The original sin was thinking we could buy and sell human beings. The next one was thinking we could make a deal with that sin to get ourselves a country. And when we went to war, it wasn’t to end that sin, but to fight the ones who broke the deal in the name of continuing that sin. And when the threat was past, we looked the other way while they got as close as they could to returning to that sin. And whenever they got close to the line, eventually we shook a finger when we should have brandished a stick, and brandished a stick when we should have swung it. We never stood up to correct the sin. Somebody always backslid. Somebody was always willing to make a deal with sin for their own benefit. The bill for our sin gets a little longer every day, and the day will come when we have to settle up. And it will cost. It might cost us a nation.
-Dec 18, 2012
With an engaged and educated population, the Internet could have been a useful tool of political discourse. But we don’t have that. We’ve venerated the stupid for a decade and a half, and instead, what we got was an electronic force multiplier for willful ignorance. Facts and lies on equal footing, and you’re entitled to your own reality. And an entire party went along with this because Donald Trump is an even more egregious version of what George W. Bush was meant to be: a matador with a signing pen so the GOP in Congress could loot the country for itself.
-Dec 23, 2016
Sixteen years ago, Osama bin Laden made Stupid Americans shit themselves. Then we spent every year after validating stupid. And after a wihile, Russia figured out how to exploit their fear. And Twitter and Facebook both lay back and allowed them to do it. The confluence of public stupid and technological free-for-all destroyed the 21st century before it could start. And now, because we didn’t push back on an electoral college that make the person with the most votes lose, because we didn’t push back on conspiracy theorists as “news”, because we decided the Internet was the free-speech wing of the free-speech party (whatever the fuck that means other than something to let tech bros get erect), we wound up where we are now. Comcast and Verizon have free reign to carve up Internet access like cable TV. There is no free market in broadband anymore. The budget is such a freakin’ disaster area that we don’t even know whether to pay off the property tax now so it’ll still be deductible on our federal return.
The really disturbing thing is…how do you come back from this? Elect a bunch of Democrats and then see if you can get away with impeachment, which will only put a bigger holy roller in the Oval Office and convince Ed Earl Brown that the job is done because Trump’s out? Run the table in 2020 and start trying to put things back like they were, only to get smeared by the catamites at the New York Times and take an ass-kicking in 2022? Do we have the time to wait for demographics to fix things or are we going to be too far gone by then?
So this is where I explain how you’ve disappointed me this year, America. Although it’s really been the last twenty years if we’re honest. I never want to hear “we’re better than this,” because mathematically we’ve kind of proven we aren’t.