After a brutal quarantine winter, I’m sure you’ll agree this week’s thaw has been most welcome. Actually, I found something really weird out on the back porch, once all the ice and snow had melted away. I almost didn’t recognize it at first, but I think it’s...whaddya call it...I wanna say, “hope?” Is that a real word? Feels kinda familiar.
(As ever, this one began its life on me blog site: showercapblog.com/...)
Longtime readers are used to finding bad news in this space, here at the top of the ol’ Shower Cap Blog post, but we’re not doin’ that tonight, because YOUR Democratic Party, the team you fought so long and so hard to install, did a good, good thing. Passed a little stimulus bill, you may’ve heard about it. One point nine trillion dollars’ worth of much-needed relief for our weary nation. $1400 direct payments, already arriving in some bank accounts, snug as a bug in a rug. Obamacare subsidies. Childhood poverty cut in half. A bonafide goody bag for anyone who cares about alleviating human suffering. Naturally, Republicans are furious.
Every congressional Republican, in both houses, opposed the bill, out of a firm ideological commitment to the belief that the millions of Americans who suffered for months under their party’s murderous mismanagement of the pandemic should go fuck themselves with curling irons, eat their weight in buffalo shit, and compose a Shakespearian sonnet thanking Mitch McConnell personally for the privilege. And yet somehow these clods are baffled they’re losing the messaging war.
The bill is so popular, Republicans don’t know whether to shit or go blind. They tried everything in their dirtbag plutocrat playbook. They offered to gut the bill in exchange for votes they’d never actually deliver, that old chestnut. They whinged disingenuously about the deficit. Shit, they even tried rubbing sheep’s blood all over their naked bodies and shrieking about a potato-shaped toy for a week and a half, but alas, it turns out the American people prefer not suffering to suffering, the filthy takers.
Celebrity Medicare fraudster/Florida Senator Rick Scott, bless his pus-pumping, reptilian heart, actually wants state governments to reject and return the aid, and I confess I’d quite like to watch, say, Ron DeSantis run for re-election on a “bravely and principledly refused to allow the fire department to extinguish the blaze consuming your home” platform. I was enjoying a chuckle at how weird and bad and generally anti-life, in a Darkseid kinda way, Rick’s little idea here is, but then I remembered he’s a Senator, and it doesn’t seem so funny now.
‘Course, then there’s Roger Wicker, who didn’t even wait for the peasant blood he dips his old-timey fountain pen in to dry on his Hell No vote before skipping merrily out to take credit for the assistance Mississippi was about to receive in spite of his vociferous opposition. Honestly? I’m so accustomed to Republican shamelessness manifesting as either authoritarian encroachment on constitutional democracy or naked incitement of white supremacist violence that I’m inclined to let Rog off with a rap on the knuckles here, but, y’know...use a ruler, certainly.
So yeah. Great big bill, massive amounts of good achieved, promises kept, overdue relief delivered, so on and so forth. Not that you’d know it, from the response in certain predictable corners of the political media.
Everybody loves the bill, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, because people need the dang help, y’know, and the take is not LYING BIDEN EMPTIES A CLIP INTO BIPARTISANSHIP’S UNSUSPECTING HEAD EXECUTION STYLE, IMMEDIATELY FUCKS ITS SKULL, it’s “the institutional Republican Party, partially out of fealty to shitty economic ideas that have failed more than the Cleveland Browns fused with the Washington Generals like in The Fly and definitely the Cronenberg version by the way; and partially just cuz they’re a death cult now, has decided that after careful consideration, they would honestly prefer not to help the American people during this time of multiple crises, several of which they created with their very own blood-stained hands.”
Democrats wanted to help people, Republicans adamantly refused; what compromise was even possible? “Ok, shave a trillion five off the total plus Tom Cotton gets to strangle a puppy on the Senate floor, and Lisa Murkowski will give you one vote you don’t need?” Just because your party got taken over by a pathological sucker doesn’t mean we’re obliged to pretend we’re idiots.
Anyhow, the GOP got so mad the stupid new government acts like poor people’s lives matter that they stomped back to their state-level parties and got straight to work taking away their constituents’ right to vote.
Obviously, the problem here is that citizens were allowed to fire Republicans JUST BECAUSE they lost control of the coronavirus, killed hundreds of thousands of us, crashed the economy, and stood idly by while a game show host on an Adderall bender attempted to install himself as dictator for life. In fairness, I can see where folks that’re that catastrophically awful at governing would want to remove accountability from the equation, when it comes to the acquisition of power.
In Arizona, introspective Republicans reacted to their recent statewide defeats by offering up a bold new platform to win back voters with popular policies designed to solve problems and improve lives JUST KIDDING they introduced two dozen different bills limiting voting rights. One would almost appreciate the honesty of state Representative John Kavanaugh’s sneering insistence that Dem voters are simply of lower “quality” than Real Muricans like himself, were it not, y’know, brazen white supremacy.
Meanwhile, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed the nation’s very first post-2020 voter suppression bill into law, earning first pick at the next RGA shindig, when it comes time to hunt the waitstaff for sport.
Seems even half a million graves aren’t enough to stop wingnut politicians from throwing deranged little mask-burning parties, in Idaho this time, where the loons went so far as to publicly revel in their successful corruption of their poor children’s minds. How are these clowns still throwing this tantrum, after a year of suffering and death? It’s like being a volcano truther when you’re chin-deep in magma.
Aspiring would-be Führer Madison Cawthorn apparently made a video of himself punching the crap out of some dinky, rotting tree, and I encourage y’all to take a second to contemplate the psychology at work there. Seriously. Stop reading, get yourself a fresh beer, and really sit with that shit for a bit. There is no healthy path to the activity captured in that video, and I really don’t think it’s safe to let the same brain that arrives at profoundly creepy decisions like “let’s go on a Hitler vacation” or “now I shall record myself beating up a dead tree” make laws for the rest of us.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party finds itself on the brink of open grifter civil war. Pumpkin Spice Pol Pot, demonstrating a genuinely impressive ignorance of the country’s laws for a dude who was President for four fucking years, sent a cease-and-desist notice to the RNC, demanding they stop using his loathsome name and pinched-butthole-mouthed likeness in fundraising appeals, because he desperately needs all the change from every sofa cushion and swear jar in MAGA nation just pay his legal bills. Fight forever, you evil fucks.
Roy Blunt became the latest GOP incumbent to proclaim Fuck No I’m Not Sticking Around to Deal With the Consequences of My Craven Appeasement of American Fascism, announcing his imminent resettlement from the United States Senate to history’s dustbin. I’m told Messrs. Blunt, Portman, Shelby, Toomey, and Burr plan to launch a think tank together, the Neville Chamberlain Foundation, to train and advise the next generation of enabling conservative cowards.
He may no longer wield the power of the American presidency, or even his own Twitter account, but the Velveeta Vulgarian remains undiminished in one field, which he is likely to stand astride, a lone Colossus, until the fucking sun goes dark: losing in court. This time it was his campaign’s defamation suit against the Failing New York Times that got thrown out, a reminder that during his time in office, he worked harder to destroy the First Amendment than the coronavirus.
We don’t hear from him much anymore, (I guess even God can’t ignore a prayer when it comes from everyone alive every single day for four years) so it was extra satisfying when Lil’ Donnie Two-Scoops popped up just to issue that sad, cringingly desperate statement, attempting to take credit for the Biden Administration’s vaccine successes. Like, I get the blind devotion thing, I just never understood how they made it work with the most pathetic man alive. I guess I always figured those folks who truly desire the rule of a strongman would seek out, I dunno...strength? Obviously pulsating globs of unbridled insecurity are where it’s really at; expect all future cults to be headed by acne-scarred eighth grade boys with braces.
Tucker Carlson, who I’m told is viewed as something of a paragon of masculinity in an alternate dimension where the dominant life form is a race of semi-sentient pork dumplings, threw a screechy little shitfit about how the military is just one big tea party full of sissies n’ cucks on account of the way they let GIRLS in nowadays, and even allow them to boss the menfolk around, in defiance of whatever inbred hillbilly god Tucker erroneously believes anointed him Archbishop of Manhood.
This earned Carlson, Time Magazine’s “Softest Boy Alive” for eleven years running, a series of public rebukes from the sorts of folks who actually risk their lives defending this country while some people stay home, comfortably ordering designer sex dolls with mommy and daddy’s fish stixx money. As an Illinois resident, I was particularly proud of the way my Senator, Purple Heart recipient Tammy Duckworth, stomped all over Liar Tuck’s pompous, sickly ballsack.
I see Government Cheese Goebbels’ own (acting) Defense Secretary, Chris Miller, made the entirely uncontroversial statement that his old boss incited the January 6th Capitol riot, which made headline news, because arguing about whether or not things the whole world witnessed actually happened is something we do now, in our extremely healthy modern society.
Exhausting as all this bullshit is, Biden, Harris, and the rest of the gang just keep on delivering fabulous news and sweet, sexxxxy competence. Now they’re saying vaccines will be available to every American adult by May 1st, and as far as I can tell, nobody’s asked us to inject bleach into a single orifice.
Goods news at the start AND the finish? I better quit before we learn Congressman Gohmert pissed in the vaccine supply, making regressing to Louie’s right-around-armadillo-level IQ the price of immunity. Good luck in the queues, my friends; stay safe out there!
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