If there's one thing that never gets old it's watching professional assholes getting swallowed up in their own shit storms. Seeing Milo Yiannapolous get booted from CPAC and lose his book deal with Simon and Schuster after the video of him saying sex between 30-year-olds and 14-year-olds is fine if the teenager consents to it and that he was the instigator of his own molestation on the Joe Rogan podcast started making the Internet rounds. Milo, of course, deeply regretted his word choices now that they've come back to bite him so viciously, and even made a Facebook post with links to his stories of outing other pedophiles as proof of his hatred for the practice. The only problem with all of that is the first person he names was never even charged with any sex crimes, and the second has had accusations against her going back to 2006. So, of the three, one was never actually charged with anything, ever, the second was Milo piggybacking off of long established info, and the third is up for trial. Not exactly the sterling crusader record he's projecting, but, we all have to work with what we have.
It's been legitimately hilarious watching Milo trying to play the victim in all this. The guy who got kicked off Twitter for telling his followers to hurl racist and sexist slurs at Leslie Jones because... she's black and a woman or something is suddenly deploring how awful it is that people can suffer because of public pressure generated from something on the internet. Indeed, dude, that's just awful.
The more interesting aspect of all this is just how shocked Milo, someone who makes a living outraging people, is that people are outraged by something he said. Well, more specifically, that he's experiencing negative consequences for said outrage instead of getting paid for it. Giving liberals the vapors has always been Milo's bread and butter, now that he's resigned from Breitbart, however, Milo doesn't have the direct platform to rebuild is brand to his main audience. Sure, he's still got his Facebook profile now, but it's looking like what was supposed to be a banner year for the self-proclaimed dangerous faggot will instead start to be very lean indeed.
Which, really, he should've seen coming. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are in a lot of ways Milo's forebears in exemplifying right-wing douchery and both of them had their own falls from grace (although the two of them actually got to deliver their speeches to CPAC before that happened). Limbaugh did himself in with the whole Sandra Fluke fiasco, which cost him advertisers and affiliates he's never been able to recover from. Beck burned out because that's really the only road his brand of crazy made available to him, and has been sliding ever deeper into irrelevance over at The Blaze. So, the good news seems to be that once these assholes cross the point of no return, there's really no coming back for them. Because for all the talk about how these guys are men of their own making, men who are bold and reshape the world with their sheer force of personality, when the chips are down all of them turn out to be petty little things that just wind up complaining about how unfair the world is and they just can't get a fair shake from all the PC, SJW Feminazi's out to get them.
Underneath all his flamboyance, Milo is a garden variety white-supremacist, and once someone new comes along to justify conservatives hate-boners, he'll be left to wither along with the rest of the right-wing blowhards who got shunted once they became too toxic to support; and a demagogue without a microphone, after all, is just a loud, belligerent asshole you have to skip past on the sidewalk. Good riddance, I say, and on to the next.
Monday, February 27, 2017
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
In Stupid We Trust
If there's one saving grace to the Trump presidency, it's that Trump sucks at his job. This isn't exactly surprising, considering anytime Trump directly led a company with his name on it it quickly went bankrupt, but still, there's a small comfort in knowing that someone with such a long history of executive failure has learned absolutely nothing from the experience. Who knew that Trump's pathological inability to admit to failure could actually be a boon? If he isn't going to adapt or improve himself, he can't really be all that effective, which, like I said, is at least something to be optimistic about.
That incompetence was on full display in every aspect of the creation and implementation of his Muslim Ban executive order. The act is the first real, concrete policy Trump has followed through on and it has fallen apart in an almost embarrassing easy way. From it's muddled and confused implementation to its patently off-the-top-of-their-head legal defense, it is incredibly obvious that no one in the Administration actually took five minutes to think about what would happen once the order was put into effect. I say this because it's really difficult for me to accept that the best legal argument the Justice Department could come up with would be to stand up in front of a judge and say with a straight face that banning people from countries that have literally never been involved in any terrorist attack on the U.S. is in the interest of national security, totally, that's all that it is. That their (ahem) trump card when that argument failed would be "Well, it's national security and stuff, so, uh, the courts don't have a right to rule on that. So there," is proof enough to me that nobody at Justice actually had the chance to look at the order and prepare themselves for the inevitable challenges that would follow.
It is also isn't hard to accept that no lawyer or legal expert looked at the order before it went out, either. Because if they had, they probably would've mentioned that banning people with green cards and visas- a.k.a people who have already been granted the legal right to enter the country- is an easily exploitable legal issue to shut down the whole order. They would've also pointed out that shutting out potentially tens of thousands of people from entering the country without any due process for said people to challenge their exclusion is also incredibly shaky legal ground to stand on and won't survive the first person to challenge it. But it honest-to-goodness looks like Trump et al. did nothing to avoid these pitfalls because the idea that someone would try to stop them never seems to have crossed their mind.
Which is mind-boggling when you think about it. The Muslim Ban was already one of the most controversial aspects of a Trump presidency when the idea spilled out of his mouth in the primaries. And yet, the Administration was still caught flat-footed by the counter-punch virtually anyone with skin the game promised would immediately come if he made that policy a reality. So, the question becomes, if the President is this incapable of handling the obvious challenges to his policies, what's he going to do when an actual curve-ball comes his way?
Sure, it's nice to be snarky about how his first signature proposal is going down in flames. And it's also fun to snipe at the Republicans shitting bricks over the political consequences of something they've been threatening for seven years now. Sadly, the nature of the job means that we are going to need Trump to make a good decision about something, at some point. That our main hope legitimately seems to be that since he is so incredibly dumb he may bungle his own fuck-ups and thus limit their damage is the opposite of comforting. Then again, we wouldn't really need hope if we had something good to look forward to, would we?
Of course, there is an alternative. I could be wrong about everything, and the response the Trump team took could actually be the result of many long, carefully thought out conversations. I don't really want to consider this option because if this is what the best the Trump administration can do, on purpose, then the possibility of what could happen when they have to make a decision on the fly with no time to think is just too goddamn depressing to think about.
That incompetence was on full display in every aspect of the creation and implementation of his Muslim Ban executive order. The act is the first real, concrete policy Trump has followed through on and it has fallen apart in an almost embarrassing easy way. From it's muddled and confused implementation to its patently off-the-top-of-their-head legal defense, it is incredibly obvious that no one in the Administration actually took five minutes to think about what would happen once the order was put into effect. I say this because it's really difficult for me to accept that the best legal argument the Justice Department could come up with would be to stand up in front of a judge and say with a straight face that banning people from countries that have literally never been involved in any terrorist attack on the U.S. is in the interest of national security, totally, that's all that it is. That their (ahem) trump card when that argument failed would be "Well, it's national security and stuff, so, uh, the courts don't have a right to rule on that. So there," is proof enough to me that nobody at Justice actually had the chance to look at the order and prepare themselves for the inevitable challenges that would follow.
It is also isn't hard to accept that no lawyer or legal expert looked at the order before it went out, either. Because if they had, they probably would've mentioned that banning people with green cards and visas- a.k.a people who have already been granted the legal right to enter the country- is an easily exploitable legal issue to shut down the whole order. They would've also pointed out that shutting out potentially tens of thousands of people from entering the country without any due process for said people to challenge their exclusion is also incredibly shaky legal ground to stand on and won't survive the first person to challenge it. But it honest-to-goodness looks like Trump et al. did nothing to avoid these pitfalls because the idea that someone would try to stop them never seems to have crossed their mind.
Which is mind-boggling when you think about it. The Muslim Ban was already one of the most controversial aspects of a Trump presidency when the idea spilled out of his mouth in the primaries. And yet, the Administration was still caught flat-footed by the counter-punch virtually anyone with skin the game promised would immediately come if he made that policy a reality. So, the question becomes, if the President is this incapable of handling the obvious challenges to his policies, what's he going to do when an actual curve-ball comes his way?
Sure, it's nice to be snarky about how his first signature proposal is going down in flames. And it's also fun to snipe at the Republicans shitting bricks over the political consequences of something they've been threatening for seven years now. Sadly, the nature of the job means that we are going to need Trump to make a good decision about something, at some point. That our main hope legitimately seems to be that since he is so incredibly dumb he may bungle his own fuck-ups and thus limit their damage is the opposite of comforting. Then again, we wouldn't really need hope if we had something good to look forward to, would we?
Of course, there is an alternative. I could be wrong about everything, and the response the Trump team took could actually be the result of many long, carefully thought out conversations. I don't really want to consider this option because if this is what the best the Trump administration can do, on purpose, then the possibility of what could happen when they have to make a decision on the fly with no time to think is just too goddamn depressing to think about.
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