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We're All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This...

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  Is anyone genuinely shocked by the results in New York? Zohran Mamdani’s been in the lead since the Democratic primary and barely lost ground. Curtis Sliwa remains a walking caricature of 1970s New York - earnest in his own way, but hopeless. He couldn’t even beat Mamdani on Staten Island . Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, drew support mostly from those who couldn’t take Sliwa seriously. A corrupt, scandal-stained has-been, Cuomo barely campaigned and only closed the gap on Mamdani by using grotesque imagery of planes hitting the Twin Towers. New York City’s GOP establishment is a hamster wheel of turds. Every election cycle, they toss a sacrificial lamb into the race and then promptly forget he or she exists. Joe Lhota. Nicole Malliotakis. Curtis Sliwa (twice!). Lhota pulled 25%. Malliotakis managed 28%. Sliwa? 28% the first time, and this year a staggering 7%. Going back to Curtis Sliwa is the political equivalent of saying, “Maybe we’ve got something in Tommy DeVito.” My brothers ...
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Due Process Is Central to Everything

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  A few weeks ago, I wrote what I'd call a  colorful   critique of the Democratic Party's leadership. Within it, I noted that they had "helped  pave the way for palpable fascism to ascend in both the Oval Office and Congress." I hadn't set out to examine the Republican Party's relentless streak of frothing illiberalism, but a few people noticed that single line and called me on it. It's fair to question whether this kind of rhetoric is just the usual hyperbole you see from partisan extremes.  I'm a Republican - not that I'm entirely sure what that means anymore. This version of the party is neither conservative nor liberal, neither libertarian nor constitutionalist. Are we witnessing "palpable fascism" in senior leadership? The answer is... kind of . We're wired to recoil at the big, bad labels - dictator, Nazi, communist, Marxist, fascist - and rightly so. They're often misused, their meanings diluted into little more than rheto...
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This Party is Cooked

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  Looking at this picture in 2020 nearly made my eyes roll so far back they'd plinko down my spine at such velocity they'd perforate my bowels and crack the earth's crust. Viewing it feels like a sudden memory jolt - the kind that transports you back to being 12 years old, frozen in place trying to talk to a girl, only to stand there beet red, gooning silently until her evolutionary instincts kicked in and she chose to deny your existence for the rest of her natural life. To call it cringe would be a tragic understatement; these people are so hopelessly unserious and disconnected from tangible reality that they'd drape themselves in Ghanaian Kente cloth - a rare textile actual Ghanaians struggle to access - and kneel in solemn performance art for... whom, exactly? Who was this for?! George Floyd's death was tragic (if you think otherwise you're a neanderthal who jerks off to state violence), but it's the same energy as dressing up like Natives to apologize f...
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Thriving on Chaos

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  It's essential to recognize that chaos is not a byproduct - it is the objective. The relentless cascade of executive actions with questionable legality, the deployment of both veiled and overt threats to allies and enemies, and the appointment of individuals who are at best unqualified and, at worst, dangerous to positions of critical authority all serve a singular purpose: to incite hysteria among those who are most susceptible to being hysterical. I'll concede it's wildly effective - each news cycle feels compressed, to the point where it feels as if we're distorting time. The onslaught is so relentless that meaningful debate becomes impossible. As you process the current crisis another one has already taken root.  He wants Greenland. No, actually, it's Canada. Hold on - we're going to slap our two neighbors with insane tariffs because tariffs are good. Nah, actually, we got concessions so we'll cancel that, tariffs are actually bad. We're going to t...
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Flip This House

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  I went to bed with the 2024 election undecided, though I knew the outcome. One of the first pieces of media I consumed at 4:47 am featured MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid earlier in the night mid-cope & flabbergasted, calling the campaign Harris ran "flawless" and pointing out that she even got the endorsement of Queen Latifah. My word! You don't say!  If I could boil down everything wrong with the Democratic Party establishment and their associated elites, add pigments and thinning agent to paint a picture like bald Bob Ross, I wouldn't come close to depicting what Reid did that night. I have made no effort to hide that I voted for Kamala Harris. And I have no qualms with that decision. Even the friendliest polls for Donald Trump did not predict the sheer magnitude of this outcome. So, to perform a competent postmortem, one must point out the painfully obvious. My lens is probably irrelevant to most - an apostate Republican clinging to an idea of conservatism that n...
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Cats and Dogs

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  "It's time to pull Trump's mask off so that people can see what we are dealing with here. He is a con artist. First of all, he runs on this idea that he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy." - Marco Rubio, 2024 Trump surrogate, in 2016.  “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical genius—a really good sociopath—and that he’s America’s Hitler." "Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.” - J.D. Vance, 2024 Republican Vice Presidential candidate.  As I write this, Fox News is cutting away from a Trump press conference in LA that happens to be a promo for one of his golf courses. They had to cut away and sanewash his performance because he's talking about toilets and David Muir's hair. As one does.  Look, I think we can agree no one's changing their minds here. If you're a Trump person, and you made it past those first two quotes, I...
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They did it!

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  Last week I published some schadenfreude at the GOP's expense, seeing as how they cycled through countless candidates for Speaker while they sabotaged any chance at keeping the House of Representatives under their control in the next Congress. They finally elected one! And... ...it's Mike Johnson! You might ask just who the hell this is, and I have to concede that I don't know! He's just some guy.  People tend to misunderstand what the Speaker's role is, or what it entails. It's a thankless, hideous job that requires expert deal-making, vote-whipping, and fundraising. The Speaker is a political animal that needs to lack a certain measure of humanity to succeed. John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, whatever you think of them, were mildly effective Speakers. They managed their majorities well and kept the things moving. They worked to get their incumbents re-elected with fundraising and shrewdly targeting ripe districts. GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert had the job for awh...
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