What a fucking day

[TheFerret]

Oh wow.

Shit be cray, people. Shit be cray.

Today's news was like if a Tom Clancy novel fucked the notebook where Hunter S. Thompson kept the ideas he thought were "too weird" on top of a big stack of Frank Miller comics. Not the good ones, the recent, shitty, super-racist ones.

We started with news of Devin "Pigfucker" Nunes recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Word is, he was forced out by Paul Ryan and the Shart House, not for being a stooge, but for being an exceptionally shitty stooge. Like so many of the shitbags caught up in this mess, he got caught in a number of easily disproven lies, apparently used by a handful of morons in the executive branch to "leak" information...back to the executive branch. Don't look at me brother, figuring out why these people do the things we do is like hosting trivia night in Arkham Asylum.

Anyhow, Nunes released a feeble little statement blaming "left wing activists" or somesuch nonsense, which fell apart about thirteen seconds later when it was revealed he was under investigation by the ethics office (the same one the House GOP tried to drown quietly in the outhouse out back while nobody was looking, remember that?) for revealing classified information, for the TOTAL BULLSHIT REASON that...he appears to have revealed classified information. Devin Nunes was not built for high-stakes politics, friends. He was built solely for the fucking of pigs.

And we celebrated Nunes' downfall for a hot ten minutes before we realized he was just going to be replaced with stooges who wouldn't be so obvious/stupid about being stooges, i.e. are less likely to call dumbfuck press conferences where they entrap themselves for no discernible reason beyond incurable idiocy. The new chair of the investigating committee is some doorknob who said some shit about how watching a Mexican Soap Opera is basically the same thing as collaborating with a hostile foreign power to influence the American Presidential election, I don't remember his name, look it up your own damn self. (He will be assisted in his abuse of power by Trey Gowdy Doody, he of the Hundred Years War, excuse me, the Benghazi investigation. I would love to rewarded similarly for a history of failure. In that scenario, my 0-for-the-entire-fucking-season in little league would land me a multi-million dollar contract with the Yankees.)

Meanwhile the Senate went Nuclear, which, calm down, doesn't mean what you were hoping it did. There was much hemming and hawing about the ugliness of partisan politics by men and women who spent the day facilitating the ugliness of partisan politics. In the left-wing media, there was a masochistic joy in trudging up past quotes from Deathlord of All Tortises Mitch McConnell as proof of his hypocrisy. As if hypocrisy bothers Mitch McConnell one bit.

Let me tell y'all something very important about Mitch McConnell: he doesn't give a shit about anything but winning. He will gleefully tell you on Monday that eating sandwiches is sinful, and then when you catch him eating a big fat fucking reuben on Tuesday, he will laugh in your face as you triumphantly point out his hypocrisy. Laugh in your face, kick you in the junk, steal your wallet, use your money to take your mom out to dinner* and fuck her in your childhood bed, and it won't bother him one tiny little bit because his job isn't "being consistent," his job is "winning" and he won this one and yeah, fuck him, but it sucks and now we just have to send his terrapin ass back to the minority for the rest of his life so he can flail helplessly on his back while we replace Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy with Rachel Maddow maybe Sarah Silverman.

*Where he orders another sandwich because fuck you that's why.

In the background there's another wave of stories about Shart House infighting. People are screaming "CUCK" at each other, Bannon's down, demoted from the National Security Council, and Kushner's up, apparently single-handedly responsible for 87% of the executive branch's duties. Why does a kid whose resume reads "got daddy's money when daddy went to jail, bought a newspaper and wrecked it" get so much responsibility? Well, because our idiot president has mad respect for the dude who gets to do the one thing he's ever wanted that he can't do, (NUDGE NUDGE FUCK HIS DAUGHTER) and therefore he's in charge of China and peace in the Middle East and reforming the government and Veterans affairs and The Vending Machines in the West Wing Don't Have Zagnuts Can We Get Some Fucking Zagnuts in There Jared and god knows what else.

And we maybe breathe a sigh of relief that Bannon's role in the administration is diminishing because this is a man who boos the ending of Schindler's List, but then you realize that the GODDAMN PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED GODDAMN STATES is only swinging from white supremacy to nepotism, and you wonder why he doesn't think, "Hey, maybe try somebody with some relevant experience?" And you know that once Kushner makes a mess of everything, Il Douche is just gonna turn to Gordon Ramsey or that One Girl Who Yells at Baristas in Chicago to run the government for him.

And at this point in the day, you're getting a bit overwhelmed, so maybe you don't notice that the Yokel, I mean "Attorney" General, our President's Loyal Huntin' Dawg Beauregard, has decided to take himself a long leisurely look at all them police abuse settlements arrived at under those colored folks who previously held his office. To Ol' Beauregard, decades of rampant police abuse? Why, that ain't nuthin' atawl, an' if an unarmed black fellah gets shot every couple weeks or so in Baltimore, well, that's jus' the price of law and orduh, don' ya see, and honestly, what's one more or less black fellah, am I right?

By now, the madness has started to settle in. You're seriously thinking rubbing cake frosting all over your otherwise naked body and running around downtown throwing poop and screaming. Maybe you catch a few human interest stories. About Rachel Dolezal going to South Africa to talk about "racial transitioning." About a shocking number of iPhone users desiring a sexual relationship with Siri. About somebody making beer that tastes like Cap'n Crunch. (All of this really happened, I swear to you.)

And in the background you start to see more and more stories about Dorito Mussolini thinking about maybe starting a War of His Very Own in Syria.

And we learn that the Shart Administration is trying to force twitter to reveal (ahem, UNMASK HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH OH GOD THE IRONY) of an anonymous user who has been criticizing them, which is a not-at-all-terrifying police state move, oh wait. And we find our the CIA was sounding alarm bells on the Russian interference/possible collaboration LAST SUMMER but somehow James Comey only thought the American people needed to know that Anthony Weiner's personal laptop may've contained the name, location, favorite color and Most Embarrassing High School Moment of every undercover agent in the world. And we even had a quick laugh at Spraytan Zartan bragging about having had the best first thirteen weeks in human history...eleven weeks into his term.

And then things were quiet for a couple hours.

And then the missiles started flying.

Without seeking authorization from congress, without consulting allies, without a strong/competent state department to give advice, without civilian leadership in the defense department, without a single voice in the executive branch any rational human being would consider qualified to weigh in on a decision so large, a military strike on a foreign government backed by Iran and Russia was ordered and executed.

And nobody seems to know what, precisely, is going on, what the long-term plan might be (SPOILERZ, there totally isn't one.). McCain and Graham are jubilant of course, nothing delights that duo quite so much as other people's children dying. Some folks are talking about regime change, but it doesn't seem like anybody thought making those kind of decisions was important before pushing the button.

There's a lot we don't know right now. If there were significant civilian casualties (a distressingly irrelevant factor to the military under the Shart Administration), if more strikes are coming, if there were Russian nationals on the base we hit. What happens next. And yes, in the background you wonder how much of the decision was made to distract the American populace from domestic scandals...nearly every president of my lifetime has played that card.

I confess I'm worried. Our President, as we've learned, doesn't know Shit about Shit, doesn't know what he doesn't know, doesn't care that he doesn't know, and, importantly, is infinitely persuadable. He blindly followed Bannon into the travel ban debacle, and Ryan into the health care clusterfuck. Why? Because he doesn't know Shit about Shit, and anybody who kisses his ass and tells him what a Big Boy With Big Strong Hands he is can, we have seen time and again, manipulate him into doing whatever they want him to do.

And when it comes to war? Wow. Bannon's an apocalyptic lunatic. Tillerson is hopelessly out of his depth. Mattis seems well-intentioned enough, but don't forget that there is a reason why we don't put generals in charge of the defense department, and Mattis needed a waiver to be confirmed in the first place. Priebus is sniveling toady with no stature on this turf. Kushner also doesn't know shit about shit, and early indications are that the brass is manipulating him, and like his father-in-law I don't credit him with the brains to understand he's being manipulated. The institutional GOP defers to McCain and Graham on matters of war, and again those two sprinkle the blood of young men on their breakfast cereal whenever the opportunity presents itself. And Pence of course is a hairshirt-wearing religious fanatic who'll play the role of Crusader with a crazed grin on his face.

Basically we have a bunch of malicious fools making these decisions. I wish I could find a way to laugh at all this, but I can't. Heaven help us all.