If the world were a more honest placeâdon't worry, I have no illusions it ever will beâthen nearly all of our current political discourse right now would just be people staring into television cameras, glazed looks on their faces, before muttering something like "Look, I have no idea what's going on with Republicans right now. None of this makes any sense. Don't ask me to explain it, I got nothing."
Every issue and crisis facing the country today boils down to Well Jimmy, It Turns Out Republicans Are Terrible People, but that's not something that people will pay you the big punditry bucks to say out loud because most of the big punditry bucks come from people who were in Jeffrey Epstein's phone contacts so, ya know. Not going to happen.
So punditry in general sounds pretty stupid right now, to be honest. Everyone's trying to work themes and morals and supposed strategies into events that are seldom more complicated than "the person in charge of it is an ignorant piece of shit with uncontrolled anger issues." Everybody has to hmm and pretend that Trump started a war with Iran for any larger purpose than psychopathic vanity, or that Elon Musk dismantled USAID for some reason rather than because he's a white supremacist who thinks "Western civilization" is under threat because white people aren't having enough children and nonwhite people are having too many, so it's time to start killing off everyone who doesn't look like him.
No, it's just evil people being evil. Whole thing, top to bottom. I don't know how many child predators have to be arrested or how many different scandals Ken Paxton has to personally initiate or how many Tommy Tubervilles have to go on television to burp up mad-libs conspiracy theories about lettuce gremlins or whatever the hell he's been ranting about lately before we can give up the pretense that it's anything else, but if you're going to pretend it is anything else than you have to come up with an explanation for why the current Republican Party actively punishes, drives out, and demonizes anyone in their ranks who won't sign up for every maximally cruel and stupid thing.
There you go, then. Proof by induction.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate held a clown show performance purporting to hold infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci to account for, hell if the rest of us know, something about not letting dipshit grifters inject random bullshit into people while claiming it cures Covid. In the Senate Republican version of reality, and I have to emphasize that this is actually a thing that is happening and not something I am just making up, supposedly we're still reeling from the deaths of "millions of people" who were killed not by Covid-19, but by vaccines, but somehow we don't remember the names or lives of any of these people killed by vaccines, not in a legally binding, presentable-to-Congress sort of way, but the suffering is so great that vaccinated people are stillâyou know what, I don't know. None of this makes any sense. Don't ask me to explain it.
Aaron Rupar
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Aaron Rupar
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If there is a lesson, it's a simple one. It turns out all of the people in charge are ignorant paranoid abusive sadistic pieces of shit, and they like being pieces of shit, you're never going to convince them to be anything else, and just once I'd like to see a history book lay out the cause of a once-great nation's decline as "Yeah, it turns out everyone in charge was a real piece of shit and it finally caught up to them. Go figure."
The sole reason for the hearing, and I do mean sole reason, is that Sen. Rand Paul has a personal grudge against Fauci for making him look stupid, way back when, and Rand Paul has a history of pushing his grudges either forever or until his target snaps and breaks one of his ribs. But by far the most replayed "highlight" of the hearing was Ohio's Sen. Bernie Moreno, who rolled out his own performative abusive piece of shit routine in his bid to move up in the abusive piece of shit ranks that dictate all government power these days.
Unfortunately for Moreno, the reason it became so replayed isn't for the tedious, well-practiced shittery:
Aaron Rupar
...but instead because on the same morning, The New York Times published a major story about his own daughter accusing Ohio Rep. Max Miller, her former husband, of horrific acts of domestic violence.
[Ms. Moreno] has said that Mr. Miller scalded her chest and stomach by throwing hot water from a skillet at her body; held a gun to her head; pushed her against a wall and hit her head; and fractured their daughterâs collarbone and bruised her shoulder.
And given that Sen. Moreno knew about all of this happening a long time before any of the rest of us did, since it was his own daughter and granddaughter, led to a lot of raised eyebrows because Sen. Moreno appears to have not once during that time whipped out an f-bomb to condemn his Republican colleague even as he retains rage to spare for a federal worker who once had the audacity to know science things and be on television at the same time.
That is not something most of us understand, I don't think. Most of us do not understand the mindset of a person eager to stage a faux-meltdown against whatever enemy the movement has propped itself up against in the moment while being willing to play nice and gentlemanly with a party full of malignant abusers who claim, among their countless victims, your own child. But it happens often enough that none of us can deny that there is something in human nature that allows or encourages it.
The long and short of it may be that some people are just pieces of shit and other than passing laws to rein in the most egregious of their behaviors, there's not much else society can do about it. All of these people have found each other's company for a reason, and it's not tax policy.
It was Mother Jones who first broke these latest allegations against Rep. Miller, who is campaigning for reelection in Ohio, the state that starts with an O and ends with an O and has a bunch of weird sociopathic politicians in the middle. Their reporting lays out some truly grotesque accusations.
Throughout the legal filings, Moreno alleges that Miller was an absentee father and abusive husband whose history of violence and misconduct dates back more than a decade. Some of the accusations she raised are previously unreported, and Mother Jones has also identified new details about incidents that have already become public.
Responding to written questions from Morenoâs lawyer about whether Miller threw a girl down the stairs in high school, faced expulsion from college for a violent incident involving a female student, and left Moreno within three days of their childâs birth, Millerâover the course of the domestic proceedingsâneither confirmed nor denied the events took place.
The picture painted is of someone with uncontrolled anger issuesâonce allegedly punching through a window and landing himself in surgery for itâthat did not go away after Trump took a shine to the youngish asshole, launching his political career.
And people knew about it, that's the thing. People have known about his behavior the whole time.
Moreno is not the only woman who has publicly accused Miller of violence. Stephanie Grisham, a White House press secretary from Trumpâs first term, wrote in an October 2021 Washington Post excerpt of her book that Miller âgot physicalâ with her when the two were dating in 2020.
Politico was more specific in its July 2021 article, recountingâaccording to three people familiar with the incidentâthat Miller âpushed [Grisham] against a wall and slapped her in the face in his Washington apartment after she accused him of cheating on her.â
So apparently you can violently attack the White House press secretary during an argument about your alleged mansluttery and it will not hurt your career in Republican politics even a little bitâit just doesn't matter how important she is or how many top Washington news reporters she talks to on a daily basis because her job, literally, is talking to every news reporter in town. You can even marry the daughter of a Republican U.S. Senator, and attack her, and allegedly hold a gun to her head after you've had a bad day and she keeps doing things that supposedly deserve that, and the rest of the party will still campaign with you and boost you and tell voters that they need to reelect this allegedly drug-using child-beating history-of-severe-violence-against-women bag of deadly sins in order to, whatever, keep immigrants in their place or something.
I don't know, y'all. I don't know how to reconcile all of this and come to any conclusion that more sense than the glowing, bright-as-the-sun obvious one: These are all terrible people. They are terrible people who like to break things, and break people, and find camaraderie in all doing it together, and quite honestly they appear to all be having the time of their lives right now.
You're never going to get these people to condemn Elon Musk for trying to foment race riots or for throwing out Nazi salutes or Nazi rhetoric. You're not going to get them to feel even the slightest bit bad about the murder of a few hundred fishermen, if one of their own really wants to get into a shooting war and fishing boats are the only things in range. You're not going to get them to turn against their lord and savior, Donald Trump. Trump could have hauled Lindsey Graham's corpse out of its casket and violated it right in the middle of that church, and not one person there would have moved to stop him, and the only reason it didn't happen is because Donald Trump has the upper body strength of a just-hatched duckling.
You can't populate a whole movement full of absolute pieces of shit and then find much of anything that they'll find too repulsive to go along with, because that's not how being a piece of shit works. It's not something that comes with an off switch. They don't have a dial they can turn to tone it down: If they could turn that dial when it was useful to do it, well now they wouldn't be pieces of shit, would they.
I have to say that personally, if I heard from my daughter and granddaughter that a man who worked in the same building as I did abused them to the point of leaving broken bones and burn marks, I would probably make something of a scene of it? I would probably be wanting to know, from everyone around me, what the hell we were going to do about the abusive piece of shit in our midst, and if anyone around me suggested that maybe we shouldn't do anything about the piece of shit then I would immediately mark them down as pieces of shit themselves. I would have an enemies list a mile long, and I would be obsessive about ruining the lives of everyone on it.
Maybe I'm the weird one? Wouldn't be the first time.
As for Sen. Moreno, we have only conjectures as to why he hasn't taken Max Miller aside and, say, done something that would have encouraged Miller to walk around with bodyguards for the rest of his stay in the Capitol. The only clue we have appears to have something to do with the Universal Pieces Of Shit Theory we started out with: Mother Jones reports that Miller's reaction to Sen. Moreno learning of the alleged abuse of his daughter was to threaten him, too.
Millerâs spokesperson replied, âWe wonât be responding.â
Nor did the spokesperson respond to questions about the toxicology report that Mother Jones obtained or about an apparent threat Miller made by text to his former father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno, which is documented in court filings.
âIâm sick of this, you know I never hurt our daughter. Take this however you want, everyone is going to get to know you better than your wife does,â Miller wrote to Bernie Moreno, according to an exhibit referenced in Emily Morenoâs motion for a restraining order. âEnjoy the ride brother, I wouldnât have to do this if you could keep your lying daughter under control.â
In a world where people are getting felony indictments for picking up paint chips or writing "8647" in seashells, you'd think writing "everyone is going to get to know you better than your wife does" to a sitting senator would result in a pair of FBI agents knocking on your door right quick, and that's before you even get to "enjoy the ride," or "wouldn't have to do this," or "daughter under control."
So okay, yeah, this guy is a freak. Not just a piece of shit, but an artisanal piece of shit, one aged for years in a damp cave to become fragrant in a way you have to pay four times the money for. And he thinks he's got dirt on his Republican colleague, Sen. Morano, that's sufficient to keep Morano's mouth shut no matter what happens to Morano's daughter.
But the thing of it is, because Universal Piece Of Shit theory, he could very well be right. I'm sure that half the Republican caucus has enough dirt on the others to take the whole party down, if even half of half of that half told what they knew. The good Republican senator may indeed not be willing to hurt his position in Republicandom over the minor issue of his daughter and granddaughter being violently abused, not if there might be blowback. Or the good Republican senator might himself be so much a piece of shit that he doesn't think Max Miller having an alleged history of violence against women that spans from his high school days to his White House days to Republican Member of the House is something to get worked up about.
The Bi of Hormuz
Former car dealership owner turned GOP candidate Bernie Moreno, whose Ohio Senate race could determine whether Republicans regain control of the chamber, settled over a dozen wage theft lawsuits in the months before launching his campaign last year, according to court documents reviewed by Business Insider.
Those settlements came after a jury ordered Moreno to pay over $400,000 to two former employees at his Massachusetts dealership for failing to pay overtime in accordance with state labor laws.
As he faced those lawsuits, Moreno admitted in a deposition to shredding documents containing information that was potentially relevant to the case, despite being instructed to preserve records â drawing a rebuke from a state judge.
That would be in addition to multiple gender and age discrimination lawsuits, of course.
So our initial presumption that Sen. Bernie Moreno, seen on Wednesday berating a top disease specialist for (???), would be the sort of person who would give a particular shit about his own daughter is sketchy to begin with, sketchy enough to need some proof behind it. Maybe he doesn't have the time. Maybe he's too busy preparing speeches against perceived enemies of "MAGA," railing against the supposed celebrityhustling of disease experts announcing things about diseases, to bother with such things.
I don't know. It's impossible to know. That's my whole premise here, the whole point of this great national despair we all find ourselves in as we watch the meanest, cruelest, stupidest pieces of shit in the world all compete to do us the most harm while people with seven-figure punditry salaries warble on about how no, there's got to be a more methodical strategy behind all these tariffs and disease outbreaks and new wars and dead fisherman, some hidden plan beyond "what if we all be the biggest pieces of shit we can be, for fun, and see how far we can take it."
If the punditry were honest, there'd be nothing on any channel or on any newspaper page that wasn't "Yeah, we don't know what the hell these people are doing either." There would be no efforts to construct some grand castle out of cow patties; Ross Douthat would not be moving from his Bob the Builder cowshit construction role at the New York Times to a new one at, lol, 60 Minutes, as the worst people in the news industry pretend that the worst people in the politics industry are not just wrecking everything you know because they think it's funny.
Want to dispute the premise? Fine, good, go ahead. Find me a national Republican who doesn't fit it. Find me someone in the House or Senate who isn't in this mostly for themselves, because they like having their name on a door, and who still remains in the party's good standing after admitting that millions of people didn't die because "vaccines" or that Donald Trump didn't win the 2020 election no matter how much his Royal Encephalitis thinks so. Someone willing to say those things at the normal politician volume, and not spoken softly into a sock in the hopes that Dear Leader's self-appointed goonsquads won't notice. Don't say Susan Collins, either, because I will laugh at you.
There's no larger mystery here, no secret plan. It's a collection of awful, awful people who get a pseudosexual thrill from hurting others, and whether the others are in Iran or in Africa or in Minneapolis doesn't make a damn bit of difference to them so long as they can make it happen. That's the only plan "MAGA" has ever put forward, from Trump on down, and you cannot find me any evidence to the contrary. You can read the Heritage Foundation documents. There's a lot of language to it, but it all boils down to because we can.
Republicans, man, I don't know. I want there to be some larger explanation for all this too, I really do; lead poisoning, maybe, or a virus we haven't pinned down yet, a pandemic virus that confines itself entirely to the part of the brain that reminds people not to be pieces of shit. It might be bursts of gamma radiation from Omicron Persei Whatever. It might be the lingering effects of 1970s television; it's possible that Donny and Marie Osmond Star Wars special combined with gamma radiation to damage humanity's core genetic makeup.
But I think they're all just assholes?
Maybe our mistake was allowing mass media to exist. It let all the assholes find each other, and egg each other on, and now they've got a whole damn political party and are haranguing infectious disease experts on television and demanding everything be made of beef tallow.
And that has turned assholery into a self-sustaining industry. It used to require real commitment to being an asshole, but now there's a whole support infrastructure in place. It's become a solid career path at a time when every other career path has been getting more and more tenuous. If you're an asshole who can't keep a real job because nobody can stand you, you can go get an asshole sinecure at the asshole foundation, a place funded by all the top assholes in the country, and they'll pay you to write asshole papers to advance the cause of assholes.
Play your cards right and they might even let you run 60 Minutes.
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