Yes, Virginia, the System is Rigged

Interesting world we find ourselves in, this, what with both major-party presidential candidates claiming that the election is rigged. On the one hand, we have Hillary von Parkinson, Duchess of Slime, beating the war drums by reassuring her supporters that the Soviet Union still exists, and this time it’s hacked into all the elections! Much though I appreciate the incoherent idea that Donald Trump is at once a Nazi and a Soviet, I am still compelled to note that, contra what you may be led to believe, World War II ended a while ago.

On the other hand, Donald Trump has just scandalized the mainstream media — which is to say: the Hillary 4 Eva Super PAC — by refusing to accept the results of an election that hasn’t happened yet. According to the paid Democratic Party interns that pretend to journalism for Politico, this is an unreasonable statement that could destroy democracy and the office of the president, whatever that means. Don’t get me wrong, now: I’m 100% in favor of that outcome, but it’s not going to occur. But just think for a minute: what exactly is Politico so worked up about? Imagine you and I are in a big connect-the-dots tournament, and, three weeks before the tournament is held, I come to you and ask “hey, will you promise to accept that I’m not cheating no matter what happens?” What’s your answer going to be? Are you sufficiently credulous to say yes to that? What if, instead of a plastic "Best Try 2016" trophy, the prize were billions of dollars and world domination? Obviously nobody’s going to agree in advance that the contest necessarily will be fair. Per usual, this is a bunch of nonsensical manufactured outrage.

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I know what you're thinking, but stop it. That's a conspiracy theory.

Last Week in Weird

I return smack ack

Now that the Republican primary season is safely far, far behind us, the real senator Rand Paul has apparently been released by the Borg slavers who captured him in the spring of 2015 and replaced him with a neocon replicant. He’s made waves recently by opposing the Obama administration’s plans to sell the Islamic fundamentalists who run Saudi Arabia yet more weapons of mass destruction — this time totaling more than a billion dollars — to be used to slaughter additional tens of thousands of helpless Yemeni civilians. Paul’s opposition to this senseless waste of human life is based, apparently, on trivial things like law and morality, which came as a tremendous shock to ancient robotic newscaster Wolf Blitzer, who once won a Peabody award for announcing that being annihilated by a hurricane is bad for you, but can’t seem to extend the metaphor to cover annihilation by bombs:

"So for you this is a moral issue," he told Paul during the Kentucky Republican’s appearance on CNN. "Because you know, there’s a lot of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling war planes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there’s going to be a significant loss of jobs, of revenue here in the United States. That’s secondary from your standpoint?"

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