Below are the 8 most recent journal entries recorded in The Rude Pundit's InsaneJournal:

Thursday, January 17th, 2019
10:45 pm	More Rudeness Awaits You at Patreon http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/01/more-rudeness-awaits-you-at-patreon.html Look, you get to the weekend and you think, "Damn, I wish there was just a little more rudeness I could squeeze out of that motherfucker." Jesus, how many times do I need to tell you: join the Rude Pundit Patreon page. For $1 a month, you get a never-blogged Patreon-only post once per month, along with an occasional audio Rude Storytime. (Yes, the word "rude" will be used a few more times.) For $3 a month, you get a weekly Patreon-only post, and even more audio Rude Storytime. My voice, in your ears, like a tender lover. Or an overly talkative cabbie. New storytime this weekend, along with a new blog post. For $5 a month, you get all of the above, plus extended interviews from Another Goddamn Podcast. Upcoming interviews will feature some hilarious writers and comedians, awesome Tweeters, and maybe a serious political pundit or two. For $10 a month, you get all of that, eternal gratitude, and, when I put together my upcoming Rude Pundit live show, a free ticket. Donate more than that and I might be obligated to do weird sex things with you. I'll have to check Patreon's TOS. I'm getting close to the magic number of donations where I can afford to hire someone to edit the podcast so they can be pumped out at a faster clip than one whenever-I-goddamn-well-get-around-to-it. And if you're someone who's all like "Fuck that monthly donation shit. I just wanna give my hard-earned cash right away and be left the fuck alone," you can donate at PayPal by clicking the button over there or this link right here. You give $50 or more, and I'll send you a novella-long collection of last year's written posts. Over 60 pages of, you guessed it, rudeness, punctuated with drinking, a few drugs, and the baffling world of QAnon, along with talk about movies, music, and other pop culture shit, as well as tales about horrible people and about lovely people. Oh, and how I was a mall Santa. I've already sent it out to about a dozen donors. It's like getting a Rude Pundit book except more expensive. But you'll know that you have helped keep me drunk, high, and angry, and, really, isn't that about all we can ask for in the USA in 2019? (Big thanks to everyone who has donated so far. You are like angels who fuck, and those are the best kind.) (Comment on this)
7:15 pm	Latest Trump Defense: He's Just an Ignorant Boob http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/01/latest-trumps-defense-hes-just-ignorant.html Twice this week, an odd defense was offered for the rank incompetence and blatant criminality of President Donald Trump, who is just an engorged slug that thinks a long tie makes him look less obese (it doesn't). Not surprisingly, that defense rested on something that would be hard to deny, that Trump is an oblivious ignoramus who doesn't even really give a shit about what's going on around him. In his upcoming book, I'm Finished, disgraced Trump lackey and terrible former governor, Chris Christie, is brutally honest about all the people who dicked him over when he wanted to be Vice President or Attorney General. Trump did offer Christie the position of "special assistant to the president in the White House," or "ball-washer," and, to his credit, Christie declined. But of the people surrounding Trump, including his miserable cockmite of a son-in-law, Christie writes that they're a "revolving door of deeply flawed individuals  amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons." And on many occasions, "the president was ill served by poor advice." As for Trump himself? Christie is nearly worshipful: "The president is utterly fearless and a unique communicator, Christie writes  and his main flaw is that he speaks on impulse and surrounds himself with people he should not trust." If all you hire are idiots, motherfuckers, and assholes, then that's because you are some combination of those. And if you don't recognize when your family members are too goddamn naive to do a job, that's on you. But Christie's defense of Trump here is something along the lines that he's just a good-hearted boob who didn't realize who he was putting in his administration. The truth is that he wants lickspittles to nuzzle up to his man-tits and suckle there. Whether they are criminals or naifs doesn't matter as long as the drink his orange milk. (Note: my brain is not a happy place.) Speaking of criminals, Trump attorney and monster in a silent horror movie, Rudy Giuliani, went on CNN last night and really said, "I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign [with Russia]. I said the president of the United States." Giuliani walked it back a bit today, saying, "There was no collusion by President Trump in any way, shape or form. Likewise, I have no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands of people who worked on the campaign." And, because no statement involving Trump and/or Giuliani can ever be devoid of abject dickishness, he added (really), "The only knowledge I have in this regard is the collusion of the Clinton campaign with Russia, which has so far been ignored," which would weirdly mean that Hillary Clinton had the Russians hack her campaign and party, and, well, no. Again, the defense of Trump here is ignorance. Overbite McForehead is right that Trump cannot possibly know what every single campaign worker did. (And that would go for Clinton, too, but fuck her, right?) Surely, it might be possible that Jesse Magaface, who was paid for putting up Trump signs in Cousin Fuck, Alabama, coordinated with Russian hackers to steal emails from the DNC. But, you know, we also have Paul fuckin' Manafort, who was the campaign manager, giving info to Russia. It's weird, you know. Of all the people Trump could have hired, a whole bunch of them seem to have connections to Russia or Russian oligarchs or Russia-supporting Ukrainians. The odds of that happening without actively seeking people with those connections are pretty fuckin' astronomical. But let's say that Christie and Giuliani are right: that poor Donald Trump has just been bumblefucking along since 2015, blind to all the treachery and chicanery that went on in his name. If we're saying that, then we're implying that he just doesn't give a damn and has left hiring decisions to his terrible children and his skeevy little worm of a son-in-law, that he just wants to play president because he gets off on the attention. So then every crisis, every failure, every harm that has been done by the desperate fools and grifters around him has been to serve his bloated ego. And yet even that doesn't let him off the hook. The FBI wants to take down a mob boss not because he himself has committed the worst crimes but because he has made it possible for them to be committed. The Trump campaign and the Trump administration all lead to one person, even if he pleads that he is just a credulous, manipulated dotard. More likely, though, Trump knows exactly what's been going on and he fuckin' loves it. (Update: This post previously had a joke title of Chris Christie's book that apparently had already been made on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. So it was changed because I'd rather have my own goddamn joke there.) (Comment on this)
1:16 am	Let Us Pause to Appreciate Just How Batshit Insane Trump's Speech on Monday Was http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/01/let-us-pause-to-appreciate-just-how.html We've become numb to the shitstream of babbling insanity that flows from the mouth of Donald Trump and into the anxious ears of his demented fanatics. However, whenever we think that he can't go any lower, stupider, crasser, or crazier, he always pushes that line below sea level, to the point where I think it's gone through the other side of the earth and is heading into space. But our general reaction to something like the Fast Food Feast he force-fed the Clemson football team has a predictable arc, from "What the fuck? Are you fucking kidding me?" to "Goddamn, this is so fucking embarrassing" to "Well, now that I think about it, did I expect that fucker to do anything else?" Still, Trump's speech Monday at the American Farm Bureau Federation convention in New Orleans was epically nuts, even by Trump standards. Here he is right after getting laughter for mocking the media, veering into horror: "Women and children are being ruthlessly exploited at our southern border by vicious coyotes -- who would think of this? Human traffickers. Now, when you hear the words 'human traffickers,' you think about 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago." Yes, I know. 160 years ago, tops. I know, although most of us probably have no issue using the phrase "human traffickers" for, say, Russian mobsters. And then shit got weird. Like spooky weird. "And they come in through our southern border into our country. And they'll have women taped -- their mouths with duct tape, with electrical tape," the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, the head of the greatestest country in the history of the universe or whatever the fuck we say now, informed us. "They tape their face, their hair, their hands behind their back, their legs. They put them in the backseat of cars and vans, and they go -- they don't come in through your port of entry because you'd see them." I'd like to think that more than a few people in that audience thought, "The fuck does this pervy shit have to do with farms?" And maybe a few more thought, "I sure could use some seasonal workers. Is that how I'll have to get 'em now?" Trump's dark vision of the nightmare everyone has lived until he came along continue as he described pre-Trump treatment of veterans. He said of people who work for the VA (I think - he's not real definite about his subjects), "For decades and decades, somebody could do anything they wanted. They can steal, they could abuse our veterans, they can be sadists, they can do whatever they want and you couldn't fire them." It's not true, but, how much does this man think about how sadistic people can be? Then, after seeming to be done talking about the wall and immigration and having moved on to other subjects like vets and tax cuts, he went right back to talking about the wall and immigration. He answered those fantasy farmers by telling them about their field workers: "You need those -- you need people to help you with the farms. And I'm not going to rule that out. I'm going to make that easier for them to come in and to work the farms. You've had some people for 20, 25 years. They're incredible. Then they go home and they can't get back in. That's not going to happen." He offered no real plan except "For the people that work the farms, that have been here, that have gone through this very short but good process, that are going to help our country, it's going to be easier for them to get in that what they have to go through now." And he assured them, "I know a lot about the farming world," which is such a blatant lie that God should have dropped a tractor on him. Except there is no God, as we know now. He seriously just kept going on fuckin' immigration, as if there is nothing else to talk about. He mocked asylum seekers, lying that only 2 percent come back for their court hearings. "And those people, you almost don't want, because they cannot be very smart," he said in his dickish way, mocking them for following the law.  "Two percent. Two percent. Two percent come back. Those two percent are not going to make America great again, that I can tell you." The motherfuckers in the audience laughed and clapped because fuck those immigrants who work your fields, right, Farmer Monsanto? You think this stops? You think the cruelty and the savagery ever stops? Here he is describing when a man intentionally drove his car into people on a running path in New York City: " Hits a whole group of people purposely, screaming all sorts of things that they scream. And 8 people died; 12 or 13 were injured. Nobody talks about the injured. You know, some of the injured lost legs, lost arms. You know, this is -- they say, Oh, well, 12 were injured. You know, like, injured -- you think, like, a headache. No, no. They lost arms. They lost legs. One lost two legs. So 12 were horribly injured." You know, President Obama should have described how the children were torn to pieces by bullets at Sandy Hook Elementary. Maybe that's how barbaric we need to be to make a point. And he talked about his election victory in 2016. And, weirdly, how gas prices wouldn't have gone down if Hillary Clinton were president. And how terrible Democrats want open borders and crime and how they're to blame for the government shutdown he specifically took the blame for before it happened. And all the lies, so many lies, about people who cried when they talked to him, about Pakistanis being caught at the southern border, about every fucking thing, ranting like a street corner preacher about to have a stroke, all to applause and guffaws. You'd think a bunch of farmers and farm industry people would know bullshit when they saw it. But I guess if you've been around it all the time, you can't tell when there's a turd in front of you. (Comment on this)
1:16 am	Real Americans Are Hurting While Trump Wants to Stop Fantasy Immigrants http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/01/real-americans-are-hurting-while-trump.html In Missoula, Montana, forest workers who have been furloughed during this, the longest partial government shutdown in our sordid history, held a yard sale this past weekend, offering their possessions at discount prices in order to make up for their absent paychecks. Right now, they should be getting firefighting equipment ready for the season, and they should be looking through applications for seasonal workers and then training them. But they can't. So they held a yard sale. In a real twist on Donald Trump's priorities, in Montana, "the federal Office of Surface Minings Coal Information Management System has been put on hold, preventing the state from permitting new coal operations." That's right. Trump is dicking over coal, which he professes to love, as he professes to love so many things without knowing how to love anything. Meanwhile, down the road a long ways, in Ogden, Utah, about 4000 workers have been furloughed between the Forest Service and big IRS office there. This has meant reduced patronage at Ogden's restaurants and stores, which means reduced sales tax revenue for the city, which means a reduction in services in the near future. One local diner noted a 58% drop in sales from the same time a year ago. And unemployment claims in Utah are surging. In West Virginia, they're releasing food stamps benefits for February early because there's no guarantee the funding will be there for much longer. In Huntington, the Salvation Army is offering food and energy bill assistance to those impacted by the shutdown. Maybe even some clothes, if needed. Meanwhile, a federal worker in Morgantown is selling his possessions on Facebook for pennies on the dollar. In Arizona and New Mexico and Alaska and elsewhere, health care for Native Americans has been affected, with 9000 workers at the Indian Health Service working without pay. Funding for education and social services, as well as maintenance of roads, has been halted, and it's stranding people and leaving them without much law enforcement. This isn't a fucking game. The harm that Trump claims will come to the United States without his stupid wall is a fantasy. The very real harm that is being done to Americans, many in states that voted for Trump, needs to end. Whatever dumb fucking point Trump wanted to prove has failed. The assholes who think this proves the government is too big have failed to do so. People need their government to function. On so many things, we are pushing people to the brink. Someone's gonna commit crimes to get the medications they need. Someone's gonna get killed because they don't want their kids to starve.  And it won't be an immigrant who does it. It might as well be Trump and the GOP with the gun in their filthy hands. (Comment on this)
1:16 am	A Polite Note to Nervous Republicans: You Don't Have to Be Republican http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/01/a-polite-note-to-nervous-republicans.html Hey, there, Republicans in Congress, The Rude Pundit here. I'm not gonna pretend I really give a damn about your futures, your souls, or your careers. But I don't wish physical harm on most of you, so listen for just a moment or two. Right now, you're dealing with some big deal shit here just from this weekend: Trump was (and likely still is) the subject of a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI for possibly working with Russia. And he's been hiding what he's talking about with Vladimir Putin. You put that on top of every other connection to Russia involving him or his family (I know, they're awful, right?) or his administration or, really, a whole bunch of your fellow Republicans, and, well, you know, if the fur hat fits... It's stupid to even pretend anymore that you don't get that Trump is compromised. Every single time I've spoken to someone with connections to the White House, they say the same thing: a whole bunch of the people who ran the hell away from Trump did so because of "the Russia stuff." They know that the ship of state is going to run full speed into a scandal iceberg so big that it'll make Watergate look like a cube in that drink you make yourself every morning and every lunch just to make it through the day. And you know it. You know it because there wasn't an upheaval of outrage at the reports, just a sigh or whine from a few members of the GOP. If you thought Trump's relationship with Putin and Russia were defensible, you would have been out there defending it. Big league. You're trying to figure out what to do when the ship slams into the iceberg and breaks apart before sinking into the depths.  You're an elected official, so you can't just bail (well, you could, but maybe you haven't put in enough time to get that cushy lobbying gig). Or maybe you have a slight nagging sense of right and wrong and, goddamnit, it just won't go away when you think about how you have to support Trump on so many things you know are wrong: the wall, the treatment of our allies, the blind support for dictators, this fucking shutdown that is hurting your constituents. You have to stay silent or maybe you can get away with a brief statement about how "disappointed" you are because, you know, tax cuts or something. But this shit is just eating at you because you know...you fuckin' know... Lemme put it this way. If this were President Hillary Clinton, you know that your party would have already burned her at a stake next to the Washington Monument or your ravening hordes of voters would have torn the Capitol down. And then what would you have done? You would have turned to anyone in Congress who enabled such treachery and sent the mob after them. Well, guess what? You're the enablers of treachery now. And you're just lucky that we're a mob that believes in the judicial system. But every moment you stick with Trump and every moment you don't go after the other Republicans who might be compromised is another moment that makes you an accomplice, that makes you even dirtier, that makes you compromised. You're nervous now because you know you bought this ticket, and you're hoping if you close your eyes, it'll all get better. It won't. Here's the good news, as your evangelical frauds like to say: You don't have to be Republican. It's true. You don't. It is more than possible, even likely, that the GOP brand will be poisonous. Oh, sure, it will always have the support of a third of the country who are so racist and terrible that they will support traitors if it keeps the Messicans and Mooslems out. But that's gonna be your cap. You're dead to the new generation of voters. And your voters are literally dying out. So helicopter off the ship. Just bail on the GOP. Go Democrat. Go independent. Caucus with the Democrats, join the investigations, become a truth-seeker instead of a lie-keeper. Do it now, especially in the Senate, and you'll be ready to be on the right side of history. Goddamn, wouldn't you wanna do it just to see the look on Mitch McConnell's perpetually shocked bitch face? Or we'll just watch you drown with the rest and put your name on a shit-colored monument to your betrayal of your country. Kisses, RP (Note: I don't really believe any Republican has the guts to do this. The party went all in on Trumpism, and all of the fuckers who went along with it deserve whatever they've got coming.) (Comment on this)
1:16 am	What Did That Dumb Orange Motherfucker Say Now (Border Trip Edition) http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/01/what-did-that-dumb-orange-motherfucker.html Yesterday, we were treated to a three-movement symphony of Donald Trump's dumbfuckery as he continues to prove that one of the only motivating factors for his presidency is racism. (The other, obviously, is self-enrichment.) He's decided to die on his wall, and he doesn't give a fuck how many people he takes down with him. Burn down the whole fuckin' country, he says, because without a border wall/fence/barrier/sharknado, the country will burn anyways because of all them Mexicans. Let's boil this down to just three unequivocally idiotic, cruel, mendacious, and baffling things he said, one from each appearance. Before leaving for a merry jaunt down to Texas to visit the actual border with Mexico, Trump paused on the White House lawn to yell at reporters for a few minutes. In addition to declaring that the media is in cahoots with Democrats, Trump bellowed, " I really believe that they dont care about crime.  I really believe this.  The Democrats dont care about crime. Theyve been taken over by a group of young people who, frankly, in some cases  Ive been watching  I actually think theyre crazy.  But theyve been taken over by a group that is so far left.  I really dont think they care about crime.  And, you know, sadly, theyre viewing this as the beginning of the 2020 presidential race, and thats okay with me.  But they have been taken over by a group of people that dont care about gangs.  They dont care about human trafficking and drugs.  They dont care about anything.  Ill tell you what  they have gone crazy." Let's not deal with the patently false allegation that Democrats "don't care about crime" since fuck him. Let's not deal with his shaking his small, elderly fist at those "young people" because he's really just jealous that they're gonna outlive his old ass and steal some media attention from him. Instead, look at that line "they're viewing this as the beginning of the 2020 presidential race." Trump started running for reelection five hours after he was sworn in on that terrible day in January 2017. His campaign ran an ad just before his boring Oval Office fart on Tuesday that declared the end of days if we don't build a border wall. This motherfucker accusing someone of campaigning is like a frog accusing another frog of eating flies. (Note: Trump looks like a fuckin' frog.) When his lard ass got down to Texas, he held one of his ludicrous roundtable discussions where he pretended to listen to people and then pretended to be profound. This one was particularly odious because he paraded the families of people who have been killed by undocumented immigrants before the cameras. It was ghoulish and pathetic, and he exploited them like a porn director forcing an actress to shoot up with heroin before getting fucked by ten guys. And he said this: "Its common sense.  They say a wall is medieval.  Well, so is a wheel.  A wheel is older than a wall.  And I looked, and every single car out there  even the really expensive ones that the Secret Service uses  and believe me, they are expensive  I said, 'Do they all have wheels?'  'Yes.'  Oh, I thought it was medieval.  The wheel is older than the wall.  You know that? And there are some things that work.  You know what?  A wheel works and a wall works.  Nothing like a wall." As many people who know ancient history have pointed out, the wheel was invented long after walls because, well, no shit. And others have said that modern tires with modern materials are a far fuckin' cry from a rounded stone. But put this in context. Trump said this, to the laughter of the gathered people, just before relatives of murder victims poured their hearts out. This goddamn fecal freak of a president is so enamored with the smell of his own shit that he couldn't help himself. He had to say something that sounded fake intelligent, something that the yahoos can repeat and that he can hear back from Hannity and Doocy and every other lickspittle in his pocket. Finally, in one final border appearance, Trump took more questions from reporters, once again abusing them for his pleasure, like a louche emperor demanding another grape and getting furious when it's not peeled. And it would be easy to point out all the times Trump said that he was waiting to see what Congress does before declaring a national emergency, which proves, quite plainly, that there is no emergency if you can wait. That's not how emergencies work. Instead, check out this: "If you read one of your competitors today, they will tell you that the Democrats that are starting to say this is not an argument they can win are some of the very young, very smart Democrats that just got elected to Congress." Wait, are these the same "young people" who Trump called "crazy" just 6 hours prior? The fuck? He can't even keep his insults straight. We are living in the middle of the delusions of a madman. It's like some philosophy experiment gone horribly wrong. And I don't know how we get out of it when he so clearly doesn't care who he hurts or what he says or even what is real. You can't argue with dumb. You'll just get dumber doing it. (Comment on this)
1:16 am	There Are Crises in This Country, But the Border Isn't One of the Them http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/01/there-are-crises-in-this-country-but.html We can all parade horrible shit, making the dead dance for our purposes. That's what President Donald Trump, a phrase that still rolls around on the tongue like mealy clam, did last night in his noxious fart of a propaganda speech on security on the southern border of the United States. After about five minutes of talking about the "humanitarian crisis" that he created, Trump got to the fucked-up violence he loves to describe: "a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien, who just came across the border...an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history...an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading, and dismembering his neighbor." You get the idea. He gets off on this, like he got off on describing how MS-13 gang members use knives and machetes, reveling in the images like it's the hottest porn. Just to fill in some details here: Ronil Singh, the police officer in California, was an immigrant, too, from Fiji. His assailant didn't "just" come across the border but had been in the United States for a while (and is a piece of shit). Marilyn Pharis, the Air Force veteran, was killed in 2015 in a crime that also saw an American citizen convicted. And the widow of Robert Page, beheaded in Georgia last year, said today that she supports border security but isn't sure anything can stop the actions of a single person: "Everybody on the earth is not bad and everybody on the earth is not good, no matter what your culture." To be sure, these are terrible crimes, awful for their families and communities. No one would deny that. As far as we know, though, none of the crimes would have been prevented by a border wall. None of the killers snuck across the Rio Grande. Like, if I go to the UK as a visitor, I can stay there doing tourist shit for six months. If I work, I'm doing it illegally. And if I stay longer than six months, I'm an illegal immigrant. If I behead someone (which seems like way too much work), I'm an illegal immigrant who is a murderer. And I get bonus miles on my credit card to do it. I'm not sure why a nightmare crime is worse if I'm an illegal immigrant. But I'm white, so Nigel Farage or some other prick wouldn't declare it an immigration crisis. Besides, you want a fuckin' crisis? You want some awful shit that should terrify you to your core and demand that the government do something? Listen: In Georgia, a man walked into a his ex-wife's beauty salon and shot her. When she tried to run away, he shot her again until she fell dead. Then he shot himself in the head and died. Her adult daughter was in the salon and saw it all happen. In Florida, a man shot and killed his wife and then killed himself. In Alabama, a man shot and killed his wife and then killed himself. I don't have to go back to 2015 for my examples. These are from the last 48 hours. If I went back to 2015, we'd be here for weeks listing all the cases like these three. And I'd never mention gangs or undocumented immigrants. You want a crisis? You want a national emergency? Then motherfucking men with motherfucking guns are a motherfucking crisis. The threat to women is a goddamn emergency. But Trump and Republicans won't do shit about that. So, yeah, Trump is lying about the border in order to gin up the fear vote and solidify his mongrel base of racist idiots and racist paranoiacs. What Democrats ought to do is shove up his ass the gruesome facts behind one of the real crises in this country, not the fake shit. He wants to prance around with a few corpses? Then let's pile a war's worth of dead women on his front step and say, "Here's your fuckin' wall." (Comment on this)
1:15 am	The Only Talking Point: The Wall Is a Lie http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-only-talking-point-wall-is-lie.html When Democrats oppose Donald Trump on his fantasy of a wall/barrier/fence/whatever on the border with Mexico, they often bury the easiest, clearest reason to oppose it. Sure, yeah, it's racist, since, you know, none of the wall-humpers are talking about the extraordinarily porous border with Canada.  Sure, Nancy Pelosi is right that the wall is "immoral, expensive, and unwise." But the easiest way to explain why Democrats have refused to fund it is that it's all a goddamn lie. That's it. That's all you have to say. No other explanation is needed: "The President is lying when he says that a border wall is needed. We may as well build a castle for his unicorn." There is no national security crisis on the southern border of the United States. There is no terrorism crisis on the border: only six people on the Terrorist Watch List (itself a problematic entity, but let's focus here) were stopped by Border Patrol in the first half of 2018. That doesn't mean actual terrorists but people on the watch list. It's like saying you caught a half-dozen robbery suspects. There's a good chance most of 'em didn't rob shit. And, in his pummeling of White House spokestooge Sarah Sanders, Fox "news" host Chris Wallace, of all people, made the point that "the State Department says, quote, There were no credible evidence of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico.'" If Fox "news" agrees that Donald Trump is a fucking liar, he's a fucking liar. There is no criminal crisis caused by undocumented immigrants coming through the southern border. According to Customs and Border Protection's own numbers, the Border Patrol arrested about 6300 "criminal aliens" (people who were convicted of previous crimes) in most of fiscal year 2018 (final numbers aren't in because, well, government shutdown). Over half were convicted of previously entering the country illegally. You can cut almost 2000 more for either driving under the influence or drug possession.  The actual number of violent criminals who make it into the country is incredibly small, and even conservatives like the Cato Institute know that undocumented immigrants commit far fewer crimes (other than being in the country undocumented) than Americans because, well, it's pretty fuckin' obvious why. The lowest rate for crimes is among documented immigrants, even lower than among Americans. So, by the logic of crime prevention, we should be letting more immigrants in. That would legitimately make the nation safer. And, yeah, it's fucked up whenever anyone is murdered, whether it's by an immigrant or an American-born asshole. But that's a law enforcement issue that a fuckin' wall ain't gonna do shit to solve.  Besides, how many children need to die or be kept in cages just so a bunch of paranoid racists can delude themselves into believing they're safer? I don't find that a fair trade-off. As for the huge amount of drugs that get into the U.S. through the southern border, put aside that most of it comes in hidden in trucks and trains and cars and boats and planes that cross completely legally. Put aside the use of tunnels that are already dug under places where there isn't even a wall. Put aside all the things that our deranged cockmite of a president said at his lunatic press conference on Friday. Instead, focus on this: If you talk about stopping drug abuse in the United States and you don't support a comprehensive national health plan that includes help for addicts, you aren't serious about stopping drug abuse in the United States. You are bullshitting and preening for the cameras. You don't actually give a shit about addiction. There are lies upon lies. The wall ain't gonna happen. How fucking long do you think cases are going to work their way through courts when the federal government attempts to seize private property through eminent domain? How fucking long do you think any cases dealing with water rights and access will take to get decided? How fucking long do you think cases that deal with the environmental impact of a goddamn barrier in the middle of migratory routes and feeding grounds are gonna take? How about cases involving lands that are sacred to indigenous people? How much money is all that costing? How much time? Gimme a fuckin' break.  Trump likes to pretend that he knew that going to war in Iraq in 2003 was a mistake and that he knew that the whole case for war was based on lies. But what he's doing here is a mirror of the propaganda prior to the invasion of Iraq: a hyped crisis that is based on readily disputed information. He likes to pretend that he is saving the nation money by getting us out of Syria (even if he really isn't) or Afghanistan (which, if he does, that's actually a good thing). Meanwhile, he's willing to just piss away billions upon untold billions of dollars on this lie. The big difference now is that there are many on the left and right who aren't getting fooled this time. Tomorrow night Trump's going to give some kind of rambling, incoherent, belligerent speech about the "Humanitarian and National Security crisis on our Southern Border," as he tweeted in his over-capitalizing way today. The only humanitarian crisis is the one that the United States has created by its cruel policies, made even crueler by this administration in violating laws and treaties on refugees and those seeking amnesty. The only national security crisis is in the greedy, diseased brains of those who need someone to demonize in order to maintain power (and probably get some sweet contracts to donors, like, say, the steel industry). And those who oppose this nonsense have to take a stand for facts, for truth, for reality. Too many of us have given in too many times to the dangerous whims of our leaders, with many believing that the liars were acting in good faith. It has always led, at the very least, to distracting from solving real problems or, at worst, to disaster. The wall is a lie. Everything about it is a lie. Everyone who wants to build it is a liar. That should be the message. (Note: Nothing in here should be construed to mean that I don't want any border security. That's fuckin' stupid and only fuckin' stupid people would get that from this post.) (Correction: I originally fucked up and wrote "Mike Wallace," the great reporter who was damned to be Chris Wallace's father.) (Comment on this)