So certain is Santa’s naughty verdict, I doubt America even bothered leaving a stocking out this year. Though down in Texas, under Greg Abbott’s Freedom Grid, I’m told they frankly could use the coal.

Yes, I offer season’s greetings from 21st-century America, a not-at-all-dystopian society in which absolutely zero public school teachers participate in dehumanizing debasement rituals presented as entertainment for the masses, least of all in the great and prosperous state of Noemistan. Everything’s fine, and to imply otherwise is disloyal. (Winston, kindly purge this paragraph from the official record.)

If anything, you should congratulate our thriving, super-healthy culture on its brand-new holiday: enjoy SCHOOL SHOOTING DAY, brought to you by TikTok! Commemorate the omnipresent dread of raising a child in a society that prioritizes the weapon-accumulating rights of would-be mass murderers over your offspring’s physical and psychological safety!

(Me, I think this is just another cynical ploy by the greeting card industry, to juice sales of their increasingly popular, “Sympathy to your family for enduring this once unimaginable, now fairly commonplace horror” line. Won’t be long until they need a whole aisle at the grocery store: so sorry your son/daughter/sister/brother/friend/mom/dad/nephew/French teacher got shot to death by a disturbed teenager/possessive ex-lover/white nationalist terrorist/random guy having a bad day.)

Anyway, don’t take off your celebratin’ pants just yet, cuz the USA absolutely strutted past that 800,000 Covid deaths line, miles ahead of any other nation on Earth! Mind you, that’s with our new buddy, Omicron, only just starting to size up the buffet.

And, predictably, Red America offers itself up to the ravenous new variant eagerly, almost politely, like a little cake that says Eat Me.

What do you even do with these people anymore? You suggest self-preservation, and they get SO MAD. “I have a Constitutional right to harm myself, and to harm those around me, based on the misconceptions of reality I get from wasting my entire life watching liars on television,” and no, that’s not actually true, but you’re wrong about so many things, I don’t know where to start; anyhoo, guess it’s time for another wave of MAGA madness to crash down upon our poor, battered hospitals.

(Hey, get your booster shot, by the way…y’all are already on top of that, right?)

While we’re on the pandemic, a new report from the House says the Trump Administration undermined the nation’s coronavirus response ON FUCKING PURPOSE, and I have to ask, like…are there supply chain issues in the pitchfork and torch industries? Both at the same time? Do we still get mad when somebody kills tens of thousands of us, or are we all just teetering piles of boiled frog meat by now?

As we reflect upon the wretched, piss-stained, pretty-sure-there-were-fire-ants-for-a-couple-weeks year that was 2021, I have to say, I think I’ll remember it mostly as the year the GOP Kissed an Attempted Fascist Coup (And They Liked It).

It’s that parenthetical bit that’s been poking me in the eye lately…the latest news from the January 6th commission has us looking back to that brief moment in time when even some fairly Trumpy Republicans understood that things had gotten out of hand, and said so; and it looked like we could come together again, which is what we used to do when the homeland got attacked by terrorists. And maybe we could all agree to take the off-ramp that so graciously presented itself, and get back to making our own mistakes instead of repeating history’s.

That moment was…awfully dang brief.

You look at the GOP now, and they’re basically operating as Donald Trump without the attention-grabbing clown makeup; all the same tactics, all the same goals, but generating much less outrage and therefore much less pushback.

It’s all proceeding with the efficiency the Koch crew has come to expect from their outrage-farming efforts. Cult45’s most fervent missionaries are already taking over local election infrastructure wherever possible. Shit, you can’t even run for Governor of Minnesota on the Republican ticket without genuflecting to the Big Lie…this isn’t goons on a deadline stumbling around, stepping on every possible rake anymore; it’s more organized every single day; these creeps’re choosing this adventure deliberately and consistently.

And we should be honest about that! Because Mark Meadows’ texts, and his e-mails, y’all…I mean, we’re talking about the chief coordinating officer for a massive criminal conspiracy to end constitutional democracy in the United States based on something Louie Gohmert saw on the internet; the contents of this treacherous clown’s phone were gonna generate some headlines, but…fuck, why is it always even worse than I was expecting? Because I was already expecting “idiot Nazi crime spree,” okay?

It’s like cracking open the chest of a lifelong smoker, and yeah, you find the ruined lungs, but there’s also a brown, oily, mass of maggots where the heart should be. This is also a handy metaphor for the American Right generally.

For example, turns out no less than SIX sitting U.S. Congressmen actively collaborated with the Trump White House’s (lest we forget) fascist coup attempt. Pretty cool that these documented enemies of American democracy get to retain their full legislating powers, isn’t it? Like, outside of “No one gets to be in charge but us,” what other laws do you think we should have, Mr. Jordan?

That’s to say nothing of Meadows’ private assurances, on January 5th, that come the day of the deed, the National Guard would stand ready to enter the fray…but only on one side. Chilling. Y’know, I never get called by pollsters, but if anybody ever asked me about Mark, I do believe I’d be tempted to go so far as to strongly disapprove.

And then there’re the texts with the haughty propagandists of Fox News, providing valuable insight into the sensation of pure, uncut, Mary Shelley clarity one experiences at the precise moment puppeteering a President stops being fun.

Hannity, Ingraham and Kilmeade, name a more iconic three-mouthed rectum, I’ll wait. Probably less than ideal that these were the folks conversing with the White House Chief of Staff during a terrorist attack on Congress, but hey, it took a whole bunch of zany misadventures to get us to January 6th in the first place.

Anyway, they’ve all once again been revealed as cheap, lying grifters, not that anyone in their audience will notice. These bastards take their indoctrination seriously, and it shows; you can’t get folks to swallow a steady diet of shit and nothing but shit with just parsley sprigs and sleight of hand, y’know; you have to reach deep inside that ol’ cranium, and rip out some wiring. Otherwise, when the curtain gets yanked back like this, and the rubes get such a clear look at the con, and the sneering disdain in which they’re held, they might ask for something else to eat.

But no, they’re gonna line up same time tomorrow for a fresh bowl of shit and a clean spoon. You almost have to admire the craftsmanship of the disinformation-dispensing apparatus.

Speaking of, I see Chris Wallace decided to sneak out the back door at Fux before the War on Xmas turns hot and the office party starts incorporating live sacrifices of the unfaithful. Probably wise.

Wallace’s successor as the network’s last, flagging voice of reason begging the mob to maintain some small shred of sanity and/or decency will be…what, Geraldo? Fucking GERALDO? Well, I’m sure he’s up to it.

Down in The Villages, they’re too old and rich to handle cop-bludgeoning duties on the front lines, but they’re every bit as dumb and disloyal as any Proud Boy. No doubt hoping to pull their own weight in the struggle to eradicate democracy, a trio of golf cart insurrectionists instead received a fun lil’ lesson on just how efficiently existing laws deal with the handful of asshats dumb enough to actually attempt voter fraud.

While it was previously reported that the RNC would submissively take on Pumpkin Spice Pol Pot’s personal legal bills, we’ve now learned the precise extent of the cucking; it’s $1.6 million these hopeless chumps have committed, plus Reince Priebus has to deliver the check in person every month, at which time he is forced to chug a sneakerful of Eric’s urine in front of the whole family.

So, I see the same piece of shit who once proclaimed the Jews-will-not-replace-us-screechers of the world to be “very fine people” yet again casually vomited up an anti-Semitic diatribe indistinguishable from the background chatter at Richard Spencer’s board game night; weird how that kind of stuff keeps happening, especially with institutional racism being so fake and all.

Still, like most white supremacists, the Deposed Dotard mostly just careens from failure to failure. He lost another big’n in court this week, those precious tax returns won’t remain secret much longer. Plus, he’s such a big fancy kingmaker man now that they’re writing whole articles mocking his impotent attempts to dethrone Mitch McConnell. Shit, the sloppy old has-been STILL can’t manage a layup as easy as an Alabama Senate primary. To me, this is exactly why you don’t build your cult of personality around an enormous loser, but hey…tastes vary.

All that said, owing to the holiday season and my desperate need to drain the poison from my brain, I will be taking next week OFF from this blog. I’ll be back on New Year’s Eve, no doubt rejuvenated, and armed with new, cutting-edge poop jokes.

Anyway, I gotta go; Bannon’s stuck in my chimney; he’s threatening to breathe on the yuletide fire, and I fear the gin fumes would set the entire neighborhood ablaze. Stay safe out there, please enjoy the seasonal rituals of your choosing, secular or otherwise.