Maybe it’s because we’ve used to it.

Two of the three most influential comedians in our life are Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, which doesn’t say much for our track record. And although their falls from grace came long after we had grown creatively disappointed with each, the fact remains that our pleasure in Cosby’s early storytelling and Allen’s early movies has long since been darkly tinged.

But we can’t walk away from what shaped us. They is what they is.

And by now, we’ve also long since known the drill: When the news breaks, deal with it. You don’t want to defend the indefensible.

At least, we thought you didn’t.

Read more »

You may have heard the news that following his outing as a — what’s that word? — hebephile, Roy Moore is now only polling even with his opponent for the special Senate election in Alabama next month.

But that’s not the full story. Among white voters, Moore leads by 17 points. Among black voters, he trails by 55 points.

This is not unusual. We only need look back as far as last Tuesday to see that opportunistic race-baiter Ed Gillespie won the Virginia white vote by 15 points. He’s not the state’s next governor because he lost the black vote by 75 points, and the hispanic vote by 35 points.

You may sense a pattern here. It’s not new.

Read more »

For a brief, shining moment, the world was safe.

For eleven minutes Thursday, the greatest immediate threat to humanity’s survival — besides humanity itself — didn’t exist.

It was bliss, a glimpse into an alternate reality where things are still going to shit, but we’re working on it, and it’s not hopeless.

And then Twitter restored Donald Trump’s account.

Read more »

What we know, as of Friday evening, is that one or more indictments have been filed against one or more people targeted by Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in last year’s election.

We know nothing else. We don’t know names. We don’t know charges. The charges have been sealed, at least until we get a perp walk out of it. Which we probably won’t — prosecutorial courtesy — but a citizen can dream.

All we can do is speculate. Which, honestly, is more fun anyway.

Read more »

We came across a plea for “civil discourse” this week. We don’t remember the source, honestly, because it made us fucking pissed.

People who plead for civil discourse don’t know what they’re fucking talking about. They think America’s political ills stem from the fact that we’re not nice to each other, that only if we’d talk and listen, listen respectfully, we’d discover our common ground and shared humanity, and like an After-School Special we’d all learn something and rejoin our productive lives, already in progress.

Fuck that. You know who used to teach us about learning from our respectful disagreements?

Bill Fucking Cosby.

Read more »

Donald Trump lies at golf. This is the word for it, as “cheats” implies a charming old coot who pulls a few tricks on the course. Donald Trump does not pull any tricks. He just lies.

This should not come as a surprise. Donald Trump lies about everything. We see ample evidence of this daily. His lies are most intense when his ego is involved, which is always. Donald Trump lies about everything, especially himself. Donald Trump has never been known to tell the truth.

In March 2016, long before we were all forced to endure Donald Trump’s lies daily, to live inside them, he took issue with Marco Rubio’s reference to Spy magazine’s immortal Trump characterization:

“Look at those hands, are they small hands?”

Read more »

In DC v. Heller, the 5-4 Supreme Court case that decided the meaning of the Second Amendment until Republicans are unable to steal justices, Antonin Scalia cites a 1931 judgment that argues for a very straightforward reading of Our Exceptional Nation’s founding document:

“[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.”

And then, just like any normal and ordinary reader, Scalia proceeds to sort the amendment into prefatory and operative clauses, the absence of grammatical constraint on the latter by the former, comparisons of sentence structure with other constitutional passages, and other normal and ordinary observations that strongly recall our first year as a normal and ordinary graduate student in philosophy.

Really, dude reads the Second Amendment more closely than we read Wittgenstein.

Read more »