Bernie Sanders Is Not Our Fucking Ally

I apologize in advance for the ridiculous amount of cursing in this post. Those who read this blog know I'm not adverse to dropping an F-bomb here and there, but when it comes to the shenanigans of the Bernie camp, I cope with my rage using good ol' fashioned sailor's talk.

Bernie needs to fucking resign as a Senator and take his shriveled old grandpa ass out to a desert fucking island with no wi-fi where he can't hurt anyone else.

The Democratic Party as we know it today has never been the party of the powerful. Black folk, Latinx, women, the disabled, LGBT folk, etc. have been the backbone of the party since the Dixiecrat revolt over the Civil Rights Movement (with the Dixiecrats becoming today's GOP). It has never been about throwing those people under the bus to win over the white working class.

But that's exactly what Bernie Fucking Sanders wants to turn it into.

Bernie Fucking Sanders has galvanized a "revolution" of freeloading angry white dudes to demonize the Democratic Party for demanding they actually do a fair share of the fucking work. Much like your stoned loser friend from college who couch-surfs through everyone he knows while eating their chips and puking on their carpets after a kegger, and then has the audacity to tell them their video game collection sucks. And just like that friend, they pitch a fit when you inform them they've grossly overstayed their welcome.

I put "revolution" in scarequotes up there because freeloading angry white dudes taking a giant steaming smelly dump on the already oppressed for their own benefit isn't a fucking revolution at fucking all; it's the status fucking quo. And Bernie Fucking Sanders is leading the charge.

That's right, kids. He's not a goddamned progressive and he never fucking has been. He doesn't want to go forward. He wants to go back. The only difference between him and Trump is how far back. Sanders wants to turn back the calendar to roughly 1960. Taxes were fairer, but life sucked enough for everyone but cishet able-bodied white males that it was still comfortable to look down on the rest of us. Trump wants to go back to 1860 so he can make slaves carry him around on a tacky golden sedan chair.

And because he's too goddamned lazy to start his own party and do the fucking work required to build it into something viable, he's decided to start a revolt within the Democratic Party.

This is a guy who literally takes a huge stinky shit on every principle he says he stands for. How many working-class people do you know who own three goddamn motherfucking houses? How is it standing up for the little guy to sponsor a bill that dumps nuclear waste from your rich white state on a dirt-poor Latinx community in Texas? How is he "new blood" in politics when he's been serving in Congress ten years longer than Hillary? Unless it's totally fine when he does it, in which case he's a fucking hypocritical bag of dicks who doesn't deserve your vote or your $27.

To make matters worse? This is a guy who, ten days after the election, says he can totally find common ground with Trump. On -- get this! -- "standing up to corporate America."

Let me repeat that: "standing up to corporate America."

Donald. Fucking. Trump.

Bernie Fucking Sanders is not our fucking ally. He's a goddamned motherfucking shit-eating collaborator. And has also probably been a Russian agent this whole time.

And I'll admit, I voted for him in my state's primary. I regret doing so. Because his antics prove every day that he does not give a single paltry constipated shit about anyone but himself. He's been on nobody's side but his own, gaming the system to get what he can out of it before moving on. He's as bad as Trump, if not worse; Trump at least makes no pretenses that he's a demented, narcissistic, self-serving son of a bitch. Sanders sells his followers his false self before he robs them fucking blind when they're not looking.

Therefore, if he wants to take all the freeloading angry white dudes with their heads so far up their own asses they could lick their own prostates out of the Democratic Party? Fucking let him. Let him lead them all into the river like the Pied Piper of Goddamn Hamelin for all I care, because these motherfuckers were never on our side, either.

If you're a "progressive" solely to improve your own station, to the detriment of other people, go join the fucking GOP, because that's where you belong. Get the fuck out of our way and the fuck out of our party, because we ain't got time for whiny, petulant, selfish children. We have fucking work to do.

The Shorter of Two Bullshit Mountains

You would think, by now, that there would be enough evidence of both Trump's corruption and unpopularity that any Republican worth their House seat would be drafting articles of impeachment the minute Comey's firing was announced. So why haven't they?

Here's the situation so far:

- Trump asked Comey to end the investigation into Michael Flynn's Russia ties.

- Trump fed classified intel to Russian diplomats.

- Trump's approval rating has dipped below 40%; his disapproval rating is close to 60% (as of this writing).

- Republican-controlled Congress' approval rating is 20% as of this writing. Down 4 entire points from March.

In a sane world, this would be a screaming neon sign for both impeachment and removal, and to push the Russia investigation full speed ahead, balls-to-the-wall, until the truth comes out. But it's not. Republican officials have either been silent, wishy-washy (saying it's "disturbing" but taking no real action; hi there, John McCain!), or outright defending Trump.

Despite his unpolularity. Despite their unpopularity. It makes no goddamned sense.

The working theory is the usual party-over-country mentality and the desperation to actually legislate now that they have control of everything, because for the last eight years they were too preoccupied with obstructing Obama to do anything else. But that doesn't hold up, either.

The first bill to actually pass the House was the American Health Care Act (AHCA). A bill that almost nobody in the country actually wants (17% approval; that's it). A bill that was so shitty Ryan had to pull it from the floor the first time, and only got it past the House by a hair because somebody made it even worse.

Why? Why, when you're a deeply unpopular Congress, would you stand by a deeply unpopular president just to pass a deeply unpopular bill?

Simple: the Republican Party knows that if the investigation is completed and Trump goes down? They go right down with him.

Let's back up a week.

On May 11, 2017 -- right on the heels of James Comey's firing on May 9 -- the FBI executed a search warrant on the Annapolis office of Strategic Campaign Group, a Republican PAC that failed gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli sued back in 2014 for scamming donors. The raid was directly related to Cuccinelli's lawsuit, but further research brings up some very interesting and very familiar names.

Strategic Campaign Group's senior adviser is Dennis Whitfield, who as it turns out also worked for a firm called BKSH & Associates. A firm founded by...Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Remember those guys?

They were gone before Whitfield came on board, but considering Paul Manafort and Roger Stone's history of shady shit going back several decades, and BKSH & Associates' history of even shadier shit going back to roughly 2002, the dots and the line are still there.

So we have a consulting firm raided for scamming donors, whose senior adviser used to work for a consulting firm that specialized in influencing foreign elections and whose founder with Russian ties went on to be Trump's campaign manager.

As the saying goes, where there's smoke there's fire. This? This is a tiny crack in the ground over Centralia, PA.

 And Republicans are scared shitless of the still-smoldering coal fire the full investigation will find. Because another interesting thing about BKSH & Associates? One of its founders, Charlie Black, Jr., was a top aide on the failed presidential campaign of none other than everyone's favorite spineless "maverick," John McCain.

This is why Republicans keep standing by Trump, and why they want the Russia scandal to go away. For the same reason Trump hasn't yet released his tax returns: whatever PR nightmare they're facing now is nothing compared to what will happen when the full truth comes out.

Republicans in 1973 turned on Nixon because at the time, they had more to gain by hanging him out to dry. Republicans in 2017 are protecting Trump because they have more to lose if the investigation keeps going.

They'll survive the stench of Trump. They won't survive Russia. And they know it.

Social Issues Are Economic Issues

If there is one thing I'm getting fucking sick of really fucking fast, it's the Straight White Guy lament in defense of Bernie Sanders that the Democratic Party focused too much on "social issues" instead of "economic issues" in the 2016 campaign. And the reason I'm sick of it is because that argument comes from a place of ridiculous tone-deaf privilege.

Issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/presentation, disability/illness, and everything else that straight white men consider "social" and therefore unimportant are directly tied to the economy in a number of ways.

Black and Latinx people incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates, more harshly disciplined in school (suspension, expulsion, etc.), and reprimanded for everything from accent to hairstyle all contribute to these populations earning substantially less than white people. It's hard to get a decent job when you were raised by a single mom because your dad pled guilty to something he didn't even do because public defenders are awful and your family's too poor to afford their own lawyer, and nobody will hire your mom for anything other than fast food service because her name is too "ethnic" and she can't afford a hair relaxer treatment every week. This gets even harder when "pled guilty" means "your dad was gunned down in his car by police because he reached for his wallet while black."

Native Americans are also affected by extreme poverty, and not just on reservations. Native descendants face high rates of alcoholism and diabetes, both of which contribute to higher costs of medical care and future disabilities. Native peoples also face the same kind of racism and police brutality that black and Latinx populations do.

Being trans and too terrified to use your preferred bathroom at work means you're more likely to suffer a bladder infection, which means you miss work or get ironically reprimanded for using the bathroom too much on the clock. Trans youth account for nearly half of the homeless youth population, due to being kicked out by parents and guardians. Trans people also face rampant housing and employment discrimination, which is perfectly legal in many states. Trans people also face extremely high rates of sexual assault and murder, particularly trans people of color.

Women not having access to reproductive services are more likely to forego college not just because of pregnancy, but also other medical issues (hormonal birth control treats a wide variety of reproductive disorders like endometriosis and PCOS, which can be physically debilitating). Women unable to access abortion services are more likely to live at or below the poverty line. Women are more likely to quit a job than report sexual assault or harassment, and if they do report it, they're more likely to be fired in retaliation than aided.

It is still legal in 28 states to fire and deny housing to someone for being LGBT, which makes LGBT people a disproportionate share of the homeless population. As a result, a significant number of sex workers are LGBT, and it's not uncommon for LGBT people who aren't sex workers to be suspected of such and harassed by police. Even legally married gay and lesbian couples can have a hard time finding things like joint health insurance. LGBT people with HIV and AIDS also face extremely high costs of healthcare and job discrimination. And LGBT youth face much higher rates of suicide, assault, and murder.

This is why we get so fucking angry when straight white men dismiss our issues as "social" rather than economic. They are economic. They just affect our lives financially instead of theirs. It's us who need to shoulder the higher costs of rent, medical care, incarceration, fines, and everything else because we live in a society that hates the fact we exist.

Social issues and economic issues are forever intertwined. If you think they aren't, it's only because you've never really faced them.

What Star Trek Can Teach Us About the Danger of Ideological Purity

It's not every decade that I get to see firsthand what is meant by a work of fiction being "ahead of its time." Star Trek is certainly no stranger to this; the original series boasts the first interracial kiss on US television, at a time when people were burning down radio stations for playing Janis Ian's "Society's Child." It also featured a Russian character played by an actor of Soviet descent at the height of the Cold War.

But 24 years ago, the third series of the franchise premiered: Deep Space Nine. And over the course of the show, the story would take twists and turns that, re-watching it today in the current political climate, seem oddly...prescient.

I'm not saying Obama was the real-world Benjamin Sisko. But where we are as a nation is right around the end of the show's fifth season. The Cardassians have taken the station. The Dominion is on the move.

While there has been plenty of analysis of the show as a World War II allegory (which it was obviously meant to be), in relation to today's crisis, I think one of the most important points the series makes is that when dealing with existential threats, there is a razor-thin line to walk that will get you through to the other side. Deviate from that line in any way whatsoever? And you'll either end up as the monster you're fighting, or you'll be torn limb from limb by it.

Two sixth season episodes in particular illustrate this point: "Rocks and Shoals" and "In the Pale Moonlight."

"Rocks and Shoals" is an illustration, bit by bit, of how Major Kira -- who survived the series' equivalent of the Holocaust as a child -- slides into a mindset of rationalization and cooperation in order to survive the Cardassian takeover of the station. A kind of Stockholm Syndrome that one of her people's religious leaders, Vedek Yassim, tries over the course of the episode to clue her into. Eventually, Yassim commits a public suicide in protest of the occupation. And it's only after that, that Kira begins to realize that she's being complicit in not only her own oppression, but that of the entire Alpha Quadrant.

"In the Pale Moonlight" involves Sisko and Garak hatching a plan to get the Romulans into the war as allies against The Dominion. The plan involves manufacturing evidence that The Dominion were planning to violate the non-aggression pact with the Romulans. The short version is that while it doesn't go off exactly as planned, it does happen. Albeit with more unnecessary death and manipulation than Sisko originally wished for.

What these two episodes represent are the two fates on either side of that razor-thin line. Giving up all of your scruples in order to survive, as Kira did, or trying to keep your hands clean, as Sisko tried to do.

We have, at the moment, two extreme factions of progressives. The first faction are The Collaborators. People who think they can compromise with Trump's regime in order to escape unscathed, or at least minimally scathed. If you want examples, look no further than this chart. The only Trump cabinet nominee to receive zero votes from Democrats was Betsy DeVos. All others -- including Jeff Sessions for Attorney General and Rick Perry of all people for Secretary of Energy -- have received at least one vote from Democratic senators, many of whom have shown an astonishing willingness to placate the new administration. In particular Joe Manchin (WV) and Heidi Heitkamp (ND), whose No votes combined can be counted on a single set of hands.

And no, not even Bernie Sanders, the self-appointed anti-corruption guru of the Senate, has really stood up to Trump all that much. On the contrary, he even declared Trump would have him as an ally if he "stands up to corporate America" like he promised to do; Sanders then went on to vote Yes (along with the rest of Congress) to confirm Shulkin for the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, despite Shulkin's ties to for-profit healthcare and his not even being a veteran, a first for the position.

But it's not just Sanders. It's the entire activist landscape and everyone in it who advocates "working with" the new administration rather than opposing it and "empathizing with" the people who voted for Trump, even when they'd been some of Trump's staunchest opponents during the campaign. Spineless louts like Jim Wright, Kyle Plantz, Michael Lerner, and Les Leopold -- unsurprisingly, all white men -- who gleefully throw progressive causes under the bus if they have something to gain in this new era.

Capitulating to oppression -- and that includes the "wait and see, give him a chance" kind of capitulation -- is like a bystander telling someone about to be raped "hey, you might enjoy it." It's just as callous, cruel, and morally reprehensible as committing the rape themselves. If you don't feel scared in Trump's America, it's because you have no reason to. And rather than going with the flow and being a Collaborator, it means you, of all people, have even more of an obligation to be part of the Resistance.

For Major Kira, it took witnessing Vedek Yassim's public suicide in the middle of The Promenade to knock that into her head. Dare we even ask what it's going to take for Manchin and Heitkamp?

The other faction is something of an ideological carbon filter. The side that seeks to remove "impurities" within its own movement. You'll recognize this group as anyone who voted for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein or wrote in Harambe or stayed home or literally did anything other than cast a vote for Clinton. People who are still screaming that Bernie would've won (but won't say how). People who are protesting against Democrats not because of how they're voting but who they're funded by. People whose only mission is "shaking up the establishment" and don't really give a rat's ass what happens as a result.

Some have begun to refer to this faction as the "Alt-Left" (as opposed to the "Alt-Right"), but I think that's giving them entirely too much legitimacy. Being made up largely of the same demographic that finds Trump an attractive candidate, I think it's far more appropriate to simply refer to them as populist anarchists. It's even more telling when, faced with direct comparison to white nationalist propaganda outlet Breitbart, Cenk Uygur is more perturbed at being compared to a publication with fewer unique viewers rather than because Breitbart openly promotes bigotry and Nazi ideas. They're not even two sides of the same coin so much as two parts of the same side of the coin; popular anarchy is the smooth and shiny background, while white nationalism is the stark, in-your-face relief.

This faction, like the Tea Party before it, seeks to essentially kick out everyone that doesn't fall into goose-stepping formation with their ideology of political campaigns run on everyone stuffing $20 in an envelope. For one thing, not everyone has that $20 to throw into an envelope. And even if they did? As someone who has had to work an annual fundraising event for the last 4 years, and for an organization that doesn't require anywhere near the kind of penetration that a political office campaign does, you can't get elected without money. It's just not possible. You have to court large donors if you expect to even win the primary, because coordinating advertising, voter registration drives, and the dissemination of info on vital shit like deadlines takes a fuckton of cash.

Bernie Sanders learned this lesson the hard way. A big part of the reason he didn't get the nomination was because he simply did not run his campaign very well, and his numbers in actual primaries (as opposed to caucuses) reflected that. A huge part of campaigning is registration drives, particularly in primaries because they're closed in most states; you have to be registered as a Democrat in order to vote in the Democratic primary (whereas the national election is completely open; it doesn't matter what party affiliation you have as long as you're registered to vote). Sanders did not do enough to get people who were already registered as Independents in closed primary states to change their party affiliation in order to vote for him in time, or to get new voters who supported him registered as Democrats in time to cast their primary ballots. This had nothing whatsoever to do with the DNC; Sanders could've done this regardless of how much the DNC favored Clinton's campaign (rightfully so, being that she is a Democrat, and the DNC actually gave Sanders some very generous accommodation by letting him run on the Democratic ticket without changing his party; they would've been perfectly within their rights to tell him "LOL NOPE"). But he didn't, because he couldn't. Because his campaign simply did not have the money to pull it off, since he snubbed corporate donors.

Sisko's lesson in "In the Pale Moonlight" is that sometimes, you have to strike a deal with the Devil in order prevent the apocalypse. You have to do things that aren't ideologically -- or even morally -- pure. But you have to do them in order to prevent a total catastrophe from happening. It was a lesson that anyone who voted third party and anyone who still insists they were right to do so is deliberately trying not to learn. Or to put it another way, they're ignoring the 109th Ferengi Rule of Acquisition: dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.

Resistance in the Trump Era is a moral imperative. We cannot compromise. We cannot "work with him." And at the same time, we may have to do things we find ideologically repugnant in order to have any chance at all of avoiding disaster. We fucked up not by "disregarding the economic anxiety of the white working class" but by not uniting against a very obvious threat. We fucked up by not recognizing evil when it was staring us in the face, and sacrificing unity and victory simply because doing something ideologically impure was an inconvenience.

We must learn from that mistake, or pay dearly for it. We have a moral imperative to fix this mess. Now is not the time for an ideological war with our party's establishment. Unify and survive. Resist or perish.

As Vedek Yassim's final words commanded, "Evil must be opposed!"

The Ancient, Cruel Notion At the Core of the ACA "Replacement"

Speaker of the Rich Paul Ryan has finally released a statement on the new "healthcare" bill. Which is really not so much a healthcare bill as it is federally sanctioned mass murder of everyone that Republicans deem undesirable: women, the poor, communities of color, the mentally ill, and the very sick and disabled. The question so many have been asking -- and rightly so -- is how people who purport to be in favor of "family values" and the tenets of Christianity can take a gigantic steaming dump on everything Jesus ever taught. Your answer is an idea that dates all the way back from the Calvinist bullshit of the Middle Ages. This is how far Republicans want to turn back the clock.

In the Calvinist view, disease and illness and injury are just physical manifestations of sin. If you are chosen by God, bad shit will never happen to you; if you're not worthy, welp, sucks to be you don't it? The current Evangelical support of legislation that rewards the rich and punishes the poor is centered around this. In their view, it's only natural that we reward God's "chosen people" so they'll put in a good word for us. Everyone else who is poor and sick? They've already been rejected by God, so who cares about them anyway?

If this sounds like a terrible way to view the world, then congratulations. You're not a sociopath.

Republicans love the fuck out of this sentiment because it absolves them of having to do anything to fix the country's problems, literally all of which go back to poverty. Crime? Drugs? Violence? All directly tied to poverty. Because when people are poor, they get scared. When they get scared, they get desperate. And desperate people do drastic shit in order to survive.

Abortion? Most abortions that occur are done because the mother can't afford to care for a baby, or even the cost of giving birth (bare minimum with no complications, childbirth costs around $30K; abortion is just under $1,000 at its highest). In some professions, she risks being fired from her job just because she's pregnant (it's been illegal since 1978, but it still happens with alarming frequency, and if you can't afford a child, you sure as hell can't afford a good lawyer).

Poverty is also a direct cause of ill health itself. Healthy, nutritious food is expensive. The highly processed food that poor people can afford is loaded with salt, sugar, fat and empty calories (calories that provide no or very few nutrients). Being able to cook requires energy and free time that many working poor families don't have. On top of that, jobs with shitty pay tend to be physically demanding (retail, food service, etc.), and because the pay is awful, employees need to work longer shifts or multiple jobs to buy even the shittiest food. This doesn't even factor stress into the equation, or urban food deserts where there's no grocery stores for miles and your only options are fast food and bodegas (which overwhelmingly sell the aforementioned highly-processed crap food).

For Republicans, the problem is that fixing this mess would require going back to the income tax levels of the mid-20th century, where top-earners paid around 70%, as well as building stronger unions and better regulation of the financial sector to prevent the kinds of market collapses we saw from the 1970s onward. And that, of course, means listening to the people rather than their campaign donors, who tend to skew wealthy as fuck and, like Thorin at the end of The Hobbit, don't want to part with a single coin.

It would be much more beneficial to them if all us pesky poor folk were kept in a highly efficient queue of high birth and death rates, so we could continue to work shitty service jobs for shitty pay until we drop dead of heart attacks and get replaced by the next desperate shmoe. And the easiest way to do that? Restrict abortion and birth control such that the rights to them are merely ceremonial in order to force the birthrate to go up, and gut healthcare for the working classes so we die faster.

That's where the American Health Care Act comes in.

Immediately, you should notice three words missing from the bill's title compared to the ACA: "patient protection" and "affordable." This is not an accident; this bill is not intended to protect patients, nor is it intended to make healthcare affordable in any way unless you're young, rich and already healthy. In other words, already chosen by God, and fuck the rest of us.

It's the same Victorian-era bullshit of regarding wealth itself to be a virtue. If you're rich, then you're obviously a shrewd and virtuous person. If you're poor, it's because you obviously did something awful or stupid, so why should you get any sympathy?

This is what lets hard-right God-fearing Christians sleep at night while they vote to slash the safety net for the country's most vulnerable. All that stuff about charity and helping your neighbor? That only goes for people who already have God's favor.

This is one of the biggest reasons I walked away from Christianity in my college years and didn't look back (besides figuring out I was gay). The idea of a "chosen" people never sat well with me, because the next logical step is to dismiss those not "chosen" as deserving of their fate. I'm not saying all Christians do this, not by a longshot; there are many wonderful churches and Christian charities that do a lot of good in the world. But ignoring individual churches who do good things for a minute? All the major players in the Bible who came after Christ promoted this idea of chosen vs. damned, and to defer to God's word (or what people assumed was God's word) rather than trying to understand things on your own. I found myself unable to maintain my faith in a system that just about required me to leave my empathy and critical thinking at the door.

But this is exactly the thought process that has brought us to this point. And it's not just limited to Evangelical fundie whacknuts. Everyone who voted for Trump did so for one reason and one reason alone, regardless of the language they couched their decision in: he is a straight, white, rich cisman, the epitome of privilege, and therefore "chosen." If they vote for him, they can be "chosen" as well.

Only now, with the very real threat of shredding healthcare to a point even worse than it was before the Affordable Care Act, do they realize what "chosen" really means: everyone else is damned.