners and grandchildren making too much noise, ice cream and football and stories everybody has already heard, quiet hours so beautifully uneventful that nobody thinks to remember them until years later when they realize those were the moments that mattered most.

And I hope among that immense, incalculable community of people pulling for him there is room for one loudmouthed girl from Jersey who once stood in the Oval Office crying while she introduced him to her dad.

Because Joe, my father taught me that when something is hard, you figure out what comes next and then you keep going, and that is what I’m going to believe for you now: the next easier morning, the next night your body lets you rest, the next laugh that comes before you have time to remember you’re sick, the next hand reaching for yours when the dark feels especially long, the next ordinary hour that asks nothing of you except to be alive inside it, and all of us out here loving you through every one.

He has no idea what those three embraces gave me, how each one reached into that father-shaped absence I carry everywhere and made it feel, for a few precious seconds, less empty, less cold, less final.

There are moments from those meetings I return to the way some people return to prayer: the warmth of his arm around me, the sound of his voice, the way he leaned in when I spoke, the simple, overwhelming relief of being held by a good man when I missed another good man more than I knew how to say.

And that is what I want for Joe now. I want the love he has spent a lifetime giving away to make its way to him wherever he is, in whatever room he is sitting in, in whatever hour is hardest, and leave that hour a little lighter.

May medicine find its mark, may his body remember ease, may sleep come without negotiation, may there be mornings when nothing inside him demands attention before he has even opened his eyes, and may this good, tender, deeply beloved man who has always reached people in their darkest hours, sat beside them, taken their hands and reminded them there was still light somewhere ahead, feel all of us beside him now.

All those folks, all those hands, all that love, finally finding its way home.

And with that, I’ll leave you with this:

 

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Photo by Edward Cisneros on Unsplash

A full decade into one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history, white people in this country need to be honest about something: White Christians ruined everything.

Over the last ten years, self-identified followers of Jesus have almost singlehandedly destroyed all that was good and decent and beautiful in America by hitching themselves to a monster and refusing to let go, no matter how unrepentantly evil he has proven himself to be. 

I mean, think about it:

If not for them, his vile Access Hollywood video confession of assault is a deal breaker in 2016.
If not for them, his ridiculing of a disabled reporter is a bridge too far.
If not for them, he isn’t declared a Christian.
If not for them, he isn’t elected or reelected.
If not for them, there are no stomach-turning photo ops of opportunistic religious sycophants laying hands on him.
If not for them, thousands of kids aren’t separated from their families and treated like animals.
If not for them, no one breaches the Capitol on January 6th and throws our electoral process into chaos.

We are living in a completely different timeline, now, because of them.

If not for white, alleged Christians in our government, sick people aren’t creating GoFundMe pages to get routine medical care,
our elections aren’t polluted by techbro oligarchs.
women aren’t losing their fundamental liberties,
and ICE isn’t murdering people in cold blood and without accountability.

If not for White Evangelicals, his unhinged, racist vanity rallies are empty.
If not for them, climate change isn’t dismissed, science isn’t opposed, expertise isn’t mocked, and sound medicine isn’t disregarded,
If not for them, gun violence victims get more than #thoughtsandprayers platitudes.
If not for them, every pedophile and rapist in the Epstein Files is facing a legal reckoning right now.
If not for these Christians, MAGA is the extremist fringe movement it should always have been.

Talk about losing the plot. Talk about mission drift. Talk about gaining the world and losing your soul. Talk about effing everything up for this human garbage… for nothing.

If not for the professed followers of Jesus, throughout this country, bigots aren’t emboldened to proudly parade their hatred in the light of day.
Sexual assault survivors aren’t belittled and traumatized anew.
Every one of his lies is named and condemned.
He is held accountable for his crimes and his immorality and his trampling of the Constitution.
If not for them, this planet is safer, more compassionate, and more just—period.

As a white person who grew up in the Church and pastored for decades, that’s a tough pill to force down.

Ironically, despite all their sanctimonious sermonizing, finger-wagging condemnation, and sky-is-falling histrionics, the white Evangelical Church has enabled, nurtured, and championed more inequity and more misery in these days than any other entity, and there is no close second.

For the disparate masses of the world, American Christians have become a barrier to belonging, a sanctuary for supremacy, and a hostile presence for the least of these.
By its marriage to a politics of exclusion, the Conservative Church has failed the poor, women, people of color, gender fluid human beings, and non-heteronormative people.
It’s failed immigrants and refugees and foreigners; vulnerable and marginalized communities; non-religious and non-Christians.
It has failed everyone outside the tiny gated community of the white and the wealthy.
This is indeed a tragedy.

But more than anyone, the White Evangelical Church has failed Jesus.

They have misappropriated his likeness, hijacked his name, and weaponized his message into something grotesque and oppressive—and it is rightfully repelling good people.

As someone still aspiring to a life of faith and still trying to speak into my religious tradition, it’s sobering to admit that we’re not here as a nation in this brutal battle for our existential life, we’re not at the precipice of authoritarianism, and we’re not steeped in this unapologetic supremacy, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.

There are tens of millions of white people here, both Christian and non-Christian, who wake up every day working to be agents of kindness and generosity in this world, who are driven to sickness by the irreparable harm being done to this nation, to humanity, to the planet in the name of God. 

And we, not people of color, not immigrants, we white people, are going to need to be the ones to make our presence felt in our neighborhoods, on social media, in school board meetings, and at the polls, and drive these charlatans and frauds out of power and influence, and into the places of irrelevance and shame they so richly deserve.

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man holding forehead under sunset
Photo by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash

So, this is what it’s like to feel normal.

As I sat in a small cafe overlooking a sun-dappled Florentine piazza, that thought floated in with the evening breeze, bringing a protracted exhale that surprised me, as if I’d suddenly remembered how to breathe again.

It had taken me nearly five full days away from America to begin to realize how very unwell I’d been, how physically and emotionally depleted the past eighteen months had left me, and most alarming of all—how normal that exhaustion had become. It was as if someone interrupted the ubiquitous chaos I’d grown accustomed to and softly said, “Yeah, you don’t have to live like that.”

Little by little, with 4,500 miles and nearly a week now separating me from my beleagured home, all my recent symptoms had suddenly become clear: the jagged irritability bubbling always beneath the surface, the ever-present knot in the pit of my stomach, the low-grade dread hovering in the periphery of my thoughts, the pervasive hopelessness I’d gotten used to, the slow but certain attrition to my joy that no longer alarmed me. 

Leaving America showed me how sick America has made me.

But it wasn’t just the change of scenery that had revealed the maladies afflicting me, afflicting us; it was the dozens of human beings I’d shared conversations with, people who reminded me that there are other ways to exist that I’d forgotten about. 

Everywhere I went, shop owners, servers, Uber drivers, and other travelers from the disparate corners of this planet routinely verified how abnormal our daily life actually is:

Not everyone wakes up each day feeling they need to marshal every available resource to protect themselves from their elected officials. 

Not everyone fears a routine surgery will bankrupt them.

Not everyone has masked, Government-funded goons murdering innocent people in their streets. 

Not everyone has a career criminal and serial predator as a Head of State. 

Not everyone is helmed by theocratic, conspiratorial Christian zealots.

Not everyone is watching every fundamental liberty evaporating.

Not everyone is feeling as though their nation’s best days are behind them.

And honestly, that all felt a bit shocking.

That’s how insidious the sickness of living in this iteration of America is, how commonplace the brutality now is, how the monstrous now seems normal. We have been immersed for so long in a state of sustained urgency and unrelenting suffering that it no longer occurs to us that these are not the default settings of a civilized nation, that we are not supposed to be this deprived of optimism. We are gradually becoming acclimated to nightmarish realities that no decent human beings should ever make peace with.

My profound privilege is not lost on me. I know that many people here don’t have the good fortune of a respite from the horrors for 10 minutes, let alone 10 days. Most Americans can’t place geographic space between themselves and this country and have the precious white space of mental rest it yields, yet that doesn’t make the reckoning of the toll this place has taken on me, on all of us, any easier to accept. 

I’m now back in the country I call home, and I’m trying like hell not to forget what I learned while I was away; the terrible afflictions that come from living here inside this unfettered epidemic of corruption and hatred. I want to remember how heartsick I’ve been, so that I can keep from sliding further into the abyss, so that I do not allow America to render me devoid of joy or bereft of hope.

If there’s anything I can give you as a memento of my travels, it’s confirmation that none of this is normal, that we deserve something more than this dystopian bigot fever dream we’ve grown ever more comfortable with, that this leaden nihilism does not have to be our destiny, unless we allow it to be.

Maybe you’ve started to accept the unacceptable, maybe you’ve been emotionally numbed by the unrelenting atrocities, or maybe you’ve grown so weary from fighting that you’ve stopped remembering what it’s like to breathe. If so, may you be reminded that these are symptoms of illness, but they do not need to be a death sentence.

The only way we can help retain our sanity and stay tethered to our humanity is to not succumb to the sickness surrounding us, to not let this parasitic regime destroy us, to refuse to be swallowed up by the cancer of cruelty our leadership has released into our bloodstream.

To every American who is being sickened by America: take heart, keep going. We can get well together. We will.

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“JOURNALISM 101 RULE: if someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true — now more than ever.”
— attributed to many, made famous on not-twitter by Andrea Junker

now, here’s a corollary: if an ambulance shows up at Mitch McConnell’s house and takes him away to somewhere, followed by a two-month-long news blackout during which the only signs of life are two fake-looking photographs, and then out of the clear blue, it’s announced that Mitch is now back at home, doing fine and resting comfortably, your job isn’t to go ‘oh, okay’ — your job is to fucking well find out if it’s true.

“Sen. Mitch McConnell said that he has been discharged from the rehabilitation center where he had been recovering after a fall and will continue to recover at home.”

BZZZT! wrong answer!

Mitch McConnell — and I cannot put too fine a point on this — HASN’T SAID SHIT.

all we have is a written statement issued by Mitch’s handlers, wherein McConnell is alleged to have said ‘earlier today, I was discharged from the rehabilitation center to continue my recovery at home’ — but come on, let’s have a little critical thinking here. there’s no proof that he personally authored that. anyone could have written it.

it’s been two months since McConnell was — according to the 911 call — found unconscious and in cardiac arrest on the floor of his home, bundled into an ambulance and taken to a hospital. since then, we’ve had no sign that Mitch even has a functioning brain at this point. no audio, no video. just two dodgy photographs, and the assurances of a couple of skeevy Republicans that they pinky-swear that they had a 20-minute phone conversation with Mitch, no, honest, you can trust us.

and now we’re being told that McConnell has been released from rehab and brought home — and there’s not one single photo of it happening? in a world where everyone now has a camera in their pocket, no one went ‘oh look, it’s Mitch McConnell,’ and snapped a pic? come on, none of this bullshit adds up.

wouldn’t you imagine that if McConnell were in full control of his faculties, his handlers would have had a crew on hand to film a video of a smiling Mitch waving to all, as he left the rehab center? 

why the secrecy? 

wouldn’t it be nice if the press were even remotely interested in finding out what the hell is going on, and didn’t just print what they were told?

but wait — it gets worse. here comes CBS News to twist the ‘journalistic malpractice’ dial so far past 11 that it snaps off in their fucking hand.

“Mitch McConnell says he’s been discharged from rehab, nearly 2 months after hospitalization”

irst, we have the same irresponsible ‘Mitch McConnell says’ in the headline — but on top of that, golly gee, it’s a photo of Mitch. anyone scrolling past this in their feed would go ‘oh, look, he’s being wheeled out of the hospital. huh, I guess he’s okay.’ 

sorry, no — wrong answer.

what CBS News has used is a file photo of McConnell being wheeled through the lobby of the Senate on May 19, 2026 — and CBS doesn’t even bother to say that anywhere in their reporting, giving a completely false impression of Mitch’s current state of health.

let’s face it — hardly anyone clicks on the news stories that show up in their socials. they just read the headline, look at the photo, and move on. 

on and on it went. every single news outlet lined up to stick a misleading photo on their breathless coverage of what Mitch allegedly ‘said.’

look, right now we have no use for a compliant press that prints whatever it’s told.

I wish we lived in a world where Republicans never lie to us, and there was no need for the press to fact-check every fucking word they say — but we don’t. we live in the shittiest timeline. we are being lied to every day of our lives.

we need a press that will rip this shit apart like a meth-tweaked pit bull. we need a press that goes ‘the fuck he did — prove it,’ every time they’re told that Mitch McConnell ‘said’ something. 

these are the same shit-kazoos who hounded Joe Biden every single day, and demanded he prove that he was still up to the task of presidenting. now, they’re handed on a silver platter the case of a Senator who is obviously hiding something about his own fitness for office, and the press can’t be roused from its slumber.

it’s fucking maddening.

meanwhile, in the Oval Bordello, undead advisor Nosferatu McGoebbels announced the latest in a long line of Preznit Fuckwit’s unconstitutional executive orders, while Dear Leader — who seems to have ditched his piss-mop wig and is back to his normal nebulous tangle of the six remaining hairs on his head — struggled to stay awake.

perfectly normal stuff.

“the president is using his authority as commander-in-chief first to sign an executive order using the new ruling the Supreme Court issued to expand the definitions of people who are ineligible for birthright citizenship. that includes, for example, alien enemies of the United States, members of foreign terrorist organizations, and large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments. and so we’re taking this action, it ensures that large numbers of people who wrongly would be getting birthright citizenship, will no longer be eligible for those benefits.”

racist says what?

don’t you just love how the Supreme Court has ruled that Donny can’t pull this shit, and they’re all, ‘oh, he’s going to do it anyway.’

words, what do they even mean? Donny’s ‘authority as commander-in-chief’extends only to the military, not to some farcical citizenship tribunal. tell me, who gets to decide who’s an ‘alien enemy’ or a ‘member of a terrorist organization’? who’s going to be making those decisions? Donny? Norferatu? Tom Homan? the Pocket Nazi?

what, I’m supposed to trust any of these hate-mongering shitweasels to make a fair ruling?

fuck all these fascist fucking fucks.

everything totally fucking sucks right now, but least we can overdose on schadenfreude a little bit, and enjoy the sight of this ‘Trump Superstore’ in rural Tennessee going out of business.

oh man. look, even Joe Biden’s having himself a laugh over this.

have a great Friday, everyone. don’t put words in Mitch McConnell’s comatose mouth.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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Listen, I know. Believe me, I fucking know.

I know this country is coming apart at the fucking seams at an astonishing, almost industrial rate.

I know we are trapped in a protracted bullshit war that apparently isn’t a war, run by a malignant, megalomaniacal, morally gangrenous sociopath who doesn’t give a single solitary fuck whether another American service member comes home alive — burning through missiles until the day this administration shrugs and says, “Gee, sorry, Ukraine, cupboards are bare,” handing Vladimir Putin exactly what he wanted on a silver goddamn platter.

Because, as Nancy Pelosi once said, all roads lead to Putin.

And why would he care? Donald Trump has no discernible regard for human life beyond whether it can flatter him, enrich him, vote for him, or be arranged photogenically behind him at a rally — and he does not think beyond the next headline, the next grievance, or the next opportunity for one of his two spectacularly stupid eldest spawn to turn a body count into a fucking revenue stream.

The entire foreign-policy doctrine: Can Don Jr. monetize it? Can Eric stand beside it with his mouth hanging open? Can somebody wrap the whole fetid, flagrantly felonious fuckfest in a flag and call it patriotism before lunch?

Then fire away.

I know children are hungry. I know people cannot afford their medicine. I know families are choosing between groceries and utilities while the American food supply plays Russian roulette beneath fluorescent grocery-store lighting.

I know there are a thousand scandals, corruption schemes, and constitutional crises unfolding at any given moment thanks to this teeny-tiny tyrant and the suppurating circle of sycophants orbiting him like flies around a gas-station hot dog.

I know.

But today, I don’t want to talk about any of it — not Iran, not Putin, not the economy, not the never-ending national emergency being run by a man whose entire governing philosophy appears to be:

“What if the dumbest fucking guy at the country club controlled the Pentagon?”

Today I want to be gloriously, unapologetically petty. Today I’m cashing in one emotional sick day from democracy.

Today I want to ignore every burning building long enough to laugh at the pustulent little pyromaniac wearing a piss-blond pubic pompadour.

Because every once in a while, the universe hands you a gift, and last night it handed us an eighty-year-old, nuclear-orange narcissist who apparently looked in the mirror, saw a strawberry-blonde Sam Sheepdog pelt glued to his scalp, nodded approvingly, and thought:

“Yeah. Nobody’s gonna notice this.”

Because what in the lemon-chiffon, swoop-de-loop, shellac-soaked, candy-coated cornmeal catastrophe is that?

LOOK. AT. THIS. FUCKING. PHOTO.

Donald Trump, that blotched, bloated, bronzer-basted, bargain-basement Baron Harkonnen of bullshit, shuffled into that Vegas ballroom wearing what can only be described as a federally subsidized merkin, a crusty, musty, dusty crotch curtain that got promoted to head office, waddling beneath the casino lights looking like somebody taxidermied the Cowardly Lion’s taint, bleached it with Sun-In, shellacked it with Aqua Net, and stapled the poor bastard sideways across his forehead.

The man’s scalp got skull-fucked by a breeze on Sunday — bent over on a tarmac, cheeks spread, bald spot gaping at God and C-SPAN — and instead of taking the L like a person with a functioning shame gland, he showed up three days later wearing his mommy’s hair like the world’s most Oedipal glory-hole disguise, a lace-front so thirsty it’s basically edging the entire press pool.

Some poor White House staffer got dispatched to the wig store with a government credit card and one breathtakingly vague instruction: “Make him look like his mother.”

And they did.

They fucking did.

That isn’t hair. Hair doesn’t just fucking materialize on Wednesday when it wasn’t there Tuesday.

Call it a wig, a rug, a syrup, a topper, a postiche, a forehead futon, a dome duvet, a keratin Ponzi scheme, a strawberry-blonde merkin, or whatever euphemism the industry invented to avoid saying, “We glued somebody else’s pubes to your skull.”

Call it whatever the fuck you want.

It is very obviously not growing out of that man’s head.

He stood up there in what can only be described as a pube parka, a taint tarp, a glued-on gooch garnish, lecturing America while looking like he skinned the shag carpet from a 1978 conversion van that hosted activities no forensic team could ever fully reconstruct. That thing is a scalp-mounted thirst trap for the assisted-living demographic, the follicular equivalent of stuffing a sock down your pants, except the sock is on his head, the pants are the presidency, and everybody around him has been ordered to admire the bulge.

It looks so much like roadkill I’m genuinely worried Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to wander over with a hacksaw, decapitate it, cut its balls off, dump it beside a bicycle in Central Park, and spend the next decade insisting that’s just what outdoorsmen do. Somebody needs to put a fluorescent orange hunting vest on Trump’s hair before Bobby mistakes it for protected wildlife.

And the color. Sweet merciful Christ.

His face is radioactive traffic cone. His neck is deli ham. His ears are boiled bratwurst. His eyelids are undercooked salmon. Then, without warning, BAM: discount butterscotch Labradoodle.

Who signed off on this fucking palette? The front is buttercream beige. The sides are nicotine nougat. The back is dehydrated corn silk. The crown is whatever color a motel comforter turns after thirty years of cigarette smoke and broken dreams. Nothing matches. Not his face, not his neck, not his eyebrows, not reality.

From the eyebrows down, he’s Sweetums from The Muppets after forty years of Marlboros, mayonnaise, and Medicare fraud. From the eyebrows up, he’s a freshly bleached alpaca undercarriage after a chemical peel and a bitter divorce.

Because this isn’t hairstyling. This is civil engineering.

Every surviving follicle has been forcibly evicted from whatever lonely patch of scalp still supported life, dragged across six square miles of barren forehead, stretched tighter than a banjo string at a bluegrass festival, varnished into submission, and ordered to swear under oath that it has always fucking lived there.

His hairline has been gerrymandered harder than a swing state. There are strands voting in congressional districts they haven’t physically occupied since Bill Clinton was president.

Every man eventually meets his hairline in the wind and makes a choice: dignity or denial.

Shave it. Buzz it. Wear a hat. Get plugs. Buy a wig. Glue a peacock to your forehead. Nobody gives a fuck.

But this leathery, lacquered, spray-tanned sarcophagus chose to hot-glue what appears to be the freshly shampooed hindquarters of an elderly Shih Tzu to his skull and call it genetics.

Just think about the poor fucking bastard whose job this actually is. Imagine being Trump Hair Guy. Imagine explaining that career choice at Thanksgiving.

“So…what do you do?”

“Well…every morning I reattach confidence to an eighty-year-old narcissist before Fox & Friends.”

“Oh, you’re a therapist?”

“No. Much worse. I color-match synthetic pubes to industrial bronzer, secure them with enough adhesive to survive a tropical storm, and convince the president of the United States that the bleached asshole of a golden retriever reads as ‘natural volume.’”

There had to be a moment backstage: the stylist fluffing, spraying, tamping, squinting, presenting the mirror — then the long, bowel-tightening silence of one adult waiting to see whether another adult believes the thing suctioned to his scalp looks remotely biological.

And then the old fuck smiles.

“Perfect.”

Perfect?

Motherfucker, this looks less like a hairstyle than evidence. CSI would place numbered markers around it. Animal Control would approach with a catchpole. The coroner would estimate time of death. A priest would be summoned, take one look, and quietly recommend cremation.

Donald Trump stared into that mirror, saw a pale, matted carcass making one final crawl toward his ear, and thought, “Nailed it.”

The staggering thing isn’t the rug. It’s the conviction — the industrial-strength certainty of a creature visibly deteriorating beneath seven separate cosmetic interventions who still believes he is projecting raw sexual dynamism, stepping beneath the lights with the swagger of a man expecting women to faint into the shrimp cocktail.

Dude, you do not look seductive. You look like a subpoena developed edema.

You do not look vigorous. You look like something a county assessor found unconscious inside a tanning booth.

You do not look younger. You look like somebody entered “wealthy cadaver, business casual” into an off-brand image generator and selected the version with extra hair.

And every spineless, sniveling, sycophantic, sphincter-polishing ass-kisser around him has to participate in the hallucination.

“Sir, you look incredible.”

“Sir, completely natural.”

“Sir, twenty years younger.”

Twenty years younger than what? The Dead Sea Scrolls?

Motherfucker, you look like the grand-prize entry in a church-basement taxidermy raffle judged by three widows on boxed wine.

Nobody nearby believes it. The only organism on Earth genuinely convinced that this glazed shag remnant erupted naturally from Donald Trump’s scalp is the swollen orange vanity blister underneath it.

He’s spent years manufacturing bogeymen out of drag queens reading children’s books and making up stories about teachers grooming kindergartners into becoming furries — and meanwhile this fucking cooked-shrimp colostomy bag shows up in Vegas looking like the world’s worst mashup of both.

But of course, for himself, there are no fucking limits. Paint the face. Cinch the torso. Elevate the heels. Reinforce the shoulders. Conceal the scalp. Spray, shellac, strap, stuff, squeeze, spackle, pad, paste, prop, powder, press, lacquer, laminate, and load-bearing-wall the whole bloated bundle until an eighty-year-old authoritarian marshmallow can lumber onstage identifying as a virile thirty-nine-year-old Manhattan sex panther.

That is gender-affirming care.

It just only counts when it affirms his gender.

When Donald wants two extra inches, the lifts are natural. When Donald wants a narrower waist, the girdle is tailoring. When Donald wants broader shoulders, the padding is genetics. When Donald wants a brand-new hairline delivered overnight like a replacement carburetor, the bleached pubic poncho is suddenly the lush, luxuriant, lineage-blessed follicular bounty of superior masculine genes.

But let somebody else ask to live honestly inside their own body and this cosmetically cross-braced, chemically colored, corseted old fraud suddenly discovers biology.

Nature handed you baldness, Donald. Nature handed you gravity. Nature handed you a body shaped like a sack of wet laundry slumped against a hotel ice machine.

You rejected all three.

Nobody would give a fuck if you simply admitted it. Wear the rug. Own the rug. Name the rug. Have the Marine Band play “Hail to the Hairpiece” every time the blond bastard enters a room.

The vanity isn’t the problem.

The fucking lie is the problem.

Donald Trump has spent his entire life demanding that everyone around him deny what their own eyes can plainly see: the debt, the decline, the crimes, the crowds, the losses, the lies, the weight, the weakness, the widening vacancy beneath that counterfeit cranial thatch.

The whole rotten presidency is sitting right there on top of his skull: cheap synthetic fiber sold as hereditary magnificence, obvious depletion disguised as abundance, and a bleached, bristling, bargain-bin pube pavilion passed off as the natural mane of a youthful fucking lion.

That is Trumpism reduced to its purest form: frightened, fawning, follicle-affirming fuckwits staring directly at an obvious fraud and competing to see who can flatter it most extravagantly.

“Sir, tremendous volume.”

“Sir, astonishing density.”

“Sir, nobody has ever had hair like this.”

Correct.

Nobody fucking has.

Because most people do not staple a strawberry-blonde church-lady séance to their forehead, paint themselves the color of buffalo-wing sauce, strap on orthopedic elevator shoes, squeeze their abdomen into reinforced shapewear, and emerge convinced the total effect is youthful, commanding, and sexually catastrophic.

That is not confidence.

That is narcissism with a glue gun.

And there it fucking is. The entire diseased, delusional, democracy-devouring spectacle reduced to one perfect image: an insecure orange fraud trying to outrun a mirror while wearing his dead mother’s church swoop on his head.

The wig isn’t the most embarrassing thing on Donald Trump.

It may actually be the most honest.

At least the wig admits it’s fucking fake.

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Former reality TeeVee show competitor, sometime lumberjack, and noted taxpayer-funded RV-vacationer Sean Duffy takes his role as the US Road Ruler very seriously:

“Out of all the sins of the Trump administration — wars, ICE raids, anti-vax lunacy and the return of measles, the empowering of Kash Patel and Stephen Miller, and so much more — Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy declaring war on “DEI bike lanes” is surely a small thing. But it’s also such a monumentally stupid act, so counterproductive, so anti-MAHA as to be completely maddening. NPR recently reported that staff at the Federal Highway Administration have been asked to purge any references to bikes and bike lanes from the agency’s website.“

Wait. What? DEI bike lanes?

“What bike lanes have to do with DEI is unclear. Likely this is the Biden administration’s fault for some admittedly political language touting the infrastructure bill’s grants. The Biden team announced they would “consider how projects can address climate change, ensure racial equity, and remove barriers to opportunity.” Which could be seen as lofty goals when many Americans were desperate for pot hole and bridge repairs. But that’s not really the issue here. If the Biden people were for something, then the Trump people must always be against it. This is a ridiculous calculus, counterproductive, and why voters are so sick and tired of our broken political system.”

I guess the assumption is that bikes are for poor people (and if you ever price check bikes, not even electric ones you will see how ridiculous this is), and therefore DEI, because we all know that poor people are not our kind (as rich white people used to politely say when being racist and /or classist).

Car-driving commuters say that one less person on the road makes their commutes better.

Seattle drivers are notoriously passive-aggressive and openly hostile to bikers at least according to bicyclists. And even the bike-riding hoards agree that our bike lanes are dangerous the way that they share the road with cars. A single car door opening inopportunely can send a biker to the hospital or morgue and turning right on red lights without looking for bikes is probably even worse.

So maybe better bike lanes might be something for Sean Duffy to think about the next time he gets in his behemoth RV for another taxpayer-funded Road Trip? Bikes are not going away nor are cars so maybe Duffy can see this as an opportunity to improve commutes or just getter around for everyone. The more people out of cars, the better and the funner:

“[My bike] gave me the freedom to not only get to places, but to access things that otherwise would have been out of reach. Even now, riding a bike makes me feel like a kid again. There’s nothing like feeling the air on your face and that freedom to just ride.”

—LeBron James

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We’re more than five hundred and fifty goddamn days into Season Two of The Donald Trump Shit Show: five hundred and fifty rancid episodes of a renewal nobody with a frontal lobe, pulse, or functioning remote control fucking ordered.

More than five hundred and fifty days of Cabinet sycophants mistaking ass-kissing for a résumé, billionaire boot-lickers marinating in oligarch gravy, political whores and donor-purchased meat puppets who couldn’t organize a two-car funeral procession, an economy stapled together with tariff grease and warm bureaucratic sludge, foreign policy conducted like a drunk Craigslist handjob, and a Republican Congress so spineless, supine, and erotically devoted to voluntary vertebrae extraction it should come with satin pillows, a drool bib, and a little bedside bell.

Everything is going spectacularly, catastrophically, Titan-submersible wrong.

And yet… somehow… through a feat of chronological acrobatics so strenuous it would make a Cirque du Soleil contortionist rupture three discs and reconsider their career choices…

It is still Joe Biden’s fault.

Trump appoints another gloriously unqualified dipshit whose only discernible qualification is a willingness to clap like a trained seal every time the Great Orange Sleep Apnea Pumpkin waddles into the room?

You guessed it… Biden.

These are Trump’s judges. Trump’s Cabinet. Trump’s economy. Every screwup, every scandal, every own goal, every international humiliation, every bureaucratic tire fire bears his fingerprints like a wet slab of cement somebody staggered across on their way out of a bar.

And yet…

The economy? Joe Biden.

Grocery prices? Joe Biden.

Inflation running hotter than every other country in the G7 after Trump was handed one of the strongest recoveries on the planet? Somehow… Joe Biden.

Trump slaps tariffs on everything that isn’t bolted to the fucking floor, lights global supply chains on fire with a blowtorch and a Sharpie, and suddenly your eggs cost the GDP of a small island nation?

Joe. Fucking. Biden.

Trump’s administration is emptying our weapons stockpiles by the warehouse, burning through interceptor missiles that cost millions of dollars apiece to knock Iranian drones and ballistic missiles out of the sky before they can turn an American base into a smoking crater?

Believe it or not…

Still Joe Biden.

At this point Donald Trump could back a golf cart into the Lincoln Memorial, declare war on the moon, appoint a decorative gourd as Secretary of Defense, and accidentally staple his own necktie to a Cabinet secretary, and within thirty-seven seconds some Republican congressman would sprint to the closest television camera, veins bulging like overcooked bratwurst, to explain that the real culprit here was Joe Biden.

Hell, Barack Obama still catches stray bullets from this asshole’s excuse factory. I’m genuinely surprised he hasn’t blamed Jimmy Carter for dropped calls, Abraham Lincoln for airline baggage fees, and Ulysses S. Grant for the fact that his Diet Coke keeps going flat.

Because the buck doesn’t stop with Donald Trump.

The buck files the paperwork to change its name, crosses state lines, assumes a half-dozen fake identities, and hires Todd Blanche to argue it never existed at all.

Remember during COVID, when that slack-jawed blame vacuum turned every White House briefing into another round of Presidential Pin the Blame on Literally Anybody Else.

China.

Democratic governors.

The media.

Anthony Fauci.

Blue states.

Windmills.

Anybody with a heartbeat and a name tag.

Anybody except the wheezing, blame-hoarding huckster standing behind the presidential seal. That bloated, grievance-gargling gasbag. That self-pitying, self-fellating monument to unearned mediocrity and industrial-strength narcissism. The only man in recorded history who wants all the authority of the White House, all the applause, all the parades, all the credit, all the fucking paintings, but reacts to accountability the way a vampire reacts to sunlight.

That’s not leadership.

That’s a toddler wearing enough bargain-bin polyester to shade a county fair livestock pavilion who still thinks “I know you are, but what am I?” is a governing philosophy.

Has there ever been a bigger whiner? A more prolific pissbaby? A more decorated professional victim in the recorded annals of human civilization? Somewhere on the wall of a cave in France there’s a thirty-thousand-year-old painting of one hunter pointing at another guy after the mammoth got away, and even that prehistoric buck-passer would take one look at Donald Trump, rub some charcoal off his hands, and mutter, “Jesus Christ, man… just take the fucking L.”

Not me.

Not mine.

I didn’t do it.

It was the other guy.

The election was stolen.

The virus came from somewhere else.

The economy would’ve been perfect if not for…

Fill in the fucking blank.

Because there’s always another villain. Always another sacrificial goat waiting patiently in the wings, powdered, pressed, and camera-ready for the moment this scapegoat-collecting bullshit artist needs a warm body to eat the fallout.

Donald Trump doesn’t solve problems.

He outsources blame.

It’s the one promise he’s never broken.

This is an eighty-year-old head of state. The President of the United States. And this… this is what passes for leadership in MAGA world: an overgrown fucking toddler who won’t cop to coloring all over the living room wall while he’s still standing there, diaper sagging under the gravitational pull of his own horseshit, clutching the fucking Sharpie in one fist and jabbing a finger at the babysitter with the other, swearing on his mother’s grave the dog learned cursive.

Leadership isn’t planting yourself behind a podium to gorge on applause when things go right and then vaporizing into a noxious fog of denials the second reality comes collecting its debt.

Leadership is ownership.

Leadership is possessing the vertebrae, the intestinal fortitude, the basic fucking decency to say, “This happened on my watch, and I’m responsible for fixing it.”

Donald Trump treats accountability like it’s a process server carrying child-support papers and an IRS auditor with a battering ram rolled into one. The instant it lumbers into his ZIP code, he’s already halfway over the back fence, bathrobe flapping, hair meringue listing to port, shrieking, sniveling, sputtering, and blame-spewing into the night that it was China, or Joe Biden, or the fucking wind, leaving behind nothing but a banging screen door, a chemical contrail of Aqua Net and spray tan, and the unmistakable stench of cowardice marinated in cheap vanity.

He inherited an economy moving in the right direction the first time. He inherited an economy moving in the right direction the second time. Both fucking times, he wrapped those bruised, blotchy, burger-greased little mitts around the wheel, mashed the accelerator with all the foresight of a drunken lawn mower, and steered us straight toward the nearest fiscal fucking sinkhole.

That’s on him.

He owns every market convulsion, every boardroom anxiety attack, every supply-chain migraine, every economic aftershock flowing directly from the policies he chose.

He also owns an obscene share of our national debt. Across just a term and a half, he racked up roughly twenty-eight percent of all the red ink accumulated since the founding of the republic. In a nation that’s been keeping books since powdered wigs and quill pens.

He did that.

He owns that.

And yet…

Still Joe Biden.

Barack Obama is not the president. Joe Biden is not the president. Donald Trump is the president. The economy you’re living in today? That’s him. The appointments. The pardons. The purges. The priorities. The consequences. Every signature. Every wound he carved into this country himself.

His.

At some point the training wheels come off, the alibis expire, and you either govern or you don’t.

Unless your name is Donald Trump, in which case every disaster arrives with a laminated list of alternate suspects ready for whichever quivering, expendable toady draws the short straw and gets shoved in front of the cameras.

The buck never stops with Donald Trump.

It never even slows the fuck down.

If he stubs his fucking toe, it’s Joe Biden’s coffee table. If he bites his tongue, it’s Joe Biden’s teeth. If he gets a paper cut, it’s Joe Biden’s envelope.

I genuinely believe we are two weeks, three tops, from that incontinent insult to upholstery shitting his pants on a tarmac, staring down in bewilderment like his own ass just staged a coup, and demanding a congressional investigation into Joe Biden’s role in Operation Brown Thunder. There’ll be hearings. Fox will book a gastroenterologist. Jim Jordan will subpoena a pair of Dockers. Todd Blanche will insist the underwear was weaponized by the radical left.

Anybody except the wheezing, blame-hoarding huckster standing behind the presidential seal. That bloated, grievance-gargling gasbag. That self-pitying, self-fellating monument to unearned mediocrity and industrial-strength narcissism. The only man in recorded history who wants all the authority of the White House, all the applause, all the parades, all the credit, all the fucking paintings, but reacts to accountability the way a vampire reacts to sunlight.

That’s not leadership.

That’s a toddler wearing enough bargain-bin polyester to shade a county fair livestock pavilion who still thinks “I know you are, but what am I?” is a governing philosophy.

Has there ever been a bigger whiner? A more prolific pissbaby? A more decorated professional victim in the recorded annals of human civilization? Somewhere on the wall of a cave in France there’s a thirty-thousand-year-old painting of one hunter pointing at another guy after the mammoth got away, and even that prehistoric buck-passer would take one look at Donald Trump, rub some charcoal off his hands, and mutter, “Jesus Christ, man… just take the fucking L.”

Not me.

Not mine.

I didn’t do it.

It was the other guy.

The election was stolen.

The virus came from somewhere else.

The economy would’ve been perfect if not for…

Fill in the fucking blank.

Because there’s always another villain. Always another sacrificial goat waiting patiently in the wings, powdered, pressed, and camera-ready for the moment this scapegoat-collecting bullshit artist needs a warm body to eat the fallout.

Donald Trump doesn’t solve problems.

He outsources blame.

It’s the one promise he’s never broken.

This is an eighty-year-old head of state. The President of the United States. And this… this is what passes for leadership in MAGA world: an overgrown fucking toddler who won’t cop to coloring all over the living room wall while he’s still standing there, diaper sagging under the gravitational pull of his own horseshit, clutching the fucking Sharpie in one fist and jabbing a finger at the babysitter with the other, swearing on his mother’s grave the dog learned cursive.

Leadership isn’t planting yourself behind a podium to gorge on applause when things go right and then vaporizing into a noxious fog of denials the second reality comes collecting its debt.

Leadership is ownership.

Leadership is possessing the vertebrae, the intestinal fortitude, the basic fucking decency to say, “This happened on my watch, and I’m responsible for fixing it.”

Donald Trump treats accountability like it’s a process server carrying child-support papers and an IRS auditor with a battering ram rolled into one. The instant it lumbers into his ZIP code, he’s already halfway over the back fence, bathrobe flapping, hair meringue listing to port, shrieking, sniveling, sputtering, and blame-spewing into the night that it was China, or Joe Biden, or the fucking wind, leaving behind nothing but a banging screen door, a chemical contrail of Aqua Net and spray tan, and the unmistakable stench of cowardice marinated in cheap vanity.

He inherited an economy moving in the right direction the first time. He inherited an economy moving in the right direction the second time. Both fucking times, he wrapped those bruised, blotchy, burger-greased little mitts around the wheel, mashed the accelerator with all the foresight of a drunken lawn mower, and steered us straight toward the nearest fiscal fucking sinkhole.

That’s on him.

He owns every market convulsion, every boardroom anxiety attack, every supply-chain migraine, every economic aftershock flowing directly from the policies he chose.

He also owns an obscene share of our national debt. Across just a term and a half, he racked up roughly twenty-eight percent of all the red ink accumulated since the founding of the republic. In a nation that’s been keeping books since powdered wigs and quill pens.

He did that.

He owns that.

And yet…

Still Joe Biden.

Barack Obama is not the president. Joe Biden is not the president. Donald Trump is the president. The economy you’re living in today? That’s him. The appointments. The pardons. The purges. The priorities. The consequences. Every signature. Every wound he carved into this country himself.

His.

At some point the training wheels come off, the alibis expire, and you either govern or you don’t.

Unless your name is Donald Trump, in which case every disaster arrives with a laminated list of alternate suspects ready for whichever quivering, expendable toady draws the short straw and gets shoved in front of the cameras.

The buck never stops with Donald Trump.

It never even slows the fuck down.

If he stubs his fucking toe, it’s Joe Biden’s coffee table. If he bites his tongue, it’s Joe Biden’s teeth. If he gets a paper cut, it’s Joe Biden’s envelope.

I genuinely believe we are two weeks, three tops, from that incontinent insult to upholstery shitting his pants on a tarmac, staring down in bewilderment like his own ass just staged a coup, and demanding a congressional investigation into Joe Biden’s role in Operation Brown Thunder. There’ll be hearings. Fox will book a gastroenterologist. Jim Jordan will subpoena a pair of Dockers. Todd Blanche will insist the underwear was weaponized by the radical left.

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Dear Leader is bugfuck nuts.

we know this. it’s not open to debate. we’ve all seen the erratic behavior. the pants-shittingly infantile tantrums. the utter lack of impulse control. the mood swings. the ever-shifting incoherence he wreaks on the world, as the family of raccoons that live inside his fat, waterlogged head randomly chew through allthe wires.

but you know who else is equally deranged?

Preznit Fuckwit’s stalker-slash-diaper-nurse, that’s who.

you know who I’m talking about: the Ivanka-esque blonde who’s ever-present, following three steps behind Dear Leader, everywhere he goes. the one whose official job is to make a broken-inside rage-baby feel good about himself.

Donny went on a posting spree yesterday, one that was even more crazypants than usual, shitting out dozens of childish memes all over his crappy app.

but of course, it wasn’t Donny pulling those antics all by himself. it’s Natalie Harp who curates all that shit in the first place and shows it to Donny, at which point he goes ‘hurr hurr hurr, so funny.’

so yeah, she’s every bit as bugfuck nuts as Dear Leader.

she’s also every bit as transphobic.

isn’t that charming? Donny and the diaper nurse are doubling down on the childish ‘Kaitlan Collins and Dylan Mulvaney, who can even tell them apart’crack that Donny made at the Correspondents’ Dinner. why? it wasn’t a particularly clever — or even remotely accurate — remark. it’s just a sad reminder that we’re dealing with the most infantile administration ever. it’s just sewer clowns and bridge trolls.

now, somebody please explain to me, what the fuck even is this?

seriously, who’s panicking? who is this aimed at? it’s just Donny and Nattie, high on their own supply, smiling at each other and going ‘they’re so scared of us.’

how fucking dumb.

and it’s all so delusional.

which man, exactly, ‘saved America’? the psychotic teenager who was so out of control that his cold and distant parents shipped him off to a military academy, so he’d be out of their hair? the serial predator who used to fight with his dead pedo bestie over which one of them had the right to ‘own’ the Motel-a-Lago ‘spa girls’? the racist game show host? or the current doughy pantload in the Oval Bordello?

who even comes up with this stuff? oh look, it’s the worst remake of North by Northwest ever.

let’s get real. any real-life scenario where George Washington meets Dear Leader would simply be George repeatedly smacking Donny upside the head and going ‘what the fuck is wrong with you? America doesn’t have kings, you stupid dipshit.’

how MAGA-pickled does your brain have to be to sit down at an AI prompt and go ‘draw me Dear Leader saving George Washington from falling off of Mount Rushmore and there should be a clock with lightning in the sky, because it’s all something something something time travel’?

this is like proudly announcing to the world, ‘look how mentally ill I am.’

so is this.

let’s do a quick fact check. does Donny in real life actually look as handsome and heroic as he does in that AI-generated drek?

yeeesh.

of course he doesn’t. that ‘cosmic commander’ bullshit is just the diaper nurse stroking the piss-baby’s ego. ‘look how rugged you are, sir!’

seriously, how can Natalie keep from swooning, being in such close proximity to such a hunk of alpha masculinity?

it’s all so fucking idiotic. no other world leader needs to be coddled like this. no other head of state runs their own social media site devoted to stroking their fragile ego. at this point, even Kim Jong-un has to be all ‘come on, dude. tone it down. you’re embarrassing yourself.’

and then there was this shit. Donny and Nattie farted out at about a dozen variations on the ‘Donny 2028’ theme, each one dumbfuckier than the next.

oh please. Donny wishes he looked anywhere near that good, ever.

it’s time for another fact check. here’s a photo from yesterday, by Matt Kaminsky, of Dear Leader waddling his way back to the White House after cheating at golf.

look, I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction: there isn’t going to be any serious effort to run Donny again in 2028. all we’re seeing here is Donny’s minders trying to troll us, and get us all riled up over nothing. it’s a distraction — along with a generous dollop of letting Donny think he has a chance to run in 2028, just to keep him mollified.

but here’s where Nattie and Donny’s posting spree goes from stupid to reckless.

oh gee, Commander Crazypants is warmongering again. I have no idea what he imagines he’s accomplishing here, aside from antagonizing the country that’s currently shut down the Strait of Hormuz. does Donny actually believe that shitting out threats on social media is an effective way of negotiating?

Donny has clownfucked himself into an unwinnable don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war on Iran, a quagmire that’s now in it’s fifth month, with no end in sight — and now he’s making things worse for himself, by posting first and thinking never.

oh, it’s our tanker now? what, we’re going to board Iranian oil tankers? just like that?

that’s a pretty strong boast — especially considering that there are reports that Donny’s gin-soaked Secretary of Death had to put his jolly little war on hold, because we’re fucking running out of munitions.

The U.S. military had been poised Friday to launch an intensive series of strikes against Iran, which could have lasted up to two weeks, the officials said.

But the operation was delayed so diplomacy could proceed and as officials discussed the effect a major attack could have on the U.S.’s shrinking stocks of Patriot and other air defense interceptors.

gee, maybe Piss-Drunk Pete should have spent less time obsessing over the testosterone levels of his warfighting warfighters and more time on making sure he had enough bombs on hand to win the war he thought would be over in an afternoon.

which brings us to this exchange between Meet the Press’ Kristen Welker and UN Ambassador Mike Waltz, because — well, you have to hear it to believe it.

Welker: “NBC News is reporting that the Pentagon is actually rationing some defense weaponry amid diminishing supplies. is America backing away from a larger military attack because our stockpile has been depleted?”

Waltz: “look, we have to take a step back here. a lot of stockpiles were depleted … the administration inherited a depleted military under the Biden administration.”

Welker: “but you acknowledge that they’re depleted?”

Waltz: “I want to be crystal clear. the US military has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign, and I have to tell you, the people who are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

got that? America doesn’t have enough munitions, because of that meanie Joe Biden, who was old and icky and smelled bad — but we also have more munitions than we need, and anyone saying otherwise needs to rot in prison.

hey, speaking of rotting in prison — everything totally fucking sucks right now, but at least we can all enjoy Andrew Tate (or, more likely, some flunky posting for him) continuing to bellyache about how super unfair it is for an ahem alleged rapist and sex trafficker awaiting extradition for his ahem allegedcrimes to be deprived of his liberty.

boo fucking hoo.

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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It feels like a good portion of this nation is on death watch right now.

My social media feed is filled with photos and videos gleefully documenting the markers of his physical deterioration, with rising hope as his public appearances grow more sporadic, with almost giddy prognostications of his departure date from this place. People are posting their plans as if preparing for New Year’s Eve or a World Series Championship.

I am not exactly one of those people.

Yes, he has been an odious blight upon this planet and a cancerous presence to this nation. He is, without question, one of the single most objectively horrible human beings our species has produced.

Setting aside the reality that his passing would elevate a successor who is smarter, shrewder, less impulsive, and potentially far more effective in accelerating this country’s slide into theocracy, authoritarianism, and economic devastation for everyone but the billionaire cadre of amoral tech bro vampires who elevated him to the platform to begin with.

But I don’t wish for his death.

I wish he’d never been born.

If he departs this mortal sphere as I type this, it will do nothing to undo all the evil that his now bruised hands have wrought, to erase every vile thing his presence has exposed as he ascended politically.

It will not rewind the years of those who lived in squalor and poverty in New York City, on whose backs he built his jittery, hollow empire.

His death will not bring financial restitution to the thousands of workers and contractors left abandoned by the many bankruptcies that emancipated him from responsibility.

It won’t give back wholeness and healing to the girls and women he violated in secret or maligned in public.

It will not reverse the irreparable damage he has done to a political party whose members individually and collectively abandoned every legal and moral expectation to fall prostrate before him.

It will not elicit repentance in a white Evangelical Church that parted ways with the compassionate, loving namesake of its faith tradition and fashioned a vicious, sneering, profane, God-mocking idol out of his antithesis and bowed down before it.

His passing now could not allow us to unsee the repugnant grievance cult he unleashed here; the historically hateful movement of miserable people who’ve spent the last decade reveling in an unrepentant ugliness because he gave them consent.

It will not remove the legion of incompetent, predatory, corrupt sycophants he poisoned our government with; people who have and will continue to dismantle and pervert our systems of care and legal oversight.

And his death, as much as it would feel like an initial reprieve from the chaos he has engineered and the unfathomable suffering he has spearheaded, would do nothing to conceal the vile sickness he exposed within the people around us: the long-simmering racism, the scalding contempt for foreigners, the phobic hatred of human beings for their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Long after he is gone, we will be left with what we now know about our family members and friends and neighbors; about the people in our churches, about the parents of our children’s friends; about the pillars of our communities, about those we trust to govern us, to protect and serve us.

These atrocities, sadly, will all long outlive him.

He lived, and his life has done its brutal, irreversible damage.

And with that being true, I do not wish for his death; not yet.

I hope and pray that he lives long enough to face legal accountability for his crimes; that he will not depart this place before escaping consequences for the willful disregard he has spent 80 years showing for the laws of our land, for the disparate humanity that has called this place home, and for the sacred and powerful platform he never deserved to begin with.

I want him to live long enough to face a cell before he faces his maker.

And I want to live long enough to see it.

That will be cause for true celebration.

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Fly My Pretties, FLY!

These are the members of McConnell’s staff the criminal conspiracy who are keeping his status a secret from the American people.  Let’s fill up their email boxes and let them know how we feel about this.

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Just When You Think They Can’t Go Any Lower, They Pull Out A Backhoe

never underestimate the ability of the shitweasels in the Donnyverse to take current events and clownfuck them into something evil.

remember those four young service members who lost their lives last week, while fighting in Preznit Fuckwit’s pointless and illegal don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war on Iran — the ones who Donny dishonored at their dignified transfer, by using them as props, and putting his own disgraceful words into their lifeless mouths?

well, apparently the Pentagon doesn’t want you to remember, because they just un-personned them.

read on, and prepare to get super fucking angry.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon reported on its casualties website that a total of 18 American service members had been killed during the war in Iran.

By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number, reporting that 14 American troops had been killed in the war.

what in the hallowed name of Memory-Hole Jesus is this bullshit?

when The New York Times committed a journalism and asked for an explanation, Pentagon spokespeople were basically ‘hamina hamina hamina,’vomiting out multiple, conflicting excuses.

of the three shifting alibis, this one’s my favorite:

Three military officials said that one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list — three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq — because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.

oh really, Pentagon? that’s what you want to go with, that ‘it’s technically not a war, so they’re technically not war dead’?

fuck you. fuck you completely. repeat that explanation to the faces of those service members’ families. I dare you.

you better believe we’re in a war — an unwinnable one that Dear Leader started — but these double-talking sons of bitches are going out of their way to call it anything but.

oh look, somebody taught Lord Shitticus a new word.

“and that’s what this— skirmish we have going on, I call it a skirmish. this is with this skirmish we have with the ISLAMIC REPUBLIC— of Iran. and I call it that. because, let me tell you, they are getting hit so hard. and they want to make a deal. but I say they’re not ready to make a deal. because every time they make a deal they want to change it, and everything. they’re not ready. they’ll be ready very soon.”

sweat-drenched loser says what?

listen to Donny try to weasel out of culpability for the death, destruction and chaos he’s wrought. oh, it’s just a wee skirmish. what’s the big deal?

that’s not what a skirmish is, you demented fuck.

A skirmish is a brief, minor fight or a small argument. It usually happens away from the main battle or is an unplanned disagreement. [1, 2, 3]

sorry pal. skirmishes don’t get the Strait of Hormuz shut down, nor do they send the price of oil into the stratosphere. wars do that shit.

who do you imagine taught Donny to say ‘skirmish’? do you think it was Nosferatu McGoebbels? nah, that doesn’t sound like him. it was probably Donny’s stalker-slash-diaper-nurse, The Human Printer. she was with Dear Leader at the dignified transfer.

why on earth did Natalie Harp need to be there?

look, we all know why the Pentagon erased these four fallen: because they didn’t want Donny to be embarrassed by the ever-rising death toll in the reckless WAR he started for no coherent reason at all.

that’s just disgraceful.

the Pentagon won’t say their names, so it’s up to us.

They died serving our country. They should be honored, not erased.
Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Hawaii
Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Texas
Sgt. Angel Rampersad, 28, of New York
Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of North Carolina

holy shit, Uncle Jeff, did you just agree with Bill Kristol, posting on Elon’s Nazi Bar and Child Porn Emporium, of all places?

yes, I did. that’s how far through the looking glass we are.

it’s all so galling. We the People deserve so much better than this. We the People deserve truth and accountability, not a war machine that hides its dead so the colicky piss-baby in the Oval Bordello won’t throw a tantrum.

“we are closing schools and hospitals in this country, so we can bomb schools and hospitals in other countries. there is never enough money for education and healthcare, but there’s always enough money for war. this morning, we learned that one of our own, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, was killed by an Iranian airstrike in Jordan. Isabella grew up in Carrollton, not too far from here. she was just 19 years old. she just graduated from Hebron High School. Isabella was sent to serve in a reckless war that no one asked for. we pay for it with our tax dollars. Isabella paid for it with her life.”

full disclosure: I may have teared up a bit just now, while typing out that transcription.

your reminder that the guy Talarico is running against — Ken Paxton — is a serial adulterer who let a confessed child rapist walk the streets of Texasthrough some sweetheart plea deal, just like the one Donny’s dead pedo bestie got in Florida.

that’s what the Texas Senate race is all about. honor vs dishonor.

Isabella Gonzales was nineteen years old, and sent to die in a war that some easily-manipulated fuckhead started because his despot bestie Bibi Netanyahu goaded him into it, and his piss-drunk Secretary of Death assured him it would be done and won in an afternoon.

say her name. say all their names.

Donny Convict is such a fucking imbecile.

I realize that just saying that breaks no new ground. in fact, it’s the main topic of conversation around here — but some days he just out-stupids himself.

look what he posted to his crappy app.

MAGA CANDIDATES WON EVERYTHING LAST NIGHT IN ARIZONA, A COMPLETE SWEEP!!! I WON ARIZONA 18 MONTHS AGO. THE DUMOCRATS ARE DUMBFOUNDED. AFTER DECADES, ARIZONA IS BECOMING A REPUBLICAN STATE. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL! President DONALD J. TRUMP

isn’t it stunning that the president of the United States has no idea how primaries work?

do you think maybe Donny’s diaper nurse could take him aside and explain to him that the reason Republicans won in Arizona was because only Republicans run in Republican primaries?

maybe she could also explain to him how batteries work.

“… did with the Green New Scam, where— we were scammed. the whole country was— I wasn’t scammed, I got it right from the beginning. I got it from— the first minute when I heard this crap. you know? they were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful. except you couldn’t— watch your television. they wanted to watch the debate. Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden, nobody could watch it because the wind wasn’t blowing. remember that? ‘darling, we’d like to watch the debate tonight. I’m sorry, the wind isn’t blowing.’”

what in the actual small-batch artisanal fuck is Dear Leader gibbering about? how are the nice men with the butterfly nets not interrupting Donny in the middle of his reverie to carry him off to a padded cell? the man’s brain has gone fuckity-bye.

if Joe Biden had ever told a story about ‘they couldn’t watch TV because wind,’ the press would have had a field day. five new books would have come flying out of Jake Tapper’s ass, on the spot.

and yet, when Dear Leader does it, crickets.

let’s do a quick fact check: did this happen? was ‘nobody’ able to watch the Donny-Biden debate because ‘the wind wasn’t blowing’ — or is it a thing that never happened the most?

this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

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