Tag: 2020 election

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #115: The Whiny Little Bitches Ride Again!

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #115: The Whiny Little Bitches Ride Again!

He is the president but wants to be the king / Know what I like about the guy? Not a goddamn thing / I want to know, how can four years seem so long? / Lord have mercy, what the hell is going on? – “What The Hell,” written by Elvin Bishop, 2020.

I like Bill Maher’s show, but I haven’t been watching it much lately. Semi-populated audiences and well-distanced guests are quite appropriate these days, but I find it creepy on a comedy panel show. No biggie; one way or another, all this will pass.

So I can’t say for certain Maher continues to refer to Baby Don as “that whiny little bitch.” He was on the money when he started this, and either he’s right today or you really do think Hillary Clinton has been running a pederasty ring out of the basement of a Washington DC pizza joint – one that, I hasten to add, doesn’t even have a basement.

Oh. Right. Sorry. I’m talking about that whiny little bitch and not QAnon… per se.

I’m not going to whine about Trump. He is what he is (whatever that is) and, as Anderson Cooper said last Friday, Trump is no longer relevant. He is a loser reacting to his mammoth defeat exactly the way we knew he would react, and if he had made a sincere attempt at being a human being we might think “hey, look, an Elvis impersonator finally landed a new gig!”

Nope. Like Caligula, Trump is history. It’s his supporters that vex me. People who are or at least once were otherwise intelligent. People who truly believe the election was stolen, despite the fact that every state’s attorney general has affirmed the validity of their election results. Despite the fact that every judge, be he or she a Democrat or a Republican with a track record of drifting left or drifting right. They all have chucked the Trumpsters’ cases out of court. Trump lost at least his first 16 challenges, as of this writing. If he had one leg to stand on, he’d be Dudley Moore.

Trumpsters are crawing about how close this election was and, in their flea-ridden brainpans, any shift in the vote count most certainly would keep their savior in office. Really? Trump lost by five million votes (and counting), which is two million more votes than he lost by in 2016. But, as we all know, the United States is a republic and not a democracy, so the popular vote is merely a means to the end. It’s the electoral college that votes according to the laws of the elector’s individual states, and Trump lost that one 306 to 232.

57% to 43% is not close. In fact, four years ago when Trump won the electoral college by the exact same count Trump’s acolytes could not stop braying that 306 to 232 was a “landslide victory.” Well, numbskulls, if 306 to 232 was a landslide victory for Trump in 2016 then 306 to 232 is a landslide victory for Biden in 2020.

It has been well established that Trumpsters are science deniers. Let us remember that mathematics is a science and in the murky mentality of these mindless mopes, 232 Trump electoral votes is closer to 306 Biden votes than 306 Trump votes was to Clinton’s 232 a mere four years ago.

This weekend, literally hundreds of reason-challenged paranoids took to the streets of Washington DC to exercise their constitutionally-guaranteed right to have their disease spreading hissy fit. That’s fine by me. Make your voice heard. Stand up for your beliefs. Four years ago, I was at an anti-Trump demonstration held a mere three days after Trump’s election that was organized by high school kids – it attracted a couple thousand people. I gotta wonder what took the Trumpsters so long to get their act on the road.

Oh. Yeah. I get it. Cellphones and social networking also are products of science. They know how to whine online under the cover of their witless pseudonyms but most of them lack the courage and the skill to actually stand up for their beliefs. They are cowards who, fortunately for the rest of us, think Covid-19 isn’t a big deal and therefore are hellbent on killing one another. You know, just like the maskless imbeciles who invaded Sturges, South Dakota last August causing, according to USA Today, at least 414 COVID-19 cases and at least one death, as of September 8.

Whine on, little bitches, whine on.

Bye-bye Baby, bye-bye.

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #112: My Slight Change In Plans

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #112: My Slight Change In Plans

There may come a day I will dance on your grave / If unable to dance I will crawl across it / Unable to dance I will crawl / Yeah, unable to dance I will crawl – “Hell In A Bucket” written by John Barlow, 1982.

As we have approached election day – both presidential and “off-year” – for the past 48 years I have been writing about why it’s important to vote. I have managed to squeeze in this biannual sermon no matter where my words were being published. I have even gotten away with it at DC Comics, as well as on the air whenever somebody was silly enough to stick a microphone near my lips.

This time I’m doing the same, but I’m tweaking my usual message a little bit. This year people are particularly pissed, paranoid and peaky – even more so than usual, and for good reason.

Machiavellian Mitch “Moscow” McConnell has stacked the Supreme Court with a gaggle of far right-wing gangsters who have no regard for the words in the United States Constitution and the principles that make America unique. The chances of getting a fair count next week are event smaller than they were four years ago, when a minority of voters overruled the majority and shoved an unqualified, obnoxious Mussolini wannabe down our throats. Together, the two managed to nearly destroy the America we were taught about in school… while nearly destroying the schools themselves.

They haven’t finished the job, but there is still time to stop them. We’ve got exactly five days.

People are so upset that upwards of 80 million have voted already, many waiting in line between two and ten hours or more to do so. That is more than the total number of votes cast when I started this braying back in 1972.

Not all these people are voting against the fascist takeover – some are right-wing and/or religious bigots who conflate Donald J. Trump with Jesus H. Christ. It has been my impression that neither Trump nor McConnell actually speak for Christ, but I’ll leave that to those who care. Their führer has been encouraging them to wait and vote in person on election day, so that his numbers at the time of poll closing will be at their best, relatively speaking, and then he can declare victory, even if it’s untrue.

The fact is, by the time most of us who follow this sort of thing go to bed next Wednesday morning, we are quite likely to be lacking an informed, educated guess as to the winners. We probably won’t have to wait as long as we did in 2000, but we might if the Republican zealots can once again throw this to the Supreme Court.

That, of course, will be a horror show, one that will piss off millions of people no matter how the ruling(s) go. And by “piss off,” I mean “Katie bar the door.” Once again, gun sales are up – and do not infer that these increased sales are to Trump enthusiasts such as the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Marching Chowderhead Societies.

Way back in paragraph two I said I was tweaking my message a bit. Well, a promise is a promise.

In my previous pleas I said that whereas I had (usually obvious) preferences, you should vote either way. I still believe that is the proper thing to do… but “proper” isn’t the same as “appropriate.”

Trump, McConnell and Company have gone to great lengths to put their truly racist and bigoted programs into effect. I won’t bother to enumerate as the list is greater than our bandwidth and, besides, if you’ve read this far you already have made up your mind about all that. You might want to rid this nation of Latinos, Muslims, LGBTQ Americans, abortion, young Blacks who do not know their place, health care, public schools, reasonable prices for life-saving prescription drugs, for-profit prisons, lower taxes for the bottom 99% of Americans, and all this talk about global warming. Your having such a desire is your prerogative. I’m not in favor of hiring brain police; you believe in what you want.

Just don’t be surprised, shocked or offended if the sane majority tends to consider you a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a science-denier, et al… because that’s what you’re voting for.

That is what you are.

Have a happy election day. Bring a book, and remember: it is illegal for anybody, for any reason, to attempt to intimidate or force you out of voting.

With Further Ado #117: Oh Demokratia! Voting is Your Super Power!

With Further Ado #117: Oh Demokratia! Voting is Your Super Power!

It’s a rainy day here and one of my first thoughts was, “Am I ready to stand out in the rain if it’s like this on Election Day?” And just yesterday the absentee ballots for my Mom and Dad arrived at their house. They’ll get them into the mail ASAP. It’s that kind of season. I think we’re all planning ahead on how to ensure that our vote counts.

Everywhere there seems to be a focus on it.  Even in this past Sunday’s Prince Valiant. The classic newspaper strip was created by Hal Foster and now capably continued by Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates.  In this week’s adventure, Aleta, Queen of the Misty Isles, remarks upon a unique form of government she had heard about. It’s an idea where self-rule by the common folks.

“Oh, Demokratia!”, she exclaims. And they she remembers that the Greeks “tried it that centuries ago! It worked well for a time…but then the people grew lazy and timid, and decided to just let a tyrant do their thinking for them.” Continue reading “With Further Ado #117: Oh Demokratia! Voting is Your Super Power!”

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind  #108: What The Hell?

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mind #108: What The Hell?

He is the president but wants to be the king / Know what I like about the guy? Not a goddamn thing / I want to know, how can four years seem so long? / Lord have mercy, what the hell is going on? — What The Hell?, written by Elvin Bishop, 2020

It’s not Trump. History tells us most dictators and despots are deposed after a while, one way or another. Mental and emotional basket cases in major positions of power such as our president have been a dime a dozen. Unfortunately, they’re like Kleenex. Pull one out, the next one pops up immediately.

This is because a certain percentage of our population is weak and incapable or unwilling to think for themselves. They possess a powerful need to feel superior to others, so they buy into a system of venomous bigotry that marginalizes and sub-humanizes various groups of people they deem inferior because they do not possess the same skin color, religious philosophies, sexual orientation, gender and/or ethnicity as “real Americans.”

I used to think humans were basically good. Sure, we’ve all got our foibles, and there are a small handful of true deviants out there that require observation, but overall I’ve been pro-humanity. I stuck to this for two-thirds of a century. Silly me. I have been the great native naïvitist.

Then, about 63,000,000 Americans voted for Trump. “Say what?” I said. It doesn’t matter that Clinton received three million more votes than Trump. America is not and never has been a democracy. We are a republic and republics can be manipulated quite easily. The proof is in the White House right now. The proof is at the Trump rallies, the Republican QAnon fanatics running for office, the Bugaloos and their fellow agent provocateurs, and on the Supreme Court — the “highest” court in the land even now, 120 years after the Court stopped serving itself cocaine wine.

The fact is, Donald J. Trump could be shot dead at high noon on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue (instead of the other way around, which, you will recall, Trump said he could do without suffering any consequence) and we would still be left with those 63,000,000 paranoid goose-stepping hating cowards marching around this nation supporting the murder of Black people by police, the religious totalitarians who believe their so-called values and only their so-called values are kosher, the environment is doing swell, the Covid virus is a Democratic Party hoax, the liberals are going to confiscate your guns, and the people who think everybody on welfare are thieves and people not wealthy enough to afford health care deserve to die.

Yeah. Herd mentality, indeed.

The America we were taught to love and respect in school and in our houses of worship and on television barely existed on its best day. That’s what an experiment in progress is all about. It’s time to put the lie to that one. We’ve had our moments, but today America exists only as a fool’s paradise.

Watch the next five weeks as what’s left of the Republican Party lies, cheats and steals its way to cementing their dictatorship. One nation, by the people, for the wealthy, one nation under Trump and his cackling puppeteers.

I’ll vote because I haven’t missed an election yet. It’s a habit. Voting used to be an act of optimism but, today, voting is an act of rebellion. Maybe some good will come out of it; clearly, it’s worth the shot. It might be our next-to-last bullet in the chamber before that second Civil War starts.

So. Riddle me this. Who was worse, Hitler or Trump?

That one is easy. When the chips were down, at least Hitler had the decency to commit suicide.

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #033: Barr None!

Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #033: Barr None!

As you read these words, and thank you for that, you are one up on me. You’re reading this after the Barr Report is released. I’m writing this the evening before the Barr Report is released.

I’ll bet you don’t know a hell of a lot more about this report than I do, or I did last night, which, for me, is right now. Can we predict future history based upon past history? George Santayana be damned! Have a little patience!

Then again, one person’s patience is another person’s deadline.

It is my belief that the Barr Report isn’t going to do squat aside from raising the volume of our already ostentatious national discourse. It’s not the Mueller Report; it’s a gaily colored, heavily-censored phone book marked up by our nation’s most talented obfuscator, William Barr. Continue reading “Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind #033: Barr None!”