Week of Nov. 16

This week: The real-life NeverEnding Story that is the 2020 election; How best to describe a typical Trump voter: let me count the insults; The call to vacate the premises is coming from inside the white house!; Are college football and sexual assault as disturbingly inseparable as they seem?; And Betsy DeVos: could she be the personification of why my online dictionary doesn’t have an antonym for “contribution”?

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It’s Joe Biden’s birthday today!

HBD, president-elect!

He’s 132-years-old.
That’s a fact.
He’s also forgetful, is incapable of uttering a full sentence, definitely battling dementia, and probably sells abducted children to Burisma Executives who put them to work in Ukranian oil fields until they’re re-sold into an underage sexual slavery ring run out of the back of a pizza parlor in downtown Kiev just past the National Chernobyl Museum.
It’s on the left. You can’t miss it.
And like 4 years ago, despite this laundry list of obvious faults and shortcomings attached to the president-elect, like it or not, that person is the one who is going to be our president on January 20th. So…

deal with it, a-holes!

It’s time to hand over the keys.

17 days!
17 days it’s been since the election. Biden has won the popular vote as well as the continually perplexing and hopefully doomed Electoral College. All claims of widespread effective fraud and cheating have been disproven and/or entirely dismissed and/or placed in a very questionable status through the bizzare messaging of a leaky vampire bat.

And yet nothing about Forrest Trump’s continuous, paranoid, fictitious ramblings on Twitter would lead us to believe that he would recognize reality if it hit him over the head with a hammer and sickle.
Sure, he’s come out from under his bridge a few times to tout the COVID vaccine that he made with his own hands because he’s the greatest president ever and the coronavirus is afraid of him.
#FACTS!
But President Dipshit is still tweeting multiple times a day like it’s the primary duty of the office. As if “The American People” (whoever the fuck that is) insist that when he’s not golfing, he sit around all day angrily typing into his phone like a moody teenager going through a break-up they should have seen coming a mile away.
And most of his tweets would have you believe that he believes that you should believe that he didn’t lose.

• “A rigged election!”
• “The Democrats cheated big time.”
• “I WON THE ELECTION!”
• “My outrageous overconfidence is but a thinly veiled mask to disguise the submissive cuckold that I actually am!”

Okay, I made up that last quote, but it’s still got a much better chance of being true than the first three.

But let’s step back for a second. Let’s think in a compassionate way about the emotions that Trump voters must be going through right now…. aside from the obvious daddy issues and dreams of legalized bestiality that otherwise plague their loathsome waking hours. For years they’ve convinced themselves to believe in their dreams like a Disney princess in her darkest hour. The difference is, their dreams are crashing down around them like a Disney stepmother in her darkest hour. (Disney movies are basically just one “darkest hour” after another stitched together by catchy songs sung by incorrigible characters, often anthropomorphized animals or perhaps a plant.)
Anywhoooo… they’re having a hard time right now. Beneath those admittedly colorful MAGA hats lie human heads containing what I assume is a brain-like tissue that for whatever reason has become disentangled from the neurons that provide the pathways to compassion and rational thought.
Trump voters like to taunt liberals by calling them “snowflakes” because, as usual, their interpretation of reality is demonstrably incorrect. Snowflakes are awesome! Each one unique and seemingly fragile, but when bound together in a common purpose they can be dropped down the back of someone’s shirt and really cause a ruckus.
But if it’s names the want, it’s names they’ll get. And the first names that come to mind when I think of Trump voters are Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, which is ironic given their likely disdain for the LGBTQ community.
Why?
Because Trump voters actually believe that…

“All you need is faith and trust and a little pixie dust.”

… though their “pixie dust” is actually buckshot.
Big difference.
One helps you fly, the other helps you mindlessly destroy things that fly.
They actually believe that…

“Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough.”

The problem being that they all happen to be at the very shittiest part of their dream right now and it’s time to wake the fuck up.
They actually believe that…

“You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”

And sacrifice they have! Common sense, basic rights, morality, truth, respect, self-respect, compassion, hope, decency – all of it, sucked out the open window of their chaotic lives by a human soul-vacuum whose very existence is a ceaseless assault on democracy itself.
And all because they’ve allowed themselves to be mesmerized beyond reason by a child who never grew up.
So, I guess, technically Trump voters are actually a bit more like Wendy and those dumbass Proud Boys.
Sorry… Lost Boys.
The important thing to remember is that they’re dumbasses.

My point is, they’re not going to miraculously “get better” any time soon. They need their space. They need a “safe space,” a notion they’ve relentlessly mocked in the past but may actually now consider embracing solely because they realize it might help them.
Big difference.
Consider, for the split second your brain will allow, what it must be like to truly support Donald Trump and angrily insist that he was clearly cheated out of a second glorious and perfect term. The very thought of the suggestion itself would cause any reasonable person to vociferously question the future of humanity, provided they could speak through the involuntarily regurgitated bile it caused to immediately fill their mouths.
So let’s give them that. Let’s acknowledge that hardcore Trump supporters need to sweat out their madness like a meth addict locked in a church basement. Trump himself, on the other hand, is willingly dug in to that church basement, and he’s quickly becoming crazier than a fly at a debate with nowhere to land.
And yet, despite all evidence to the contrary, Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, promised this week that the current administration will conduct a “very professional transition” to President-elect Joe Biden.
…
Holy shit!
I just realized something…

The promise is coming from inside the house!
Run, Mr. President! Run!
Whatever you do, get out of the house!

Seriously…

Get the fuck out of this house.

And maybe help the new guy move his couch in while you’re at it.
And by “couch” I mean “whatever plan he’s working on to deal with the fact that over a thousand Americans are still dying every single day from COVID-19.”
But also his actual couch. He’ll want his own. It’s a safe bet that every couch in that place has been irreparably destroyed by your enormous and grotesque ass-groove.
But I ass-gress.

***

Aside from being hijacked by the usual hijinks, my brain was horribly drawn to one other particular story this week.

It appears that a recent investigation has found that Louisiana State University – Go Panthera tigris’s! – has consistently “mishandled” (a forgiving quote, to be sure) sexual misconduct allegations against male students and star football athletes, particular by the names of Derrius Guice and Drake Davis. Now, before we rush to judgment about the veracity of the repeated accusations against these young men, please keep in your free-market mind that LSU Football makes an annual profit of about 56 million red-blooded American dollars every year. And for that kind of dough, various sacrifices have to be made.
Right?
Wrong.
The reason this story caught my brain-eye is because I can’t wrap my heart-feelings around how the hell shit like this keeps happening in our world.
What in THEE… FUCK is wrong with people?
I like football. It keeps me in constant wonder as to how and why human bodies don’t crack in half more often under the intense and determined pressure of other, giant human bodies. But stardom and money do not a “rape and get-out-of-jail-free” card make.
You shouldn’t have to have a daughter or a wife or a mother or have had any sort of commonplace interaction with a female human being on this planet to be able to summon the genuine sympathy that should always be afforded a victim of sexual assault. If the accused are innocent, the righteous thing is for that to be revealed in a thoughtful and meaningful and legal way. But if they are not, then they shouldn’t get to walk away just because they’re likely to be a first round draft choice.

From the article:

“Each step of the way, LSU officials either doubted the women’s stories, didn’t investigate, or didn’t call the police.”

Negative. Negative. Negative.
Victim blame. Victim blame. Victim blame.
All certain men in this world have to do to do whatever it is they want to do is be confident enough to actually believe it when they tell themselves “she wanted it.”
That’s it.
That’s literally their Trump card.

From the article:

“Officials in the university’s athletic department and broader administration repeatedly have ignored complaints against abusers, denied victims’ requests for protections and subjected them to further harm by known perpetrators.”

Good… lord!
Is there any possible way for that sentence to be more disturbing?
I mean, maybe if you read it while staring intently at this photo of a smiling Donald Trump giving a thumbs up…

SuperGross.

In closing, feel free to READ ALL ABOUT how billionaire not-a-shit-giver, and current, but definitely not future Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, helped fuel this LSU-vian approach to sexual assault by publicly stripping down Title IX and humiliating it in front of its friends.

Trump Administration, you will not be missed… though it’s admittedly going to be next to impossible to purge from my mind the image of your weird, misshapen squid-member with the uncontrollable ink glands.
Sleep tight, America.

Ending, as usual, on a positive note…
This week’s musical guest is Abbott and Costello, because “Who’s on First?” is music to my ears.
It’s also, quite unfortunately, a perfect example of how confused we are as a nation by the gobbledygook being ear-fed to us from our very highest perch.
If you’ve never seen this performance, I’m glad you crawled out from under your rock. The bad news: you crawled out a terrible time. If you have seen it, I’m confident you will happily watch it again.
The writing is perfect. The timing is flawless. And the performance is timeless.
It’s a pretty good combination for comedy.
The actual writer’s identity is a bit murky. First of all, versions of the now classic sketch had been around for years before A&C did it. A British comedian named Will Hay performed a similar routine in the early 30’s about a schoolmaster interviewing a schoolboy named Howe who came from Ware but now lives in Wye. So the idea wasn’t new, but nobody did it quite like the best.
How is it possible that a nearly 100-year-old comedy routine never gets old?
I wouldn’t take a sip of milk for the next 6 minutes and 35 seconds if I were you…

Peace, y’all.