To all you pearl-clutchers, just stop it.  The election is over, and Kamala lost.  BIG TIME.  She lost because of Biden’s own poor judgement by staying in the race, his relentless institutionalism, Chuck Schumer’s maddening dawdling and insistence of following calcified rules, and the Democrats obsession with nose counting and identity politics.  Well bucko, THAT DIDN’T WORK.  AGAIN.  For fuck’s sake, people, STOP IT.

Half of the American electorate just voted for a convicted felon who ran on one thing – destroying what’s left of our society.  He’s poking decent people in the eye with his picks for top government jobs, intentionally trying to piss people off by nominating drunks, perverts, weirdos, rapists, criminals, and assholes to critical leadership roles.  He’s thumbed his nose, AGAIN, at every norm and law that presidents have followed for over 240 years. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about rules, the law, country or you. Period.  He’s in it for himself, and with the foot dragging of law enforcement, the Congress, and now the courts, he’s doing what he wants, when he wants.  He’s in the process of weaponizing the DOJ to turn us into 1933 Nazi Germany, and what are you doing?  Handwringing over Biden’s pardon of Hunter.

To be clear, Hunter is a broken, morally bankrupt person whose own personal life provided Trump a gigantic target for him and his goons, but you know what?  I don’t give a shit.  Trump actually got Republicans to mount an unrelenting attack on Hunter for the last 7 years to the point of Merrick Garland bending to political pressure and allowing a prosecution over crimes he had already confessed to and prosecuting him for a violation that is NEVER enforced.  It was nothing short of weaponizing a federal agency against a political enemy, ironically the EXACT thing Trump is howling about that supposedly happened to him after he tried to overthrow the US government, steal a national election, and violate a literal legion of federal and state laws.  He did all that while fucking Mitch McConnell twiddled his thumbs and miserably failed at his number one job of protecting the Constitution.

It’s time for handwringing progressives and Democrats to fucking stop it.  Getting pissed off about Biden’s pardon of Hunter is like an HOA going after someone who hasn’t mowed their lawn while ignoring a serial arsonist setting fire to the house across the street.  I’m sorry, but fretting over your pronouns and nose counting doesn’t help a goddam bit when the winning side is in the process of actually destroying what’s left of our society.  It’s time to get out the fucking flame thrower and start fighting fire with fire.  The reason that vulnerable members of our society are even at risk is that the bad guys are in control, and in the case of Texas, have been in control for 30 fucking years.  They’ve been in control for 30 fucking years because the leadership of the TDP are incompetent and/or bogged down in reams of silly rules and traditions instead of fighting for Texans.

The only way you fight an out of control fire is with fire.  It’s time to get out the flamethrowers, and fight dirty.  You can’t follow arcane rules and maintain decorum when your political opponent wants you in jail, or worse, dead.  Wake the fuck up, and put your pearls away.  Pick up the flamethrower and light it up.

News item: Biden Pardons His Son. In another timeline, this news would cause a universal gnashing of teeth as yet another outgoing president abuses the power of the pardon as he passes them out like party favors in the waning days of his term. It’s what lame ducks do, and we’ve all come to expect it.

Remember Marc Rich?

But all I can say, upon reading the headlines on Sunday, that Joe Biden gave his sole surviving son a sweeping pardon for his crimes is “Good for you, Joe.”

This comes after a long drawn-out sideshow of Hunter Biden’s trials, aborted plea deals, stolen laptops, and President Biden’s repeated assurances that pardoning his son was a non-starter. Not since Billy Carter was derided and defiled simply because he was a presidential family member that took advantage of that fact, has a relative been drawn-and-quartered and given public whippings by the Righteous Right.

The abuse had to stop, and we finally got to see Biden eke out a win after all this time, even if it was (literally) by his own hand.

The timing of the announcement couldn’t have been more perfect, coming as it did after Don the Con promoted a former heroin addict to the Department of Health and Human Services, and named a scheming and disgusting former felon to Ambassador to France. What a massive F-You to Americans and the entire world over just these two actions. Given the smelly s–t sandwich that Bronzer Boy just served up to us, the sackcloth and ashes being worn by right wingers over Hunter’s reprieve is laughable by half.

In his way, I think, President Biden simply realized the truth of what was first noted by French philosopher Michel de Montaigne when he considered the negative blowback he would receive over his son’s pardon.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

It has been a while since the last time we had a president-elect Trumpelstiltskin. I can still remember the sick feelings of loss and disgust when he won the first time by a gnat’s eyelash. But the post-election malaise that is setting in right now is unprecedented as is every other damned thing this time.

I bear witness to the fear and loathing taking place from Lubec, Maine to Lebec, California, as we await the second term of His Shartfulness with two observations.

First, what is with the dipping viewership of broadband cable news channels MSNBC and CNN? I don’t recall that from before. Is the whole Left in such a state of loathing and disgust that watching it unfold again and again on TV is too much to bear? Yes. I can understand the spectacular crash and burn of Joe and Mika’s once-popular morning show on MSNBC (more on that later), but the whole liberal news genre seems to have to scrounge for a vanished audience. Yes, it’s hard to watch, but it’s time to wake up and taste the bitter dregs. America really screwed the pooch this time, but we still need to pay attention, more so because this time we really dug ourselves a hole by electing an a-hole.

The other thing that seems to be new is the desire to be fair and impartial, especially after being treated to such over-the-top rhetoric before 11/5. Joe and Mika went to Mar-A-Lago to make nice with the president-elect, and they lost 31% of their audience almost immediately. Could it be that, as Jon Stewart posited the week after their pilgrimage, they said he was Hitler?

But it didn’t stop there. Whoopi Goldberg is willing to “wait and see.”

Quoting her: “I’m not going to waste a lot of time on what he might do. I’m gonna wait because I need to see what he will do so that I know what I’m gonna do.”

Are you kidding me? Whoopi has the distinction of being compared to Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s filmographer, by an anti-abortion ad that was aired during a commercial break on The View. That really happened.

At least they didn’t call her Hitler.

Even Ana Navarro (who I remember as an evil Republican back in the good old days) said, “I spent weeks telling people he was apocalyptic. I’m not going to change now because it’s still the same man! I think that’s when we lose credibility.”

Ya think?

You can’t spend months proclaiming from the mountaintops that the apocalypse is nigh if Captain Bone Spurs gets elected, and then adopt a reasonable “can’t we all get along?” approach when it actually happens. That’s lazy. That’s disingenuous.

And it just isn’t who we are.