Liar's Polka

 

Host: At the end of the book you say, the very first thing you would do if you got to the WH that was different from Biden, is you would make sure Biden's dog was nowhere on the grounds. Commander say hello to cricket. Are you trying to look tough? pic.twitter.com/oAlQBHDCmd

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 5, 2024

"Liar's Polka", not "Liar's Poker" because this woman is moving her feet all over the place but doesn't have a lick of an idea how to play a game. She doesn't just kill her own dogs, but wants to kill Biden's dog? (Hint: A potential Trump VP candidate?)

That is not a Biden problem, that is very much a Kristi Noem problem. She is very tough on livestock and her imagined conversations with world leaders, but she is as dumb as her foot and a half of natural hair extensions and her prime-time makeover. 

So here is how dumb Noem wants to be--she supposedly read the galleys of her ghostwritten political memoir, and even voiced the audio book, but is only just now realizing she never met Kim Jong Un and that's a problem. Somehow someone else's problem. She says she met other world leaders, but she isn't talking about that because...I dunno. 

Kristi Noem, Dog Assassin

 

SD Gov. Kristi Noem is getting a roasting over her depiction of killing a backwards "untrainable" puppy as well as a smelly goat that came from her political memoir No Going Back: Descriptive Stuff After the Colon. A lot of people on social media are posting pictures of their own good doggos--and that's great. But to give her her due, sometimes a dog just is either traumatized or dimwitted, or for some other reason has misplaced aggression issues, and they aren't fit to their environment. You could try rehoming them with a family--hopefully in a "single pet, no small children" situation, but once they have demonstrated they will kill livestock, like a neighbor's chickens, there's a real chance they aren't "fixable". She may have simply made a pragmatic choice with the dog because she didn't want to see it turn and attack a human--especially not a little one. 

There's more humane ways to put down an animal, though--we aren't living in Little House on the Prairie times. And also killing (poorly) a goat because it is smelly and misbehaved just feels gratuitous, because what do you expect from adult goat? And wasn't she responsible for how the dog was trained and controlled (crated or fenced?) Feels like she might have set that pup up by not preparing it for success.

The Red Meat Diet

 

The one time leader of the free world who now lives alone in a hotel sharing buffets, common areas, and staff with strangers, yearns for attention and relevance so badly, he now stands on a patio step every night ranting to tens of people about a 6 month old election that he lost pic.twitter.com/xIuZ7jAkZD

— Mystery Solvent (@MysterySolvent) April 30, 2021

Consider if you will a world where Republicans will, for hardly any reason at all, insist that the current president is going to ban hamburgers because of cow farts, and I'll show you a world where the former president still thinks maybe he could have won that last election, and there's a bunch of ninjas in Arizona trying to prove him right. 

The Twilight Zone? Sadly, no. This is America, a country internally divided because people are looking at two different realities, one that exists in the material world, where germ theory and evolution and a round planet are kind of understood to be real things, where democracy is the thing where people get to vote and where the widely available public historical facts pretty much indicate that slavery and segregation and all that were bad and racist, and um, the other one that Republicans seem to be living in. 

You know, the one where kids (who aren't getting vaccinated right now) wearing masks might be a sign of child abuse (is it just me who sees a Q shout-out in one of Tucker Carlson's latest rhetorical abominations, or is my brain just uniquely broken by trying to rappel down the Q rabbit hole on a digital shoestring?) and where Kamala Harris' book is being stuffed in welcome bags to the migrant kids that are, one who was a certain kind of person might insinuate were invited into the US by Biden's policies already in a sort of replacement theory way except yeah, totally hinting at it in that way, also, too. Because criminy, I have heard of people inviting migrants to the US to swell voting rolls in a particular way, but I didn't think any asshole would be so cynical as to also assume it was to plump book sales.

I mean, there's conspiratorial thinking muscle, and then there's conspiratorial thinking muscle on steroids. And with plenty of red meat for protein. 

I've been saying this sort of thing for more than a minute, but I'm developing the conclusion that additional conspiratorial thinking on the right is increasingly a kind of vice-signaling thing. You know, like where if the CDC says masks are good, then fuck no! I'm not wearing them, and if Michelle Obama wants my kid eating vegetables, then fuck no! they are eating hot chips and sprinkling extra salt on, and if the libs want clean air fuck no! we're buying the biggest truck possible and maybe even rolling coal, and if...etc. Like when cigarettes were bad so Rush Limbaugh sucked on cigars until he got cancer and died.

I'm saying it's not a perfect system, but I kind of get it. They're so punk they're Pat Boone. They're so metal they're formica. They're so edgy they're a Nerf football with the ends chewed off. They are different and not made like other men. They eat red meat. They have mad guns. 

They have mad guns specifically because somebody might take them . Robbers are totally going to come to this house to take guns because guns are expensive and this is a totally fucking expensive pile o guns. It's like people deciding they are going to give up and go be racists now because the libs made them that mad by saying stuff like, I dunno, racism actually exists. 

Basically, we're at a point in Cleek's Law where pointing out that the shit's fucked up might actually lead to Republicans actually eating shit. 

I don't know if it behooves me to respect that level of commitment or not but I'll watch it on YouTube. Because I guarandamntee the signifiers will be filming themselves doing it, since they chug milk, bleach and Trump's vomit right out in public where people can see.

Saying Trump won is a kind of vice-signaling--it isn't true, but Republicans will say it anyway. Calling right-wingers hypocrites doesn't work because the double-standard is the point. Just call them filthy fucking liars who believe dumb ass stupid shit. Respect is earned and they want a cookie for filling their diapers and painting the walls with their mess. I'm over it.

Game of Masks

I'm going to keep it real--I do not like wearing a mask. It's a little constricting, it sticks to my lip balm, and when I'm walking, I sometimes get a little claustrophobic like, "Am I getting enough air?" which makes me hyperventilate just a bit. It's a small pain in the ass.  But when no one is about, I can take it down and suck a mean lungful if I so like.  It doesn't trouble me to wear one when I go to get gas or if I have to stop for an errand.

For aesthetic reasons, I have amassed a quantity of printed bandanas that ensure I can coordinate my outfits with my new must-have fashion accessory (I prefer to look "veiled" rather than acquire something more functional-looking) and since I literally see no one at close range in my newly-irregular travels, this is merely an adjustment. Sitting indoors and talking with a mask on is fine. I've adjusted to preferring to see other people doing the same. It's no more a hassle to me than wearing gloves in winter or carrying an umbrella (although I am starting to lose my mind a bit this spring over too much freaking rain and always carrying an umbrella). It's just a thing. I wear the thing so people are not alarmed by my potentially disease-laden exhalations. Short of locking myself in a cell like a Jainist ascetic, it's the least I can do--

And it is apparently just too much for some people out here, who have decided that their precious bodily fluids civil rights are being impaired by being asked to suit up their faces.  It's just little bit strange to have the party of "Wait a minute, what about the right to refuse service?" decide that governments and businesses insisting on masks are...."mask Nazis"? Wow. Imagine all those years we blithely saw signs outside convenience stores reading "No shoes, no shirt, no service" and didn't realize what that was going to lead to. 

Oh. Right. The bad people are the ones who don't want every smotherpucker out there horking germs onto essential workers so they can keep doing their jobs and not die.  The good people are the bare-faced liars who say this is about civil rights when it seems to be about partisan vice-signaling. 

Somehow, that doesn't sound right to me. 

I mean, take OH Representative Nino Vitale, as an example:

The man says he thinks wearing a mask dishonors God because people are made in the image of God and I dunno. He just looks like a guy who wants to show off that he invested $247 in Crest White Strips to me.  Does God wear pants? I don't know that God does, and I don't think we need an argument about whether it's cool for someone to stroll through Golden Corral with their whole braciole hanging out to determine we know people are human without seeing their various bits. Yes, if you say so, you are a stunningly beautiful child of God. Also put a mask on anyways, ya filthy animal.

Of course, it would help if the Commander-in-Chief of our very much conscripted anti-plague army of warriors would try and wear a mask himself. So far, the picture is--he sure doesn't, and goddamn the poor optics.  (Even if he limply explains he wears one "backstage" at an event at a manufacturing plant, which is the way Trump reminds you that the world is a fucking stage, baby.)   In part, I can sympathize--masks make my make-up and nose run, too! On the other hand, if you can't lead by any other way at all (and he can't) maybe he could try leading by example on one little thing.

Maybe there is a psychological reason why just wearing a mask is the cause of so much resistance--the denialism, our old friend, once again, and the visual indication that something has changed in the form of the unfamiliar mask and the change in routine. But resisting wearing a mask because "I am afraid of the unfamiliar and changes in my routine!" probably does not sound quite as butch as the anti-mask resistance intended. Also, denying the seriousness of the disease is just fucking bonkers, because no one, and I mean no one, is faking the refrigerated trucks and the bodies, or playing around with people's paychecks, for some grotesque partisan game.

The COVID-19 threat is real. Wearing a mask to protect others is a sign of strength. Making it all about anything else at all seems like a tantrum to me.