A Rather Strong Opinion on Mr. Trump

I've blogged here numerous times about how I have the secret guilty pleasure of following  a blog called The Rude Pundit.

The author, Lee Papa,  is disgustingly rude and uses crude sexual analogies plus a mega dose of profanity to make his point...which generally I agree with.  So I can overlook what Papa calls "the rudeness."

So in all its profane glory, here's an excerpt from a recent post on The Donald:

Because, you see, the one thing Trump has going for him, more than any other candidate running for the Republican nomination, is that the voters are fucking retards who get most of their information from TV news and Trump is more famous than any other candidate. Put it this way: there are people who paid good money to learn business success from Trump at one of his bullshit seminars, totally ignoring that Trump has declared bankruptcy multiple times. You think anyone gives a happy monkey fuck if Trump is "qualified" to be president? Fuck no. He hosted a TV show. His name is everywhere. He says things that make everyone else angry. He's a blatant racist who claims to love Hispanic people. He's a vulgar monster with voracious sexual appetites who preaches morality in marriage. 

And many, many voters simply will overlook that because he's the most goddamned entertaining clown in the circus, the only candidate they know, and his pop culture status has given him the aura of earthy wisdom instead of nonsensical shit-tossing. He's like most of the other candidates rolled into one: a blithering, idiotic, climate change-denying loudmouth xenophobe who wants endless war, Christian "values" (whatever the fuck those are anymore), an economic and health care system that benefits the rich, and a big fuckin' fence with alligators or some such shit to keep out the Mexican rapists. He doesn't need to pander to the baser instincts of the primary voters. He is the living embodiment of the baser instincts of GOP primary voters. That's why he's wiping the floor with virtually every other candidate. 

Don't say I didn't warn you.  Now, go ahead and put The Rude Pundit on your regular reading list. You know you want to.

The Republican Senator Letter to Iran

I've not blogged recently about my secret love affair with the writings of The Rude Pundit. In case you do not read his blog, you should.  It's a guilty pleasure I indulge in, despite the fact that The Rude Pundit makes his points often through very crude sexual analogies and what my mother would have called very bad language.

But...The Rude Pundit is generally spot-on with his political analyses.  You really should read him regularly.

Which brings me to today's post, based upon The Rude Pundit's post earlier this week.  Seems that last week some 47 U.S. Senators all signed a letter to Iran, pretty much sticking a shiv into President Obama's efforts to deal with the Iranians over their nuclear program.  

Here's The Rude Pundit's missive on the subject:

So 47 Republican Senators from the, well, Senate of the United States bravely sent a letter to the leaders of Iran, explaining to them how our government works with respect to treaties and other foreign policy decisions. The letter is related to ongoing talks between the Obama administration and the Iranians over its nuclear program, and, no surprise here, it contains basic misinformation about the process of ratifying a treaty. 

It's pretty goddamned insulting, too. Eleven members of the Iranian government's cabinet were educated in the United States. You can be pretty sure they know more than most of the constituents of the senators about how you negotiate an agreement with the U.S. And the senators got to see the back of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Zarif's pimp hand in response: "I should bring one important point to the attention of the authors and that is, the world is not the United States, and the conduct of inter-state relations is governed by international law, and not by US domestic law. The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfil the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations." When the Iranian government dismisses your political propaganda as propaganda, you've failed mighty fuckin' badly.

Let's put aside the overheated talk of treason. Let's not go down the rabbit hole of wondering what would have happened if a group of Democrats had done something like this to Bush. Instead, let's say that a group of Republican elected officials from the United States did the impossible: they made the repressive, fundamentalist government of Iran look like the reasonable ones. 

I should note that I continue to find our outrage and fear at any other country's nuclear program somewhat ironic...not that we want a world full of nuclear weapons, it's just that for us to play the good cop role on this topic, well, just seems, a tad ironic.  But that's just me.

Last Post on Gun Culture and Stand Your Ground

No, not because the problem is resolved.

It's because the problem isn't resolved, and won't be, and writing about it just makes my head hurt.  If the nation didn't take any meaningful action after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, if the bottom line essentially was "Tough break about those kids, but we have this much more important gun fetish to consider," then it's game over for reason and sanity.

So to preserve my sanity I'm gonna stop writing about guns etc. after this post...but not before turning to the Rude Pundit for his unique way with words.  As I have mentioned before, the Rude Pundit uses crude over-the-top language and hyperbole to make his points in a unique way.  And I almost always find myself in total agreement.

Link is here; you'll need to scroll down to his post of 20 Feb 2014, entitled "Jordan Davis Killer Michael Dunn Was Just Another White Coward with a Gun":

Take the gun out of the hands of Michael Dunn, and he backs the fuck up and drives away. See, if you have time to reach in your glove compartment and get your semi-automatic pistol out, you have time to shift into "reverse." If the semi-automatic pistol ain't there, all you got is a car that moves in various directions. Without his gun, George Zimmerman sits in his fuckin' car and waits for the cops. Without his gun, Curtis Reeves goes back to his fucking seat and watches a shitty movie. Because these men, and so many others, are pussies who would never push things to a confrontation without having the gun readily available.

You should be able to defend yourself when you're being attacked. But you should also have the balls to fucking suck it up and walk away or call a cop. Instead, we have states that are filthy with racists who have been told they don't have to back down for anyone, least of all that scary-looking nigger. Well, that racist is gonna think, what the fuck is the gun for anyway?

Think about it.

More Drone Stuff and Targeted Killings

Compliments to The Rude Pundit (on 30 May) , whose profane prose is always right on the money:

Right now, Obama has placed himself and his judgment as the ultimate arbiter of who can and will have the fuck target-bombed out of them, with collateral damage being hidden or written off as guilt-by-association and thus counted as more terrorists killed. The whole program is based on a belief that Obama is doing good, with a list that has included and more than likely still includes American citizens, who, the White House has declared, got their "due process" when people talked about whether or not to kill them.

Forget for a moment the idea that we're just outright murdering people in foreign countries. Forget for a moment that if, say, China decided to send a drone to take out Chen Guangcheng in New York City, we'd be hypocritical pricks for having a problem with that (not that it would stop us). Forget that. The reason to be angry, very angry about the drone program is right there. A unilateral, unchecked power over the life and death of individual, everyday people now rests with the President. And we're supposed to be fine with it because it's Obama, and, boy, trust him because he's so fucking smart. But even if you do, would you trust President Romney to rain robot doom in a rational way? Or President Christie? Or President Jeb Bush? Or some unknown who isn't as smart and good and wise and Nobel Peace Prize-winning as the current kill list decider?

How can a Constitutional scholar think it's OK to take short-cuts on due process in life-or-death matters, just because it's the War on Terror or whatever we call it now?

 

Hey, Times are Tough

Courtesy of The Rude Pundit, whom I read and love like a secret daily vice.  You should too.

He is no fan of jerks, of whatever political persuasion, though he saves his best ammo for conservative idiocy.  The Rude Pundit usually always nails it, and his column of 21 June was no exception, where he discusses North Carolina's forced sterilization program that ran from 1929...through 1974.

1974.  Thinks about that. 

He points out that many of the victims still are around today, and the NC state legislature considered financial reparations (excuse the language, if you are easily offended...The Rude Pundit uses profanity and crude sexual analogies to make his points):

Your Daily Example of Republican Fuckery:  So used to be that North Carolina, like many states, had a eugenics program. That is, under a misguided belief that you could breed out the bad, the damaged, the feeble, people were sterilized, sometimes for things like being a rude kid at school (which means that Bart Simpson would have lost his nuts) or liking to fuck around. Thing is that most places stopped the practice when they understood, oh, shit, this is the kind of thing that Hitler believed.

Not North Carolina, though. Nope, "it actually ramped up its program after the war. Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina forcibly sterilized about 7,600 people whom the state deemed 'feeble-minded' or otherwise undesirable. Many were poor black women." Since it ain't something from the distant, distant past, some of the actual victims, not their families or descendants, but the sterilized people themselves are still alive. Keep that in mind: we're not talking reparations for slavery.

So, in an example of decency, after a few years of activism and negotiations, with a formal apology issued in 2002, the Democratic Governor and the Republican House Speaker had come up with compensation for the victims. $50,000 each, with $10 million budgeted for the purpose. It ain't perfect, but it's something.

Enter the Senate Republicans, who said to the victims, "Fuck your pain." Yep, they blocked the effort and the compensation fund failed to be included in the state budget.

The rest of the blog post contains all the good reasons flimsy excuses as to why the legislators could not be bothered.

 

Obama Care and Conservatives

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Plan B, a Liberal's Dilemma...and Ultrarunning

My fine Sunday hat is high in the air for my favorite guilty pleasure, blogger The Rude Pundit, whom all of you should be reading as a matter of daily routine, like brushing your teeth.

In his 8 Dec post, he's thumping President Obama, and rightfully so, starting with the decision to not make Plan B emergency contraception available to women under 17 without a prescription.  [see NOTE at the end of my post for more solid thinking on the subject, from Lindsay Beyerstein]

He nails the rationale: politics trumping science.  Somewhere in the White House, a staffer thunk these thoughts and they prevailed (bolding is mine):

If you think about it, of course HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA's decision to allow the Plan B emergency contraception to be sold over-the-counter with no age restrictions. Can you imagine the Republican ads in 2012? "President Obama thinks it's okay for 13-year old girls to abort their children without parental consent," they'd lie. "Mitt Romney is pretty sure that's wrong." There's an election in less than a year. And your precious science and "facts" and "rights" have no place here.

The Rude Pundit would bet that some White House insider would say that it was more important to take abortion off the table as an issue in the presidential election, even if Plan B is a contraceptive, not an abortifacient, and, really, the anti-choice yahoos need to make a decision here on whether life begins at conception or at ejaculation. He bets that that insider would tell women of all ages not to worry, that the decision would be changed in a second Obama term, that that's just the way the world works.

 

The Rude One goes on to opine that the Obama administration is now most analogous to the meanderings of the TV series "The X-Files" in having no apparent direction, premise or end game:

The Obama administration now seems like a television series that has lost its plot thread. The Rude Pundit remembers watching The X-Files back in the day, believing that the mysteries and mythology would have a resolution by the end of its run, that the creators of the show knew the arc and knew the conclusion. So you'd get a great episode involving aliens and conspiracies in the government one week. And then the next week you'd get David Duchovny being beaten up by a talking ape. But you stuck with it, thinking that it would all pay off, that your loyalty would be rewarded.

 
But in the end, that happy revelation and closure were not to be.  It was all indeed a random, ad hoc goat rope.

You finally realized that you were being suckered, that there would be no satisfaction at the end, that the only goal was to make more money for Fox TV by staying on the air....So it is with the presidency of Barack Obama. Any time you attempt to say that you're sick of the cynical way the White House takes the left for granted, you're given a list of things that Obama has accomplished, as if somehow you were denying that he did those things. Yeah, he did accomplish an overhaul of the health care system that has benefited Americans in ways large and small. Yeah, he did get Osama bin Laden and is, at least to an extent, winding down the Iraq war. Yeah, yeah, fine, fine. But this isn't a case of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately.

The Rude Pundit wants to believe that there's an ideology at work, a path, if you will, to what Obama wants to achieve as a president. And, no matter what you say about Republicans in Congress blocking his way, it seems that, often, even when it's purely executive branch matters, there is no ideology at work, either - just political calculations, as with the Plan B decision, or the continuing concentration of power in the executive, as with indefinite detention and drone assassinations.

When he ran the first time, Obama created a narrative about the nation and its possibilities. That narrative has been abandoned for the sake of expediency, out of fear of the right, with barely any nods towards it anymore. He might say that the exigencies of the contemporary political and economic and foreign policy landscapes have forced changes in the storyline, but that the goal is ultimately the same. We just need to keep believing him. And, c'mon, liberals, what choice do you have?

The link to Ultrarunning is that in our sport we have simplicity and consistency.  Sure, there sometimes is a whiff of the woo factor, of superstitions and luck, of habit or hunch trumping logic.  But in the end, we Ultrarunners are a practical lot.  We deal with fact and science, with what has been proven to work, either through our own "experiment of one" or through the collective hive mind that has run literally millions of trail miles and shared the results via blogs like mine, the Ultralist, or the print voice of the sport, UltraRunning Magazine.

I like to think that thinking Ultrarunners are as appalled as I am by the Plan B decision and by the political expediency of the current administration.

 

[NOTE promised in para 2 above.  C'mon: the stated reason to not make it over the counter to under 17s (and to keep it behind the counter for over-17s) is this, from blogger Lindsay Beyerstein:

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius concedes that Plan B has been shown to be safe and effective when used as directed. She claims she is overruling the FDA because the company that asked to sell it over the counter didn't produce evidence that girls under 17 "can understand the label and use the product appropriately."

By that logic all over the counter medication should be banned because people under 17 might buy it.

Plan B is not difficult to use. Plan B One-Step is a single dose in a single tablet.

It is effective for 72 hours after unprotected sex. If it is taken too late, it won't work. That's it.

Besides which, a kid who can't figure out how to take 1 pill in 3 days is really not ready to be a parent.

The FDA lets kids buy Tylenol over the counter, despite the fact that surprisingly small overdoses can kill. The instructions on cold medicine and allergy pills are more complicated than the instructions on Plan B. The FDA trusts young women to treat their own yeast infections with OTC fungicide, a process that requires much greater reading comprehension, dexterity, and tenacity than taking a single pill.

   

 

The Rude Pundit, the Debt Deal, and Ultrarunning

I've previously posted (here and here) about my love affair with The Rude Pundit, a secret vice, actually, where via using profanity and vulgarity and crude sexual imagery he makes political points that are right on the money.

His post for Monday about the debt limit deal was another great example.  At the bottom he gets more serious and asks the question about the linkage--or lack thereof--between the debt deal and the fact that our two three wars are kinda accepted as a budgetary given, some sacred off-limits nondiscretionary spending:

One thing the Rude Pundit can't get his mind around is that the wars continue. Aren't they the vestiges of a fallen empire, attempting to remain relevant in a world that wants to move on? That we prefer war to roads and health care and education here is unfathomably depressing.

Oh, and the connection to Ultrarunning?  Just this: even though I rail about how the U.S. is coming off the rails, we still have it good (at least if you are safely employed).  By that I mean that if I want to go trail running, I go.  It's safe, and there are no bands of armed partisans or rebels waiting to butcher me for trespassing on their turf.   That's not true everywhere on the planet.  for example, ultrarunning is a pure luxury in the Sudan or Somalia.

 

"An Apology to the Woman Without a Nose on the Cover of Time Magazine"

As always, I am in awe of the slice-and-dice wit of the Rude Pundit, a blogger who does not suffer fools gladly, and who uses foul language and crude sexual analogies to make valid points.  He is a dark pleasure, and I read his blog daily.  You should too.

Many of you have seen the photo on the cover of Time Magazine last week, featuring Aisha, an unfortunate Afghanwoman who was horribly disfugured by the Taliban.  The photo is here; I don't want to post it.  Let me turn to the Rude Pundit, from 2 August 2010:

An Apology to the Woman Without a Nose on the Cover of Time Magazine:

Aisha, the 18 year-old Afghan woman on the cover of last week's Time magazine who  deserves all our sympathy, as does every victim of the particularly horrific violence committed against women by the savage and backwards men of places like the Congo, Somalia, and Pakistan. But, to Aisha and the women of Afghanistan, we owe an apology.

....

We owe Aisha an apology because we have fucked up the Afghanistan war so badly for us and for the Afghans that the only meaningful thing we can do now is get out. And even if that means more violence against women and more repression, we have to do it. For we are now in Afghanistan in a vain attempt to transform a society that won't transform.

....

We screwed it up, Aisha. First George W. Bush did by making Afghanistan into the Junior Pep Squad version of the misbegotten Iraq conflict. Now Barack Obama is screwing it up by thinking he can unscrew it. He can't. And now, Aisha, we can't. We have to leave. It's just that simple. We have to leave because things are so fucked up here, because we can't afford it anymore. The wars were the luxury of an empire bloated with cash and hubris. Now we have hubris and no cash. And every day we stay is another day that life will not get better for the women of your country, and we're sorry we promised that it would. Yes, there are ways we can make it better, but not this one. For what we are attempting to do, despite every effort to win hearts and minds, is bomb a culture into change. That ain't gonna happen. It didn't work even back in the 1990s.

....

(Note: we're never leaving Afghanistan.)

 

The Rude Pundit and Obama's Oil Speech

Another non-ultra post: I must confess to the guilty pleasure of absolutely loving The Rude Pundit's blog.

He is extraordinarily profane and sacrilegious, so if you are easily offended, don’t read on, and don't click the link. But if you can tolerate the Pundit's usage of colorful language and sometimes crude sexual hyperbole to effectively make a point, and want to gain some insight, do read on, and do click here. Then scroll down to Tues 16 June (his separate posts do not have a unique URL), to the post called Obama's Oil Spill Speech: Us and Them.

I've cleaned it up a bit below, but you get the gist.

The President's big Oval Office speech was a bullsh*t pile of news updates, vague promises, and toothless threats. Look, we know that Obama wants the leak to stop. We know that the government is doing a lot of sh*t to make that happen, we know that the oil and tar and dead things need to be cleaned up, we know that BP is on the hook, we know that sh*t is effed up for fishing fleets and shrimpers. We know that he has limitations on what exactly he can do.

But the man said, "Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America’s innovation and seize control of our own destiny." And he's right. So tell us what to do. Lead us. That's what we want; it's what we've wanted all along, not an especially skilled anchor informing us that oil spills are bad. "As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs -– but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment," he said. So effing seize it.

Obama's cautious approach to governance made him speak in generalities with little vision for the future. He could have said he was wrong about further drilling. He could have laid out a path that said, "Here's where we are. Here's where we want to be. Here's how we get to this new place." And he could have called on all of us to help. Jesus Christ, how about one mention of conservation (beyond having "conservationists" on one of the endless stream of panels studying sh*t)? How about saying that it's time, once again, for American drivers to give up their big-ass SUVs? How about enlisting us in the fight, or making it into a fight for our survival? "It's wind energy or The Road, mf-ers. Which do you choose?"

Above is what I was hoping for--President Obama to use the disaster to seize the moment, to channel President Carter from 30+ years ago, and to challenge the United States of America to undertake a program analogous in scope and difficulty of putting a man on the moon.  The oil WILL run out.  We--and our children--need an all-out, full-court press to develop non-fossil fuel energy sources now while we can still be in proactive rather than reactive mode.

We just need a strong leader with vison to take us there.