Getting the political out of my system in short bursts, to make more room for things that matter.
The Matt Gaetz story is viciously distracting because the layers of slime just keep appearing from underneath. You probably know about his friend the gun-toting, ID-stealing, server-fire Tax Assessor, now in the process of throwing poor Matt under the bus in a plea deal. But seriously, who the fuck is this Nestor? Note that the Chapo treatment is from late last year before any of the recent allegations came to the light of common knowledge. Also note the weird ways in which the Q-Anon cultists were actually not completely crazy at all. This society is a rapey death cult, and all too often that’s not even a metaphor
Most people know by now that $15 an hour is a ridiculous band-aid (not that Progressive Joe can even keep that shabby promise), and that the real living wage, had it kept pace with the actual cost of living, would be much closer to $25. Which is what they pay experienced college professors with advanced degrees in this shitty unequal devolved ‘economy’, when they should be paying that at the entry level of wage slavery, by the standards of 1965. But take heart. Those who can afford not to work, or barely work at all, are doing fine. Minimum Wage Would Be $44 If It Grew Like Wall St Bonuses … thanks for giving us a fresh way to be pissed off, Kyle.
Speaking of Biden’s disappointments, the greatest of them all is him letting the legendary Kids In Cages saga go on and on and on, packing them into cells in the middle of a pandemic, and sending out his brown flak to plead about Human Dignity when the human reality damns her every hypocritical word. How seriously fucked up do you have to be to let Ted Cruz legitimately take the moral high ground over you? About that fucked up–watch it and weep.
Biden’s betrayals and failure were predictable, if not quite inevitable. But hey, we still have those Progressive Dems to save us, don’t we? Sadly, No. The fallen savior Senator Sanders can’t quite stop himself from running along convulsively in his pre-election Biden apologetics mode, still nattering about The Movement out of one side of his mouth while cheering about the Inside Game from the other, and in this clip even finds himself pressured from the left, astonishingly, by a fucking garden-variety MSNBC host. How we once loved you, Bernie.
Meanwhile the young squaddy resistance Dems carve their own credibility to shreds by much the same methods, with AOC incredulously defending Biden’s child concentration camps, full of babies that look like her, as so much better than the exact same shit under Trump. And managing to try and justify doing so even while prating on about how either situation is barbaric and wrong.
I give up. Two-party electoral politics is a sideshow full of hypocritical freaks, and if they’re not already fully corrupted when they get to the halls of power, their bankable mutations will never be long in evolving once they do. All the poser fights between them mean no more and maybe less than a Sunday afternoon of football in the crisp air of a dying cultural autumn.