I haven’t ranted nearly as much as I could, given the opportunities that abound in our nation today.  Part of it is that the opportunities are such a fire hose.  I feel like I’m in one of those money grab booths: I’m being bombarded by all the outrages of the Current Embarrassment and I just can’t seem to grab just one.

Somehow, though, I was completely struck dumb by one of the outrages that flew past yesterday — YESTERDAY, KENNETH! — so you know it had to be spectacular.

For some reason, in the midst of the Mueller indictments/arrests/pleas, John Kelly, chief of staff and supposed “adult in the room,” chose to go on Laura Ingraham’s show and defend the Confederacy.  The topic was Confederate monuments — for some reason — and Kelly said, and I quote, “… the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”

Wait, what?

My reaction, and that of the entire internet, can be summed up thusly:

WHAT THE HELL, JOHN KELLY? A lack of compromise caused the Civil War?? A lack of compromise on what, exactly?

I can’t even. Once again I am rendered dumb by the brazenness of this administration.  I will let Ta-Nehisi Coates do the honors.

UPDATE: White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on the kerfuffle, i.e., Robert E. Lee being a dedicated slave-owner and similar niggling details: “All of our leaders have flaws, that doesn’t diminish their contributions to society.”

Wait, what?  She went on to list some of those men: “Washington, Jefferson, JFK, Roosevelt, Kennedy” — niftily giving John F. Kennedy two personæ in the process.

Okay.  Let’s see if we can suss out the problem with Sanders’ statement.  Here’s a quiz:

Sarah, sweetie, I know you’re from Arkansas, but ROBERT E. LEE WAS NOT ONE OF “OUR” LEADERS. This is a very, very hard concept for us Southerners to understand, but IT IS TRUE, KENNETH.

Here’s the answer key to the quiz.  Don’t peek.  I SAID, DON’T PEEK, KENNETH!

 

My internet server has a spam filter on it and catches about 100 spam emails a day.  It’s very good—I’m actually quite surprised when I get a spam message in my inbox these days.

However, it will also occasionally snag emails from people or companies that I want to hear from, and so when I get the email saying that it has messages for me to review, I click and go look.  Mostly I just scan the subject lines; it takes less than a minute to do, and then I click Reject All As Spam and I’m done.

Every now and then, though, my curiosity gets the better of me: what are all these emails that warn me of Hillary Clinton’s devastating plans to oust our current embarrassment and take over the White House?  Since I can check the contents of the email without actually leaving the spam filter, I opened one up the other day and found this:

This was followed by blocks of text that were literally jumbled together by a bot from online sources.

I did not explore past this content; in my experience, these things are setups for sites trying to sell you miracle cures or prepper supplies.

As always, my fascination is with the target audience, the 27% who are going to be clueless rage-bunnies no matter what.  I found it fascinating that in our new reality it’s taken as a statement of fact even by the rage-bunnies that Russia intervened directly in our election—but the rage-bunnies direct their anger at the woman who lost the election eight months ago.

And I love the links to “unsubscribe.”  This is where the cluelessness of the rage-bunnies is delicious: how many of them click on those links and give the spammers their information?

Bless they hearts.

This popped up on Facebook today:

This is the “evidence” used by racists whenever they’re doing the uh-UH you’re the racist thing: since the Democratic party took this position over a 100 years ago, they’re the real racists.

There’s plenty of this type of thing in archives about our great nation:

Like with today’s racists, it seems to have been a talking point passed freely around:

But back to my point about today’s racists’ uh-UH stratagem.  I have found that there’s no point in arguing any kind of historical perspective, because those folks don’t do historical perspective.  (Cf., “Why was there a Civil War?” With a conservative and a liberal take from writers who do have historical perspective.)

So when confronted with this fuppery:

… I shall now reply, “That’s absolutely true.  Those voters were racist cretins.  Here’s the deal, though: those voters haven’t changed. They’re still racist cretins.  Their party allegiance has certainly switched, though.”

We all live in bubbles—it’s more comfy in here, isn’t it?

But some choose to live in some pretty dark bubbles.   On a whim just now, wondering what the conservative side of the world thought about Sean Spicer’s disastrous press conference where he idiotically compared Assad to Hitler (who didn’t even use chemical weapons, you guys), I went to the Fox News website and typed in Sean Spicer Holocaust.

This is what I got:

Zero results.

Here’s what Google gave me:

Not a fair comparison, you say?  Google is an aggregate search?  Fine. Here’s CNN:

No, it’s not because CNN is “liberal.”  CNN is a news outlet, and Sean Spicer’s astounding gaffe was news.

Fox “News” chose deliberately not to tell its audience that this thing happened.  Fox viewers have no idea that the Republican Administration’s press secretary said that

“I think a couple things. You look — we didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II. You had a — someone who is despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

and that it went downhill from there.  (For a truly hysterical, laugh-so-that-you-might-not-cry summary of the debacle, see as always Wonkette’s take.)

A study done several years ago showed that people who watched only Fox News were less knowledgeable about current events than those who watched no news at all.  Even taking into account that correlation is not causation — people that blindered would seek a narrow worldview anyway — it’s still a reason why your rightwing relative thinks you’re an insane libtard.  Whenever you shower them with facts, their innate fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in: you’re a snotty, pointy-headed intellectual without any common sense.

It’s a pretty thick, dark bubble to be in.

Here’s the link to the article imaged below.

Emphasis mine.

This is Gingrich’s modus operandi: he loads everything he says with nasty, vituperative words so that even if you are only paying attention halfway, you cannot avoid feeling revulsion at whatever the hell he’s ranting about.

He’s done this since the 90s, and he’s done it deliberately. If you wonder where Kellyanne Conway or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly came from, look no further.

Newt Gingrich is why we are where we are today.

One of the drawbacks of swimming at the gym now is that the flatscreen TV in the locker room is tuned to Fox News, and I never thought I would see the day when I hoped that sports would be on the tube.

Today I heard yet another presser hosted by Melissa McCarthy Sean Spicer and watched in disbelief as one reporter, referring to the Current Occupant’s statement yesterday that terrorist massacres were being “under-reported” by the “very very dishonest press,” fumbled his question.  Spicer skittered away across the surface of the pond, untouched by any attempt to get some hard truth from him.

Sweet Jebus, White House Press Corps, do yourself a favor and head straight to the nearest elementary school. Sign in, and ask to be assigned to a kindergarten class.  Take notes.

BECAUSE KINDERGARTEN TEACHERS CAN GET BETTER ANSWERS OUT OF SEAN SPICER THAN YOU CAN.

Here’s the deal: Never never ever ask a kid a yes/no question about some misbehavior.

TEACHER: Did you hit Suzie?

SEAN: No, I was just blah blah blah.

No.  Watch and learn.

TEACHER: Tell me what happened here.  Sean, you go first.

SEAN: Well, Suzie called me a doopyface so I hit her.

And scene.

How does this work for you guys?

Instant replay:

REPORTER: Yesterday, when the President said that terror attacks were being under-reported, did he mean blah blah blah?

SPICER: —::deny:: — ::pivot:: — ::spin:: — [runs away laughing, possibly shouting “nanny-nanny-boo-boo”]

That’s not how you do it.  Watch and learn:

REPORTER: Yesterday, the President said about terrorist attacks, and I quote, “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”  What did he mean by that?

SPICER: Um… I thought Melissa McCarthy was funny, but she chewed too much gum.  No more questions.

So there go you.  Hie thee to an elementary school and pick up some skills.  I imagine you could even learn this in Betsy Fupping Devos’ new string of for-profit Talibaptist madrassas.  Well, if any of the people being paid minimum wage to ride herd on students there are in fact teachers.

A friend rather foolishly clicked on a link in a spam email yesterday.

Fortunately,^[1] it just leads to a webpage that first asks you to make sure you have your sound on, and then proceeds to auto-play a slideshow that is nothing but text, which the narrator then reads out loud to us.  Oy.  It also says that it’s only six minutes long, but as I type this it’s been way over fifteen and it’s still going.

I will now pause to let you guess what the presentation is actually about.

The presentation is about _____
A) a quasi-military organization plotting a coup, thereby enabling Clinton’s accession to the presidency
B) a super-secret cabal which will engineer the president-elect’s impeachment before the inauguration, thereby enabling Clinton’s accession to the presidency
C) an ad for a “free” book on secret cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, etc.

If you guessed C, congratulations.

Yes, it’s true, boys and girls.^[2] Hillary Clinton conspired twenty-three years ago to kill off 31,000 patriots a year with the pharmaceutical cartel.  Their plot was to put her in the White House, where she would allow them “access to the power and money” of the U.S. government something something drugs.

How exactly this is different from our current healthcare situation is unclear, but IT’S SCARY, KENNETH!  Hillary Clinton!  Cartel!  There is so much ooga-booga in the first five minutes of this thing that I cannot remember it all—and I’m not going back to listen to it again.  It hits all the notes: Clinton, conspiracy, patriotism, threat of death, etc.  There is no documentation or proof, just blunt assertions about “knowing” stuff that NO ONE ELSE KNOWS, KENNETH!

[The presentation is still running in another browser window.  Six minutes my ass.]

The speaker finally reveals his affiliation: HSI, Health Science Institute.  A more wretched hive of scum and villainy, etc., etc.

Why do I say that?  The target audience for this pitch is those of us over 55, who combine the traits the HSI values: intractable health issues, not-very-solid reasoning capacities, distrust of institutional healthcare, and increasing fear of death.  (And a whole bunch of us have an irrational fear/hatred of Hillary Clinton, so that’s a bonus.)  The pitch is deliberately crafted to engage the amygdala and its irrational fears—and create a sense of panic and urgency so that the poor senior citizen clicks on that link to receive the “free” booklet.

I’m guessing that in order to receive your free book, you have to give the HSI not only your mailing address, but also your email address and probably your phone number.  You will then receive pitch after pitch for their products WHICH WILL CURE YOUR CANCER THE NATURAL WAY WITHOUT SIDE EFFECTS, KENNETH!  These people are evil.

The only way to make sure is to click on that link.  Which I’m not going to do.^[3]

—————

^[1] For differing values of “fortunate.”

^[2] It’s not true.

^[3] I have written this entire blog post and the presentation is still running and still has not given me the information to receive my free book.  We’re now into the second free gift.

I have been reading Mirrors, by Eduardo Galeano.  I have come to believe that there is a thread of evil running through human history that will not die but must be fought against without stint or let.

In the middle of a series of disquisitions about slavery and its never-ending end in the 18th and 19th centuries, I came across this:

When Iqbal Maiz was four, his parents sold him for fifteen dollars.

He was bought by a rug maker.  He worked chained to the loom fourteen hours a day. At the age of ten, Iqbal was a hunchback with the lungs of an old man.

Then he escaped and became the spokesman for Pakistan’s child slaves.

In 1995, when he was twelve years old, a fatal bullet knocked him from his bicycle.
[pp. 190-191]

In 1995.

Evil.

Evil is not having sex with someone to whom you are not married or is the same gender as you.  Evil is not realizing your brain is not the same gender as your body.  Evil is not praying to some other deity than you and your neighbors.

Evil is cruelty to anyone with less power than you.

Period.

Not in my name, not in my country.  Speak up.