Hey, I see that infrastructure bill finally passed the House, about nine minutes after I got last week’s post up, no doubt because Joe Biden covets my Friday night thunder. In fairness, the Democratic Party’s achievements this year, the trillions of dollars worth of new progressive policy, all accomplished with the narrowest of majorities, are perhaps marginally more impressive than the drunken ramblings of a failed stage actor in a luchador mask, but I refuse to concede until every ballot is counted.

Now, the bill was ever-so-slightly bipartisan, which of course means just one thing in modern conservative politics: a volley of death threats for the apostate Reps, from the feral base! Real healthy mindset they’ve got over there, huh?

“Dear Congressman X,

It has come to my attention that you believe roads and bridges should be repaired. As per the clearly-defined tenets of our death cult, your entire family must now be violently murdered. I regret it has come to this.

I remain your obedient servant,

@MAGAsm1488#BLMSUXXX”

Republican campaigning from here on out is gonna be a never-ending procession of low-rent Donald Trump cosplay pageants, which is, my God, exhausting to contemplate, but at least we’ll be granted comic relief, in the form of Ted Cruz’s doomed, clumsy efforts to inspire devotion in the faithful, with that creepy, preacher-from-the-uncanny-valley thing he’s got going. Anyway, he’s picking fights with Muppets now, like a normal human culture warrior would.

“BIG BIRD IS A COMMUNIST SEND TWEET. Are we viral yet, Mildred?” Oh, Ted. Bless your heart. Maybe you can put together a little support group with Mike Pence, a sort of I Debased Myself For Years and All I Got Was the Fervent Disdain of a Bloodthirsty Mob Anonymous kind of thing.

What must it feel like to be Mike Pence right about now? Listening to your BFF (that’s “Best Fascist Friend,” if you’re unfamiliar with current slang) casually but completely take the side of the frothy flock of buttholes that giddily sought your public execution? “I was treated very unfairly, what’re they supposed to do, not hang Mike Pence?”

That must truly suck, Mr. Vice President. Guess the lesson here is “don’t enable authoritarian tyrants,” huh?

I understand everybody’s at Stage: Fuck It with the pandemic, (Joke’s on you, Aaron Rodgers, we’re all too fucking tired to cancel you. Use whatever animal medication you desire, bro. I hear the suppositories are a trip around the fuckin’ moon.) but you’ll no doubt be shocked, shocked to learn the suicide-by-Facebook/Covid-team-up gap continues to grow along decidedly partisan lines.

You have to give grudging admiration to the Right’s propaganda peddlers; on issues ranging from access to insurance to pollution to vaccines during a once-in-a-generation, global pandemic, they’ve made millions of Americans choose, nay, demand self-harm over self-preservation. The evolutionary implications are fucking staggering; it took billions of years, but we’ve developed a brain capable of deceiving itself into discarding hard-won survival instincts. We musta taken a wrong turn back at Albuquerque.

The January 6 commission’s list of new subpoena targets is a real Who’s Who of treacherous crotchtumors, isn’t it? So many enormous pieces of shit on that list, they’re gonna have to hold these hearings in a diaper.

Now, I understand the wingnut media is desperate to drum up outrage against an administration that generates relatively little controversy, with their boring-ass decency/law-abidingness, but this week’s attempts to project the veneer of scandal onto the President and Vice-President were fairly pathetic, even by the standards of the gibbering wad of mediocrity that worships a visibly-deteriorating doofus who thinks exercise is bad for you and has proven incapable of mastering the intricacies of the wily umbrella.

So hey, put in some nose plugs and grab a barf bag, because we need to talk about Paul Gosar for a minute. I like to think of Paul as a Nazi velociraptor. Remember Jurassic Park, the raptors testing the fences? That’s Gosar. That’s his whole job; he pulls increasingly brazen Nazi shit, largely to see if he can get away with it. Nothing much happened when he threw a fundraiser with a noted white nationalist, for example, so he’s testing another section of the fence now.

(At a certain point, it’d probably be helpful to notice the House’s burgeoning Happening Here Caucus doesn’t appear especially interested in pursuing legislative avenues to change, and that “United States Representative” isn’t a responsibility to them, or even a job…just a platform.)

Anyway, as I’m sure you’re aware, Gosar shared a particularly sleazy little piece of murder propaganda from his hate cult’s deeeeeeeeeeeply warped internet culture, and…yeah. We can waste time in nitpicking arguments over plausible deniability, or just how much presumption of good faith we owe to people who have already incited terrorist violence and clearly aim to incite more, but wouldn’t it be more useful to skip straight to dealing with the reality that an influential Republican official just said, “what we should do with people who disagree with us is kill them,” and barely any member of his party could be bothered to disagree with, let alone condemn him?

Tested the fence, y’see. No shock. Censure is a good start.

So, a brand-new watchdog report revealed to the public that at least THIRTEEN high-ranking officials of the recently-deposed regime, up to and including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, violated a very significant law, stealing federal resources from every American taxpayer for selfish political purposes, but if there is one thing I have learned since 2016, it is that Hatch Act violations do not, sad to say, generate clicks. Insert infuriating Kellyanne Conway clip here.

In saner days, getting caught committing such big, fat crimes tended to end political careers, and that was a good thing. When you stop enforcing that standard, (and, y’know, THE LAW) you wind up with Gosars and Taylor Greenes rampaging through the hallways, fucking with the instruments of government in Washington while fanning the flames of hate back home.

See, the crazies have had their taste of power, and they want it back, and they know the only way to grab it and keep it is to get rid of every adult in the room once and for all. Didja see that memo from John McEntee, aka Autogolpe Human Resources during the final days of the fall of the Turd Reich? The memo laying out the “case” to dismiss Defense Secretary Mark Esper over opposing the confederate flag and refusing to deploy the military against civilian protesters? Consider that a teaser trailer for what’ll happen on Day One if these greedy little termites successfully gnaw their way back into the White House.

While the bureaucratic wrecking crew plots the dismantling of the institutions of government, a little closer to the proverbial grassroots, right on schedule, you’ve got conservative school board members, gleefully calling for a good, old-fashioned, public book-burning, without a lick of shame, in the naked light of day.

Now, I know you creeps think you’re being all sneaky with this stuff, but if it’s come to  book-burning, and it apparently has, you’re not allowed to get pissy when people call you Nazis. If they had a Family Feud category called Things Nazis Do, burning books would be on the fucking board, so sit your book-burning Nazi ass down and shut the fuck up.

So, the Rittenhouse trial…or should I say say, Judge Bruce Schroeder’s sloppy stumble down the media runway? You know your national culture’s in a healthy place when you’re working out whether or not angry white folks deserve the right to wave semiautomatic weapons at strangers and then slaughter their way out of whatever trouble arises.

Regardless of the eventual verdict, Mr. Rittenhouse is, um, not destined for the stage. Folks, I grew up doing community musical theatre in suburban Kansas City, I thought I’d experienced the outer limits of obscenely phony emoting*, but…yikes. They won’t have closing arguments, just Kyle’s blubbering rendition of On My Own.

If you felt like tying all this shit up with a pretty ribbon and sticking a bow on it, you could be forgiven for observing that so many of these stories, from Gosar to Pompeo to Rittenhouse, indicate the American Right is toying rather vigorously with the idea that crime, even violent crime, in pursuit of maintaining white supremacy, oughtn’t really be considered crime at all. And that is an awfully flammable canister these children are playing with.

“Bannon indicted” would be the two sexiest words in the English language, were it not for the extreme gag reflect triggered by linking the name “Bannon” to the concept of sex. I apologize for this paragraph, which is more or less a war crime. Still…Bannon indicted, I’ll drink to that.

Okay, it’s the holidays, and every third headline screams INFLATION, so I don’t want to push the comic book too hard this week, but yes, the Kickstarter for ODD YARNS is indeed live, and we could indeed use some help. Check out the page if you have a minute, and toss us a pledge if it looks like somethin’ that’d bring you a smile. (It totally will, by the way.)

Let me just take a quick moment to express my deepest thanks to everyone who’s backed this project, and everyone who’s backed the earlier ones, (Marguerite is on the way, promise!) heck, to everyone who’s ever stopped to read any individual post of this years-long barrage of inebriated shouting…it’s a fun little life y’all have helped me to, and I thank you for it.

Stay safe out there, my friends!

*How many white kids have I watched sing Ol’ Man River? Lots, okay? Lots.