Monthly Archives: June 2025

06/28/2025
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The F-bomb

522 Words: We’re Stuck With Him

The only thing that could ever beat Li’l Duce in this day and age of social media driven by monetized rage clicks was a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans.

That is, one of every 330 people living in this holy land had to be snuffed out for a plurality of voters (individual and Electoral) to want to throw him out of office. Mind you, they didn’t blame him for the disease. Probably, those swing voters who opted for Old Joe were teed off at the Mad King for not outlawing the use of masks and not forcing schools, workplaces, ballparks, and every other goddamned thing that was shuttered during the pandemic to stay open.

To paraphrase Monty Python, Nobody expects the global coronavirus!

The dude actually garnered some three million more voters in 2024, than he had in 2020, despite the wits, wags, and pundits chirping that America was fed up with his act.

They weren’t.

They never will be.

45/47 will remain the champion Outsider — capital O — until the day he keels over. That’s what he’s portrayed himself as since the day in June 2015 he descended the escalator at NYC’s Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president. His base 35 percent — plus whatever percentage of folks who swing, baby — continue to see him as that Outsider, the rebel, the one who’ll drain the swamp, the ultimate disrupter, even as he amasses more power and distances himself from all the Constitutional checks and balances the Framers wrote into that wildly imperfect document back on March 4, 1789.

He’s one of a kind. He could declare himself king tomorrow and still be seen as the guy sticking his middle finger up at the Establishment.

I realized Li’l Duce is unbeatable earlier this week when he was questioned on the White House lawn by a reporter who wanted to know what was what regarding that genocidal dustup on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. “They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, do you understand that?” he blurted and stomped off.

There it was. He’s the first, and so far only, US President ever to drop the F-bomb in response to a reporter’s question, willingly, intentionally, brazenly.

I’d bet a certain percentage of the American electorate got tumescent when they heard him say the word.

It was the ultimate outsider utterance.

President’s don’t use that kind of language, the pearl-clutchers gasped. Yep. No other president would. This one did.

He’s different!

He says what’s on his mind!

He’s just like us!

Those were the conclusions much of America came to almost before the word had completely exited his mouth.

That’s all Li’l Duce‘s base and those swing voters who went for him in November care about — that he’ll do and/or say anything,  everything, that his predecessors or current and future rivals would never. It’s the essence of his cult of personality.

He knew exactly what he was doing when he eff-ed. It was no slip of the tongue.

The only thing that’ll ever beat him is death.

And woe to the poor Republicans who try to step into his shoes after he’s gone. They ain’t him.

 

 

06/16/2025
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2028 Presidential Election

382 Words: A Simple Truth

I just came across this neat little quote from George Carlin:

Oh, if only Democratic Party leadership could see this and really take it to heart!

Because, truth be told, not enough people care about the rights of others, anybody’s pronouns, how other countries look at us, or any of the other hammers the Dems have been hitting us over the head with for years and years. People, my party seems to have forgotten, care about only a few things: making a living, being able to pay the mortgage or rent, not going broke at the grocery store, and being able to save up enough money to leave the kids a nice pile.

That’s it. And that ain’t wrong. Somehow, the titans of the Democratic Party past — FDR, Truman, LBJ, and even Bill Clinton — got it. Today’s Democrats, with the possible exceptions of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (and, technically, he’s not really a Dem although he caucuses with them) do not.

I, of course, am four-square in favor of everybody’s rights, everybody living life as whatever gender they choose, maintaining this country’s reputation as a place much of the world aspires to be like, and all those other liberal, Left, progressive talking points. But campaigning on those issues doesn’t win elections.

The reason Li’l Duce won the 2016 (on a technicality) and 2024 elections was he told the American people a very simple truth. (Which is ironic because truth-telling never has been his forte.) Here’s that very simple truth:

Don’t worry about the fact that the Mad King is doing nothing to fix the situation. That’s not the point. In fact, he’s doing all he can to make the situation worse for us. The point is, he’s been one of the vanishingly few people to say it out loud. And all people want is for their president to say what they already know to be true.

Whoever runs for president in 2028 — be it Pete Buttigieg, John Fetterman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Josh Shapiro, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Cory Booker. or some as-yet-unkown who comes out of the woodwork — had better tell the American people just this: That the deck has been stacked against you and we’re gonna do all we can to make it fair. We, the Dems should be saying, are on your side.

As I say, it’s a simple truth.

06/10/2025
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Resistance

811 Words: Our Losing Streak

Ever since springtime 60 years ago my people — the folks on my side of the fence, my tribe, the Left, progressives, whatever descriptor you’d care to use — have been losing the battle for America’s hearts and minds.

We’ve been so wrong in strategy, tactics, optics, and messaging that the more conspiracy-minded among us might be tempted to think we’ve been infiltrated by agents provocateurs all these years. Do Nixon’s ratfuckers and their heirs walk among us?

BTW, the spring I refer to, above, followed immediately after the events of March 7, 1965. the day voting rights marchers attempted to walk from Selma, Alabama to the state capital in Montgomery. Alabama, at the time, posed any number of roadblocks, “legal” and illegal, to block Blacks attempting to register to vote. Peaceful demonstrators on the way to their destination were viciously beaten by state troopers and local ad-hoc deputies after crossing the Edmond Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. Now known as Bloody Sunday, that day more than 500 marchers were attacked and gassed by the white men, some mounted on horseback, with march leader and future US Congressperson John Lewis clubbed to the ground, his skull fractured. Some 67 marchers were injured with 17 requiring hospitalization.

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Bloody Sunday

The whole rotten mess was captured on film and broadcast by the major national networks that evening. So many Americans were repulsed by the televised spectacle that civil rights legislation efforts were kicked into higher gear.

That, I propose, was the last time America was moved positively by my people.

Here we are a half century plus ten years removed, still in the midst of the mother of all losing streaks, still screwing up the picture we’d like the rest of the country to see. Which brings me to Los Angeles, where the President of the Untied States has sent the Marines in to suppress the protests against ICE snatching people off the street and disappearing them.

And, yeah, the Li’l Duce regime — or, as Susan Sandberg has dubbed him, The Mad King — is clearly attempting to turn this holy land into his personal, private kingdom. He has become the single most dangerous thing to happen to the United States since Japanese-Americans were forced into concentration camps during World War II. Or since public officials and private business leaders unleashed deadly violence against labor union organizers. Or 13 states seceded and formed the Confederate States of America. Or the US gov’t waged genocidal war against the Indians. Or the Founders decided to allow white men to “own” dark-skinned human beings. Pick whichever atrocity you prefer.

But a significant percentage of the American populace continues to feel that Li’l Duce is the best thing to happen to us since the development of the internal combustion engine. A lot of that can be ascribed to echo chamber news sources, misinformation, Big Lies, AI-doctored images, fear-mongering, grievance-wallowing, and, of course, flat-out idiocy. But another lot of it has to do with my side’s awkward, clumsy, ill-conceived, shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot presentation.

While Trump has famously humped the American flag time and again, protesters in the streets of LA are waving Mexican flags. That ain’t gonna win us any more converts, I assure you.

Here’s Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark:

There is a strain of thinking which maintains that all of these protests are beyond reproach. I’ve seen people say, for instance, that it’s perfectly fine for protesters to be waving Mexican flags. That this is their God-given right, etc.

A lot of the uncritical support of the protests is based on moral judgments about what should be true.

It should be fine for people to wave Mexican flags. But I don’t think should is a very useful frame right now. I’m much more interested in will.

Will the rest of America—rightly or wrongly—become more sympathetic to the people opposing Trump after seeing Mexican flags?

We can expand the frame of will for the entire scene—the people in the streets, the torching of cars, the throwing of bricks. Protests are a tool for leveraging public opinion. It does not really matter what the public shouldthink. It matters what it will think.

Jonathan V. Last then quotes Peter Coyote:

A protest is an invitation to a better world. It’s a ceremony. No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at. More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is. The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, the Congress, etc. The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them.

Last then concludes that what the LA protests, and the anti-Trump movement in general, need are leaders and discipline. And now he’s about to get his mouth washed out with soap for uttering two of the foulest expletives in the Left-ese language

06/04/2025
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Toxic Masculinity

981 Words: Bad Boys

Spent some time with an old chum last night. We got around to talking about politics, of course.

Like me, my chum’s a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. He’s got a couple of college-age sons in fraternities. He shook his head, sadly. “You wouldn’t believe how Trumpian their frat brothers are,” he said.

“It must be miserable for them,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” he said. He looked down, ashamed. “I can’t even talk with my own two sons anymore.”

“You mean…?”

“Yes,” he said. “I mean my boys are all in for Trump.”

He was crestfallen. I was crestfallen. I like to keep my own spirits up by crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that the American electorate will awaken from its Trump slumber and vote as many of his bastards out as possible in next year’s mid-term elections. The young, who unwisely largely sat out the 2024 election, will see the error of their ways and flock to the polls and we’ll get back to some semblance of sanity.

My chum’s sons, I’d wanted to believe, would be among the cavalry that’d save us from Li’l Duce‘s savage raids on democracy. Apparently, they won’t be.

Funny this exchange should have taken place last night. The day before I got my regular installment from Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin blog. The Dems, Silver writes, have a problem with young males. That demographic went for Li’l Duce in a big way last November, as did males of every age. The Democratic Party, too often oblivious to its own shortcomings, (“We’re on the side of the angels, our philosophy is pure; why should we muck around with strategies and messaging?”) surprisingly has begun to come around on this front. The party is spending some $20M on something called the SAM Project (for Speaking with American Men). The fact that the party even needs to create such an outreach illustrates exactly how far the Dems have had their heads up their asses for far too long. Because, prior to this, thanks to their pristine, unassailable philosophical purity, they’ve perceived no need to reach out to one fucking entire half of the American electorate!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Democratic Party needs a 1st grade math teacher to advise it. Then they may get it into their thick heads that the winning party in any election needs more votes than the other party. Simple math, right?

Anyway, re: those young males, Elena Schneider writes in Politico: “Democrats aren’t taking this disaffected and politically alienated voting bloc seriously enough.” Duh.

Silver, for his part, quotes a commenter who wrote:

Lately I’ve been feeling like a lot of the country’s rejection of the Democratic Party can be traced back to their Village-ness, seeming “fake,” the groupthink they foster in cultural institutions and the media, wokeness (and the forces that created it), generally being insufferable.

Insufferable. Imagine that! An opposition party, tilting against a neo-fascist, authoritarian, death-cult, CEO-King tidal wave that’s totally anathema to our Enlightenment democratic principles, is being given the finger because it’s insufferable. Think, for instance, of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and John Lewis being ignored because they were insufferable pains in the ass. Well, yeah, they were to the troglodytic segregationists of their time, but that was their whole point. They weren’t, though, insufferable to normal folks who didn’t genuflect before the likes of George Wallace or Orval Faubus or Bull Connor.

It can be assumed that my chum’s sons’ frat brethren don’t genuflect before Mussolini, Francisco Franco, or Vladimir Putin. They don’t really want a tyrannical, right-wing dictatorship. But they just can’t abide by the finger-wagging, carping, censorious, accusatory prigs that the Democrats have become. So, aw hell, let’s just vote for the guy who doesn’t hate us for our junk and hope he doesn’t suspend the next presidential election.

Too many young American males see the Dems as buzz-killing, hair-in-a-tight-bun, obsessively prim and proper elderly aunts. Too many young American males have been bombarded with messages that they are bad guys simply because they’re…, well, guys. They’ve been hearing for years all about toxic masculinity and the key word of that slam, to them, is the latter of the two. They hear masculinity as being the evil. They hear too many voices implying that rape, workplace sexism, child molestation, and all the other misogynistic sins are endemic to all males. To them. They hear that they’re not just guys, that they’re sexual predators, that they lure kids into vans, that they all denied some 1990s Hollywood actress that plum movie role because she wouldn’t fuck them. The logical corollary of Me-Too is You-Too.

The Democratic Party, young American males feel, is too mom. And young American males today have spent their entire lives — and I mean every freakin’ minute of every freakin’ day — in the company of Mom. From playdates when they were toddlers; to Mom driving them to school, to play soccer, to every goddamned thing young boys want or have to do; to the smartphones that keep them shackled to Mom in perpetuity; and more, much, much more, today’s young American males haven’t had the slightest chance to err, to makes stupid decisions and realize there’s a price to pay for them, to work out problems among themselves without parental input, to learn how to climb a tree, to dare, to discover.

And now that they’re grown up, here’s the Democratic Party telling them they’re bad boys, go to your room, no supper for you every time they use the wrong pronoun, every time they sit with their knees spread too wide on the bus, or every time they laugh at the wrong joke.

You ain’t my Mom, they say, so screw you.

The Democratic Party’d better figure out how to get young American males back into the fold. And quickly.