2016 GOP Frontrunners

The midterm elections have come and gone, which means it's time to play a game we've been waiting for since 2012: Pick the GOP Frontrunners! Another slate of Democrats has been stomped, leaving a fertile field of Republican bullies ready to whip holy hell on Communists, sodomites, licensing firearms, and unlicensed vaginas. Not to mention Ebola.

I know what you're going to say: there are so many options already! That's true. There's Wall Street creep Mitt Romney. There's (probably a) crook Chris Christie. Almost certainly a crook Scott Walker. There's serial-plagiarist and bong-level political science theorist Rand Paul. All those are good candidates. Very good candidates. That's an impressive roster. But let's get real: not one of those guys is a slam dunk.

I know of some people who are, and a tweet I wrote on Election Night reminded me of them. Last year, Mr. Destructo contributor Dan "General Gandhi" O'Sullivan, Classical editor David J. Roth, nomad political writer Alex Pareene, and SBNation writer Bill Hanstock and I, amongst others, collaborated on a world-beating slate of 2016 GOP candidates. Not just candidates for president but candidates who could run the table in every open Senate seat as well.

This is the future of the GOP. This is your future, America.

The Time the Duck Dynasty Guy Saved America with a Boat

So we all know Duck Dynasty's patriarch Phil Robertson is a bigot, and a homophobe (I wrote about him in The New Republic, if that's something you care about), and a fraudulent country club Republican dressed up like a bayou redneck to move more units of redneck product, and generally he's about as useful to the rest of the world as a copy of The Second Sex is to his audience the minute they realize there are no pictures in it.

It's not in spite of this that Sean Hannity has him on his Fox News show but because, since Robertson's brand of retrograde politics moves the same number of duck calls as it does Hannity merch. It's tempting for people on the left to see Robertson on Hannity's show as some kind of error or the bad luck of last-minute booking—which is mostly the fallacy of liberals thinking that the things they belly laugh at can't be cherished and defended by someone else with just as much sincerity. Robertson unironically calling on America to convert-or-kill ISIS as a means of dealing with the horror of ISIS converting-or-killing everyone else is a welcome opinion to the right set of ears, and college-boy tittering about how this sounds like Innocent III scouring the Languedoc of Albigensenes or any previous Pope scouring the Holy Land of Muslims amounts mostly to smug nerds playing to their liberal audience as much as Robertson's duck call goes out to his people on a certain frequency.

Which is to say that, since no minds will change and nothing will be accomplished in any meaningful way, the most you can do is goof off. If there is a larger point, it will be lost, and it was probably a stretch to even assume it was necessary, so go have fun or go home.

I Don't Even Own A Television: 'Those Who Trespass'

Ordinarily I'd assume that I did a good enough job last time selling you on my friend Jay W. Friedman's podcast. And I would likewise assume that the new page for podcast appearances I put up would be a sufficient resource for finding out where and when I'd droned on and on like an asshole about something. But this time I joined Jay to talk about Bill O'Reilly's Those Who Trespass, and nothing about O'Reilly comes easily. Except his women.

Here's the thing about Bill-O: despite Jay and I spending an hour busting on his godawful prose, his sexism, his casual racism, his uncritical love of police strong-arm tactics, his bunkum facts about David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, his racialized image of crime, his historical clunkers, his incredible vanity, his stereotypical straight-outta-suburbia Irish-American fawning over the Ould Sod and his bad sex scenes, we could have gone on for another hour without breaking a sweat. Because he's really that awful in his fantasyland version of reality, too.

Jay touched on something in Those Who Trespass that I wanted to supplement with a bit from real life. In it, O'Reilly's Gary Stu character has a black friend named Jackson Davis, one who Bill's narration takes pains to describe as articulate. He's one of the good ones basically for no other reason than that he behaves like Bill O'Reilly's vision of a good white guy. And I really don't want anyone to walk away with the sense that this was an accident of bad writing.

And Yet More Things I Want to Do When I Grow Up

As you may know, we the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? conduct an annual personal test of our abilities. We do not remark upon things as we see them and ask, "Why?" We look at things as they have never been—a machine that makes my ex-girlfriend STACY think about me when she hears any song on the radio, even "Thick As A Brick"—and ask, "Why not?" Then we create that machine.

In the above case, that machine is called the simple human heart.

Nevertheless, the conundrum facing the Destructo crew for several years was this: How do we find newer feats of mental daring and near-impossibilities of time and space that we have not already accomplished? And how, given our 100% success rate in meeting our goals, can we ever outline new goals in which our readers might see the faintest glimmer of failure? What happens when a shadow no longer falls between the idea and the reality?

An idea presented itself in January, 2013 when journalist David J. Roth wrote to regret that his submissions for January, 2012, sent by passenger pigeon, had been unavoidably delayed by that species' extinction for 99 years and that he would try to forward them via "interior crocodile alligator." The denial of an object or goal seemed to be a goal in itself.

We thought of embracing the noble truths of the Buddha, but abandoned that concept when we realized that there is no documented evidence of that man ever wearing a shirt. Instead, we chose to embrace a state of post-accomplishment, a place beyond goals, neither above nor below metrics but askance from them. We chose a heaven where nothing ever happens.

Needless to say, 2013 would have been an unqualified success if indeed success or failure had been possible. And, despite the overwhelming likelihood of each pledge below being satisfied thoroughly, early and often, 2013 opens 2014 to the possibility that maybe—just maybe—what you're about to read may, this once, just be words.

Everything below was written by Jeb Lund, General "Bro_Pair" Ze'evi, Cory Harris, Justin Shapiro, David J. Roth and Mark Hengge. We renew our respects to our fallen comrade, Mark Brendle (RIP), who at this time in 2013 was killed in a tragic midchair collision.

A Progressive's Guide to the 2013 Election

Note: Today, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? confront the fact that we stopped caring about politics after Mormon Flanders lost the 2012 election. But, like aging and death, democracy doesn't stop; it even happens during odd-numbered years. Thus we turn for voting advice to Robert Wheel, a Brooklyn resident who went to law school when his job in the Kerry White House didn't pan out. On the bright side, now he's really good at knowing when a campaign is going to lose on Election Day.


Races Democrats Tried to Screw Up Only to Have the GOP Foil Their Incompetence
by ROBERT WHEEL

You're probably vaguely aware of the 2013 elections. Odds are that the only election going on in your area is a municipal one, and you really don't care who's on the local water commission. (Although you probably should!)

Regardless, there are a few elections nationwide that you should pay attention to, both because they affect a lot of people (8 million of us in New York, it'd be nice if the mayor were a Democrat), and because they might be signs for future elections and for the future of the only political party left not helmed by a Texan suicide cult leader dressed like Pagliacci. Anyway, here is your Progressive's Guide To The 2013 Elections.


NEW YORK MAYOR
Hey, you might have heard about this one! You probably know the story—former Sandinistabro Bill de Blasio won a Democratic primary over his more conservative rivals and he's poised to be the Elizabeth Warren of New York City. Well, not quite. The most liberal candidate in the field was hampered by a fundraising scandal that he likely had nothing to do with. De Blasio is about as liberal as third-place finisher Christine Quinn, but she decided back in 2009 that she should run as the heir to Mike Bloomberg, thinking that Democrats would like to elect another imperious plutocrat. Oh well, then.

But de Blasio did a really good job of positioning himself as the champion of those left out of the Bloomberg boom years. He kept saying that New York was a tale of two cities, even though I don't think he even read the book. He's got a cute biracial family and told New Yorkers of color that the cops shouldn't just be allowed to stop them because they look funny. And he proposed a tax on rich people that he knows would never get approved by the state legislature because a) Democratic primary voters love that shit and b) the handwringing in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times from out-of-touch plutocrats about the tax was fucking hilarious. I don't care that the tax won't pass; I applaud him just for freaking them out.

TNR: 'The 21 Greatest Conservative Rap Songs'

Conservative pundits seem especially fond of a type of filler article: the list of works in some form of entertainment that argues for a Republican bedrock that is the foundation of our art. Forget a story of marginalized immigrants creating a mirror government to protect them when they're shut out of the real one, The Godfather is actually about family values. Look, they all eat dinner together! And it's always positive. Except with Turk!

None of this is necessary. In music, while country and southern rock are hardly homogenous, they teem with red-blooded red-state fare. In TV and film, while "issue" episodes/movies might trend toward the liberal, it takes little effort to find a procedural or thriller with police abuses of searches and good cops who just want to hug kids who sleep with an under-pillow holster, dreaming with exquisite trigger discipline. In traditional art, Thomas Kinkade is not just a painter but a painter of light. Conservative work abounds; if you have to go looking for it, you're probably reading your own beliefs into what you encountered.

Such is the case with the American Enterprise Institute—home of countless slam-dunks on the Iraq War—and Stan Veuger's list of the "21 Greatest Conservative Rap Songs." His piece is a weightless exercise, devoid of context, expropriating meaning to serve his cause when he's not simply making things up. While he surely wants to provide a short list of handy GOP talking points so that vampires in Brooks Brothers and blonde haircuts can seem "rap-positive," he also implies that he has the right to define a demographic in the absence of that demographic's will. It's disgusting.

Because I don't know half as much about rap as some of my friends, I enlisted my buddy Jay Friedman, a/k/a Satellite High, to help break down everything wrong with (at the time of writing) Veuger's first nine entries. (You may remember Jay from his awesome diss track on the Birther rap group "Wolverines.") Together, we worked up a good guide to how thoroughly wrong the list is.

Continue to The New Republic...

Cordial Greetings to 45 Pocket Toys of Death Merchants

Yesterday, the US Senate killed even a candyass, quintessentially senatorial approach to gun control. You could have cocked a single eye at the television with lid at half mast while falling into a K-hole and still had enough situational awareness to be furious at the lobbyist capture of our most venerated, sclerotic chamber full of war profiteering racists, foot-draggers and bozos. This was, after all, nothing new.

Yesterday's vote—against a treacly version of measures supported by 90% of the American people and even a majority of gun owners—had the virtue of malicious consistency. The essence of its unconcern was obvious to all because it came as a fulfillment of fate. In the face of real, existential problems, the United States Senate can be relied upon to sublimely split the difference between the cruelest act and the least difficult. In Washington, the blood rolls downhill.

Yet just because something is obvious or foreordained does not spare it from outrage. Given how far away it's possible to see stupidity coming only makes it that much worse when it inevitably arrives. As such, it's probably not terribly surprising to see people tackily lusting for violence. Especially when a walking anti-Habsburgian chin deformity like Mitch McConnell uses his Facebook page to do the public policy equivalent of "u mad, bro?" trolling about the tryhard epic "care" of people who have negative attitudes toward human flesh being torn apart ballistically.

The Sweet Smell of Failure: Dinesh D'Souza, Colonial Apologist and Right-Wing Loser

Note: Today, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to our Managing Editor General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria. He last joined us for a look at Big Mark Brendle's Radio Fragments.


Dinesh D'Souza: Portrait Of The Failure As A Done Man
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

In the pantheon of hard-right holy rollers who have spectacularly strayed on the road to New Jerusalem, Dinesh D'Souza—the Indian Mr. Bean—is a pitifully dull case. But Jesus wept all the same, anguished as he was by Dinesh D'Souza's wayward penis.

The lodestar of suck, the one that propelled this greased weasel to fame on the right-wing rodeo circuit, shines even on his tepid excuse of a sex scandal: he showed up at some Bible-thumping conference with an extramarital companion—the also-married Denise Odie Joseph—introducing her as his fiancee, before retiring to a shared Comfort Suite. This induced a collective case of "the vapors" among the Board of Trustees at King's College, the barely accredited evangelical diploma mill where D'Souza served as president. A marathon Board meeting, and it was all over: D'Souza was fired, stripped of his six-figure salary (he only took a vow of intellectual poverty), and booted back into the GOP scullery from whence he came.

Texts to Rafalca

About a month ago, I started tweeting at Rafalca, Ann Romney's personal torture horse, who Ann took to England to riverdance in humiliating circles after years of ruining her youth. I even kind of hoped to get a little trending hashtag going for a while, maybe to push Rafalca to break the silence and the cycle of abuse. She never replied.

Needless to say, it got discouraging after a while, speaking into the darkness when that special animal shone so brightly on the TV and the international stage. I became frustrated and had a bit of a tantrum. I tweeted these a while back, and someone reminded me of them. (I would have posted these on Tumblr, since that's where brief stuff like this belongs. But for some reason my Tumblr — or maybe all of Tumblr — refuses to render embedded tweets.) Maybe they'll keep someone else from making the same mistakes that I did.

Discovering Paul Ryan: An Odyssey in Twitter

There's something kind of wondrous about watching major world events unfold via a late-night Twitter feed. While a lot of the people hanging around are Aussies or Kiwis and thus up at totally reasonable hours, everyone else is drunk, insomniac, a crank, a news junkie or a dangerous loner. And, because there are fewer people around — and because those who are seem more forthrightly oddball — the response to these momentous events feels a little more intimate and authentic.

Watching Paul Ryan (R-WI) be introduced to the United States as the next GOP Vice Presidential candidate, and watching large portions of the still-awake, grouchy barfly part of the United States reject him like a diseased organ was a blast. There, at midnight, were thousands of people having fun with the careening, inevitable horror. It was as if all these strangers were in on some prank, giggling as it unfolded. Paul Ryan? The nerd undertaker? Really? Ahahahaha.

I Get Letters: 'Bend over and grab your ankles,piss ant'

This site has gone dormant over the last month due to a dead computer and my inability to do much more than write basic text documents with my makeshift alternatives. I do apologize for the lack of updates here, both links to pieces elsewhere and also new writing from General Ze'evi and other contributors who want to do something fun.

That's a ways off. For now, here's some fun hate mail I got about this piece on Gawker about Mitt Romney and Treason. I've attached an artist's conception of the sender, which I found by Google Image Searching "Crazy Motherfucker."

FROM: Jim Devitt
EMAIL: devitt9@aol.com
SUBJECT: Bend over and grab your ankles,piss ant

While Chicago community socialist revolutionary usurps our constitution,rule of law and attempts to take away our individual freedom quisling "Americans" like you are enabling and helping oblameo destroy America.we Americans are fed up with the pimps and pimpetes in the leftist oblameo radical leftist propaganda mill spewing out their ofal.america is waking up to the fifth-column of euro-socialist in our mist. The description of treason fit perfectly with you quisling socialist.we will never submit to to obameo's socialism or romney's progressive-moderate- liberal agenda.GOT THE MESSAGE PISS ANT

GAWKER: GOP Death Games for Kids!

Wednesday morning, a man working for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign described the transition from the primaries to the general election as "a reset button. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch." The man who said that was Eric Fehrnstrom, which would be fine if he were Professor Farnsworth's nemesis on Futurama or President of the Association of People Who Share the Same Name as Charlatans Groucho Marx Played. Unfortunately, he's Mitt's charlatan: Fehrnstrom is his Communications Director.

Click on Mitt's sudden uncontrollable urge to barf after hearing his own bullshit to continue to the Gawker piece:

GQ: Seven Minutes in Heaven, Six Hours with CNN

One of my handlers at GQ — a stern but humane gentleman who obeys the law — had an idea: if CNN has been this bad during the rest of the campaign (and it has), then it's going to be a spangly, exploding abortion on Super Tuesday. And ordinarily, he'd be correct. Only, this time, against all odds, something went right with CNN.

Still, there were mistakes and weirdness. Virtual conventions? Yeah. Gloria Borger. Oh, Lord, yeah. Bad riffs, telescoping simulacra and gleeful invocations of Taco Bell? GIMME A HELL YEAH.

Click on the Stone Cold Wolf Blitzer below for a liveblog of six hours of CNN Super Tuesday coverage.

GAWKER: Andrew Breitbart's Dead

Good. General Ze'evi and I take a moment to look back comprehensively on a life that the media either mistakenly, squeamishly or warily summed up as mostly benign. You know, one or two regrettable bits, but otherwise a gauzy, sunny family portrait — like what Madison Avenue thinks wheat and beaches look like when you're menstruating.

Click on the dead fraud's impression of John Lithgow from Third Rock from the Sun to be taken to the article.

GAWKER: Michigan, Home of Nothing

The predictive ability of presidential campaigns has been thrown out of kilter by a front-runner who can't win two contests in a row and challengers who can't win more than one on a weekly basis. Michigan didn't clarify anything. Reading meaning from Michigan is like trying to divine a source from the dust storm ejected by a Shop-Vac while politely pretending that nobody brought a device that farts anything.

Click on the Mitt & Rick cuddlebears to be taken to the Gawker article.


Thanks again to Jim Cooke for the excellent image you can see in whole by clicking the above.

GAWKER: Rich-Guy Marionette Slapfight

My first piece wasn't a catastrophe, so the good people at Gawker allowed me to keep going. That looks to be the norm from here on out. (More below the pic.)

This time, I wanted to talk about how bizarrely satisfying it is to watch the Republican primary surrogacy developing via individual billionaire sponsorships. It is, of course, a horrendous development for democracy, and exactly the sort of thing we don't want to see happen. But if we are fated to be kicked around by bored people with lots of money who feel like buying a presidency, at least we've been blessed with an incredibly entertaining version of that fate, via a bunch of weird old coots.

GAWKER: Mitt Romney, The Inauthentic Man's Inauthenticity

The good people at Gawker asked me to write something for them. And by people, I mean, "AJ Daulerio," whose last communication with me before that was probably reading me saying incredibly rude things about him. I'm sure this is a lesson for young students out there, and I'm sure it's the wrong one.

Anyhow, I was lucky enough to be able to write something that had been bugging me about Mitt Romney — namely, that the man is so thoroughly artificial that what stands out about him on the campaign trail is not that he's unreal but that he's badly faking being fake. Gawker illustrator Jim Cooke was also gracious enough to create this original work for the piece.

Click the miniature version of Jim Cooke's Mitt to be taken to the article and a much bigger pretty picture:

Also, if you get the chance, you might also really enjoy this excellent take on Mitt and his dad from Rick Perlstein.

The Foster Friess Think Tank

Foster Friess made the news last week for the first time since his invention of inexpensive family-friendly hot dog restaurants and tasty iced creams.

You may already have heard of him as the man who's bankrolling the Rick Santorum campaign. At CPAC, he scored one of the best lines of the day by opening with a joke: "A conservative, a liberal and a moderate walk into a bar. The bartender says, 'Hi, Mitt.'" While that was funny, many Americans felt that his comments last week were not. When discussing birth control, Friess said:

I get such a chuckle when these things come out. Here we have millions of our fellow Americans unemployed, we have jihadist camps being set up in Latin America, which Rick has been warning about, and people seem to be so preoccupied with sex. I think it says something about our culture. We maybe need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are. And this contraceptive thing, my gosh, it's such inexpensive. Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly.

Taken out of context like this, his comments are of course offensive. But a full look at what Friess espouses for America quickly dispels much of this foofaraw.

Let's be honest, upsetting women is not politically damaging when they have no business voting in the first place. In a Friessian political milieu, statements like these are a non-starter. Thus, to explain to America the broader plans he and Rick Santorum have for the country, I have gladly accepted a position as a Senior Fellow at the Foster Friess Think Tank for America, which was founded by this Friess supporter. (Another Fellow, Mark Brendle, has contributed to this site.)

VICE: A Belated Santorum to You!

Nobody cared about Rick Santorum. Until now. I wanted to care, but he never came to me. Rick, he was distant. I called. I sent letters. I poked him on Facebook.

Unfortunately, he never replied. And, unfortunately, some of this is out of date by a few days, because CPAC happened. But most of the rest of it is still valid. Sadly. Click Rick for a sick trick:


If you haven't, AND I DO NOT KNOW WHY OR HOW, click on the Santorum to take you to Vice.com.

VICE: Ron Paul, Hacked to the White-Supremacist Bone

In the last two weeks, we've learned from Ron Paul's own former staffers that he was fully aware and in control of his own newsletter operation. That removes the desperate Paulestinian rationalization that somehow millions of dollars worth of racist newsletters were sold for decades without Ron Paul's awareness.

"But, that was in the 1990s!" counter Paul fans. And there another inapplicable, inapposite and unpersuasive argument might have lain, if it weren't for a recent hack by members of Anonymous, who exposed connections between Ron Paul and white-supremacist groups. Connections that exist today, rather than back in 2008. As if there were a freshness date on courting racism. As if there were a time-stamp on being worthless.

Click the wrinkled, lecturing, race-baiting goblin to read more at Vice:


For more on Ron Paul, in order:

• Ron Paul: Reactionary Racist Leprechaun

• The Ron Paul Political Report: Special Issue on Race Terrorism

• I'm Not Mad at Ron Paul, I'm Just Disappointed

• Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters