Category: Politics

Betsy DeVos is a fucking worthless hack and so is her scumbag boss

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching15 Comments

bagofdicks.jpgNote: the title to this post very nearly contained a Certain Word that I genuinely try to avoid using under any circumstances, and no, it isn’t the orange shitgibbon’s actual name.  Having thus demonstrated restraint by using “hack” instead, do not expect me to do any further holding back.

Motherfuckers, let me be perfectly clear on something here: the next person to try and pull some sort of mealy-mouthed, fuckwitted “Republicans and Democrats are the same” horseshit where I can see them is going to get my hand rammed up their ass so that I can use them as a human puppet for a while and force them to say things that make sense.  Because I dare you– I double dare you– I double dog dare you, motherfucker,  to find one fucking nominee by a Democrat to a Cabinet post at any fucking point in my lifetime who was even remotely as fucking unqualified for their jobs as any single one of the shitbirds Lord Dampnut has thrown up.  It’s fucking unbelievable; the qualification for any Cabinet post appears to be “does this person completely oppose the mission of the department they’re being nominated to head?”

Find one fucking time– one fucking time in the last forty years— where the Democrats nominated anyone as unqualified as fucking Betsy DeVos.  I’m serious.  If there is one, and I don’t think there is, I want to know about it.  I mean, let’s be real, here: this motherfucker had a chance to nominate Ben Carson to something, right?  Ben Carson’s a fucking surgeon, and by all accounts is actually good at that.  Like, legitimately.  So… maybe Surgeon General?  Health and Human Services?

Nah.  He’s, like, black n’ shit, so put the motherfucker in charge of HUD.  I mean, he’s completely fucking unqualified, but what-fucking-ever.  Let’s find someone who doesn’t believe in global warming to head the EPA.  In every single fucking instance— other than the fucking military, of course– the person nominated to head the department has been explicitly against what the fuck their department is supposed to be for.

Find me a fucking time where the Democrats named a fucking hippie for SecDef.  Go ahead, look.  You won’t find one.  Because the Democrats, despite their frequent lack of basic fucking competence, actually give a shit about having a fucking functional goddamned government.  The Republican plan is to loot the citizenry for every single fucking dime they can and “prove” that government doesn’t work by being utterly fucking incompetent at governing every chance they get.  It’s explicit.  It’s obvious.  It’s been going on for fucking decades.

Fuck this.  Fuck them. Fuck everyone who fucking voted for them, too.

On refugees and Christianity, again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics9 Comments
24OPINION-diptych-articleLarge.jpg
On the right, Rouwaida Hanoun, a Syrian five-year-old who is, as far as I know, still alive.  On the left, Anne Frank, who is not.

There are– it is horrifying to think, but it is true– people who believe that the orange fascist currently occupying the White House is a Christian.  Many of these people are the same people who believed Barack Obama to not be a Christian, so it’s immediately and apparently clear that when they say “Christianity,” what they mean is “White supremacy,” and they have little to no idea of what Jesus actually preached, what he might have believed, or– rather importantly– what he looked like.

I noticed this morning that the post I wrote about refugees last year is spiking in page views again, which is not surprising.  The monster in the White House has chosen to ban desperately frightened and endangered people– the “least among us” who Jesus spoke of– from our country, has deliberately decided to let children die rather than incur even the slightest risk to people who look like him.  He has, of course, excluded his business partners from these calculations; if  you are wealthy enough for him to have business dealings with, you are a Person, of course; Rouwaida Hanoun is not.  When I wrote the post last year we had a President who, while he made bad decisions in any number of ways, I believed fundamentally cared about people.

Unfortunately, that is no longer remotely true, and the man who was trying to keep Syrian refugees out of my state at the time is now Vice President.  Most of the time, I have trouble believing our current President is actually human.  It takes every bit of moral strength I have to recognize that the demented narcissist in the White House deserves as much compassion and dignity as anyone else by simple virtue of having been born a person.  Somebody or something fucked this man up; I don’t believe he was born this awful.

But that’s beside the point.  When I wrote that post last year, I was trying to be nice and trying to be the voice of reason.  You may recognize the tone; I use it around here from time to time when I’m writing something I want to be taken more seriously than usual.  At this point, I’m going to take a different tack: if you don’t think these people should be allowed into the country, if you think refugees (and people with green cards!  People who have been here, and are now separated from their families simply by virtue of having been somewhere else when the ban went into effect!) should be banned from the United States simply because of their religion, you’re a fucking monster.  You’re not a Christian.  Christ himself would rebuke you– he already has, in fact, in clear terms in the Bible you claim to believe is divinely inspired and true in its every word.

You are a bad person if you agree with this ban.  You are a racist and a monster and a coward and every bit as much of a piece of shit as the people trying to keep the Jews out of the country in the 1940s were. You are the exact same people saying the exact same things for the exact same reasons, only with “Jew” crossed out and “Muslim” written in.  And while I don’t want this to be true and I try to be a better person, I really wish there was a Hell so I could see the look on your face when you end up there. Because Jesus has been clear on your responsibilities in this matter.  If you’re not a Christian, you don’t have to follow Jesus.  I certainly don’t.  But he was perfectly clear on this, and you are the bad guys.  

As I was writing this, word came through Twitter that the ACLU has won a stay against this executive order, which is good, as it was wildly illegal from the start.  I set up recurring monthly donations to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood today.  You should too.

On taking action, sorta

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

qlemjK.jpgHere’s where my head’s at right now.  I’ve called my Senator twice in the last couple of days, one to thank him for announcing that he was voting against Betsy DeVos and again this morning to encourage him to vote against Jeff Sessions when that abortion of a confirmation vote comes up.  I literally just say “call my Senator” to my phone and bam, I’m talking to a staffer a couple of moments later.

And then it hit me: the #1 rule of Republicans is They Always Get Worse.  The #2 rule of Republicans is They Only Get Worse.  So am I doing anything that actually has a point here, other than encouraging Joe Donnelly to go against his usual first instincts and vote like a Democrat?  Is there any point to calling my other Senator, or even finding out his name, which I’m just now realizing to no small amount of self-loathing that I don’t even know?

I can’t name my Governor right now either.  I’d recognize either of their names, mind you, but I can’t produce them.  That’s how deep the hole I’ve been in since November is.

That’s not the point, though.  Let’s say Sessions and DeVos both get voted down somehow.  It’s at least conceivable, right?

Their replacements, the way things have been going, will be David Duke and Michelle Rhee.  Neither will be an improvement.  That’s not how Republicans do things.  Whoever they replace Sessions and DeVos with (and Rhee is very likely going to be the actual choice) will be worse than they would.  And we won’t manage to fight off two in a row.  It won’t happen.

I’ve been saying “I need to shake myself out of this” for nearly three months now.   Probably about time for that to actually happen.

Photos from history

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics6 Comments

I wasn’t able to attend the South Bend march yesterday (stupid job) but my wife was.  She took some pictures.

On denial

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics9 Comments

pen-solidarity-fistI won’t say his name.  You’re never going to see it in print on this site again.  I have found a silver lining to being at work tomorrow; I will be nowhere near a television set at any point between about eight in the morning and 8:45 or so at night, and so there is absolutely no chance that I will even accidentally catch any part of the inauguration or the address itself.

Yesterday, I watched a portion of Al Franken’s gentle questioning of useless rich idiot Betsy Devos at her confirmation hearing.  I was not surprised but that didn’t keep me from being horrified.  The woman knows nothing; a college sophomore Ed major would have been embarrassed to answer those questions as poorly as she did.  Hell, I’d expect anyone who has been reading this site for more than a year to be able to do a better job just out of osmosis.  At one point this afternoon, I found myself wondering if Franken has Presidential aspirations, and then spent a moment being quietly horrified at the fact that I thought it was a halfway decent idea.

(He’ll be 69 in 2020.  Nah.)

Which of these sentences, if any, is hyperbole?  This is a genuine question.  I don’t know for sure that any of them is:

  • Tomorrow is America’s worst day since September 11, 2001.
  • Tomorrow is America’s worst day since December 7, 1941.
  • Tomorrow is America’s worst day since April 12, 1861.

I suspect that right now only the first is inarguable, and the rest hyperbolic.  I wonder how long I’ll feel that way.  Hopefully at least a few months.  We have made the biggest mistake our country has ever made.  I just hope not too many people die before we find a way to correct it.

(I also, for the record, think that there is a nonzero chance that impeachment proceedings are begun damn near immediately– by the Republicans, who we would obviously need in order to pull such a thing off.  This would effectively be a legal coup by the Republican establishment.  I cannot say that I wouldn’t welcome it.  For all that I despise Mike Pence and everything he has ever stood for, he has principles.  The shitgibbon has none.)

(Yes, that was a Hamilton reference.)

REBLOG: In which I gently suggest something to white people

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Wrote this two years ago. Still true.

Luther M. Siler's avatarWelcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Take a look at these two pictures.

JESSE JACKSON EATONVILLEal-sharptonWhat do you think of these two guys?  Go ahead, jot down a few thoughts.

Okay.

I hate to break it to you, but you just told yourself more or less exactly what you’d think of Martin Luther King Jr. if he were still alive, or (having just had his 86th birthday, after all) if he’d been allowed to live a normal human lifespan and was no longer with us.

Yes.  Really.

No, he wasn’t different.  Look at the things white people were saying about Martin Luther King Jr. when he was alive.  People say the exact same things about Jackson and Sharpton.  Word for goddamn word.

Publicity hound?  Outside agitator?  Stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong?  Communist?  White people said all that shit about King, and white people say all that shit about Jackson and Sharpton now.  (Okay, Al Sharpton to my…

View original post 822 more words

Wait, what?

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I checked Twitter before leaving work, after an incredibly busy and yet almost entirely non-lucrative day, and “golden showers” was trending, and it involves a person who is, apparently, supposedly going to be President?

I cannot.  I cannot even.  Not tonight.  Sorry.  Have a music video. 

On gestures, meaningless and otherwise

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

img_5089I got my first tattoo at a place called the Jade Dragon in Chicago.  It’s a pretty famous tattoo parlor; there’s pictures all over the walls of various celebrities who have gotten work done there and there are billboards for the place all over town.

At the time, much like now, I was bald and had a goatee.  In between my tattoo and the tattoo the friend I was with got, we ducked into a bar next door so that she could have a quick drink.  It was her first tattoo too, and hers was a lot bigger than mine was, and she wanted a touch of liquid courage.

A guy at the bar, also bald and bearded, wearing a denim vest over a black T-shirt, made eye contact with me, did some sort of fist-pump gesture, and yelled “Skinhead!  RAAH!” at us.  We got the hell out of there– I told my friend to steal the fucking glass her drink was in if she needed to– and went back next door to get her tattoo done.

You get a T-shirt if you spend more than a certain amount on your tattoo, and the place is overpriced as hell so just about everyone qualifies for a free shirt.  It’s got the logo of the place on it and a bunch of symbols all over the place.  I figured they were just random flash tattoos.  The shirt looked cool.  I wore it as often as I wore any of my other shirts, I suppose.

Fast forward about a year.  I’m chatting with this girl online and we get to talking about tattoos.  I mention that I’ve got one and tell her it’s from the Jade when she asks where I got it.

“Ugh,” she says.  “Don’t go there.  The place is run by neo-Nazis.”

I flash back to that guy in the bar next door.  And I do some research, and I discover that I’ve been wearing a shirt covered in white power symbols for a year.  Luckily for me, a shirt covered in obscure white power symbols, as I’ve been wearing them on the South Side of Chicago and that could have ended up going very, very poorly for me.

The shirt is thrown away on the spot.

I am on an L train heading somewhere; hell if I remember where any longer.  There’s a mom with several kids in the back of the train.  The kids are being loud– not ridiculously so, but they’re clearly excited to be on the train and I get the feeling that they’re not from Chicago and this might be their first time.  The train is maybe a third full; a few dozen people, perhaps.  Some jackass starts yelling at the lady about how loud her kids are being and how she needs to keep them under control and it gets very creepy and threatening very quickly.  The rest of the train car goes dead silent.

I unleash my teacher voice on the poor stupid bastard and redirect his attention from them to me.  I am still bald and bearded and I’m wearing a black trenchcoat.  I basically order him to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down and not say another word until either the family or him is off the train and then stare at him until he complies.

No one else on the train says a word.  One person– a white guy, maybe in his mid-fifties– nods approvingly at me.  I get off the train a stop early at the same place the family does in case he decides to try and follow them.  The mom thanks me.  The guy gives us the finger through the train window.  I blow him a kiss.

My wife and son and I go to hang out with some of our friends a few days after America decides to elect a fascist.  One of our friends is wearing a safety pin on her shirt.  I am not wearing one on mine.  I think about that family on that L train, and wonder about that safety pin.  Were they supposed to look around for someone wearing a safety pin, to appeal to that person for help?  If it’s winter, does the safety pin move to the outer clothing, or does it stay on the shirt, where you can’t see it under the coat?  And if the person wearing the safety pin stands up and makes herself visible, or speaks up and makes his voice heard, is the safety pin really making any difference?  Who is it there for?  Is it a reminder to ourselves?  A signal to other people that we are virtuous?  Both?  Neither?  If it’s not combined with action, does it really mean anything at all?

My friend has five children.  Those kids need to know to stand up, and she’s teaching them how.  And she walks the walk and talks the talk.  She will stand up.  The pin represents something real, on her.  I wonder how many others that’s true for.  How many people are just trying to make themselves feel better?  And do I have any right to criticize anyone else for making a small gesture that makes the world seem a little less bleak than it has recently?

I probably do not.

There is an American flag on the wall in my office.  America decides to elect a fascist and I find that I can’t stand to look at it any longer.  I order a rainbow flag from Amazon and hang it over the American flag, without taking it down.

I still believe in the things that America is supposed to represent, but I’m not sure the Stars and Stripes represents those things any longer.  The rainbow flag is better.  It expresses my ideals more concisely.

It’s on the wall in my office.  No one but me and my family is ever really going to see it.  I leave it there anyway, because I need the reminder.  So, for that matter, does my son, once he’s old enough to understand what it means.

I find myself looking forward to the day when I can take it down.