America in 2019: Well, I Lost My Health Insurance, But I Did Get This Nifty Security Clearance! F/SC

Oh look, ‘tis the first of April, surely the most irritating, er, merriest holiday on the internet! Perhaps I shall spend tonight's blog amusingly contradicting my established beliefs! I could talk of my support for Lindsey Graham's 2020 re-election, for example, wouldn't that be delightfully naughty? Fair is foul and foul is fair! I dislike beer, and cats, and gun control, ho ho ho what cheer!

...or we could just do the news, like usual. Let's do that. And as always, if you want this post with all those nifty news links, click here: http://showercapblog.com/america-in-2019-well-i-lost-my-health-insurance-but-i-did-get-this-nifty-security-clearance/

In one of those perfectly Trumpian collisions of hatred, ignorance, and boredom that periodically endangers all life on Earth, Government Cheese Goebbels threatened to close the border with Mexico. Yup. The whole border. He probably thinks there's a button he can push and a great big cartoon garage door rolls down from the sky. And yeah, if it does billions of dollars worth of damage to the American economy, throwing the nation into a recession, well, that's a small price to pay when you're a narcissist, and the only other option is backing down and admitting you were wrong.

In a move allegedly aimed at reducing illegal immigration, Fat Q*Bert announced he's cutting off foreign aid to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, which anyone with the mental capacity to tie a necktie to an appropriate length could tell you will actually increase illegal immigration. Yes, this is rather like going on a Crisco-and-deep-fried-butter diet and expecting weight loss, but hey, while America had the choice to delegate these sorts of decisions to a hyper-competent, extremely intelligent, non-rampaging-moron in 2016, well, she was a woman.

And yeah, I'm sure you all saw the thing where Fux n’ Fiendz referred to this story by referencing "3 Mexican countries.” Look, when your job posting for chyron-writer reads “instinctual racism and lack of attention to detail encouraged,” you have to expect this sort of thing.

Anyway, I think we can all stop worrying about 2020, for Jeff Flake has raised his banner, and proclaimed that so long as nobody minds, it'd probably be better if a Democrat beat Hairplug Himmler next year. With such a resolute foundation to build on, how can we lose? For when the American people look upon Jeff Flake, do they not see a man they would follow right up to the very gates of Hell, knowing he would surely express mild disapproval of Lucifer's centuries of depravity before voting to confirm his entire slate of judicial appointees?

Still, Shart Garfunkel believes he's found a golden ticket with his hot new “no collusion” campaign slogan. Honestly, it's better than running on his record, isn't it? “I tried to steal your health care, cut Meals on Wheels, and defund the Special Olympics, also I opened concentration camps for children on American soil and gave myself a big fat tax cut at the middle class’ expense!” certainly doesn't have the simple elegance of “no collusion,” and anyway it's too long to fit on a cheap, made-in-China ballcap.

Traffic to porn sites plummeted over the last week, as Americans are increasingly meeting their arousal needs by reading stories about Alex Jones squirming and flailing as his long-overdue day of reckoning draws ever nearer. I'm no lawyer, but I imagine “I used anonymous 4chan posts as ‘evidence’ to provoke my dirty fuckstick followers in a campaign to terrorize families who lost their children at Sandy Hook, MY BAD” isn't going to hold up in court. Anyway, if I get hit by a train or struck by lightning before these lawsuits squeeze every last dime out of this swollen rage tick, I am absolutely haunting the shit out of that courtroom.

We tend to focus on the negative in these times of constant turmoil and borderline fascism, but today, I choose to celebrate the fact that we've survived more than two years with the nuclear arsenal controlled by a man who doesn't know what batteries are. Yes, the Velveeta Vulgarian, feeling his oats after his Complete and Total 100% Exoneration Forever and Ever No Take-Backs (more on that in a minute) tried to dunk on renewable energy by pointing out that it's not always windy. Instead of debates next year, maybe we should just have the candidates take fifth grade science tests.

Gosh, Stephen Moore sure is upset that he's being vetted before he's handed the enormous political power that is so clearly his birthright as a Mediocre White Dude. Anyway, it's really cool to live in a country where you still have to wonder if a tax-and-child-support-dodging turdmaggot like Moore, who, just as a side note, is also totally unqualified for this post, will be confirmed by the obsequious Republican Party anyway.

So, I guess Mick Mulvaney is bad at trivia, which is sort of amusing, but ultimately inconsequential. Regrettably, he is equally bad at health care policy, and the stakes there are...somewhat higher. With his shitsack boss working in court to destroy the Affordable Care Act, Mick went on the Sunday Shoz to insist that nobody will lose their health insurance should the Trump Administration position prevail, presumably because elves will go door to door offering the affected families coverage in exchange for their firstborn children.

I'm disappointed in Mulvaney, if only because the gaslighting has gotten so lazy. Mick, we already know that Republicans would happily watch millions of Americans die from treatable ailments if it meant lowering the DeVos family tax bill by just enough to gas up a yacht or two; that's why so many of your old House colleagues are enjoying their new private sector gigs right now. Take a little pride in your work, man! Tell us we're not only getting pre-existing conditions covered, but a free basket of adorable puppies at no extra charge! At least when Sarah Slanders lies to us, she makes the effort to sneer condescendingly at anyone still clinging to quaint concepts like “objective reality.”

Don't worry though, Strawberry Shartcake has placed a Medicare fraudster in charge of the GOP's health care “reform” effort. That's not an April Fool's joke, by the way. How in the living fuck is that not an April Fool's joke? I mean, you've got 53 Senators to choose from, and while they're certainly not the best and brightest America has to offer, surely you could've chosen somebody who never ran a company that perpetrated the “largest health-care fraud case in U.S. history.” What, is Ron Johnson too busy switching to pull-up training pants?

We know Pissant Pol Pot is driven largely by a crippling jealously of his immediate predecessor, who was well-liked, and, y'know, understood things...well, Don, while you're demonstrably inferior to Barack Obama by almost every metric, you've lapped him several times over on the “humiliating defeats in court” thing. This time a federal judge overturned his executive order opening parts of the Arctic and North Atlantic to fossil fuel drilling. Hope you get some quality down time in your weekly taxpayer-funded golf vacations, Fuck-O, cuz you must get awfully tired of losing.

A whistleblower tells us the Dopey Dotard with Diminutive Digits doesn't like it much when he's told his corrupt stooges have no business possessing high-level security clearances just because they're “susceptible to blackmail” or “have a criminal history” or “will sell state secrets to get out from under serious personal financial trouble,” so he's overruled security experts 25 times, and opened up the U.S. intel buffet to the Dick Tracy rogues gallery of creeps and crooks he surrounds himself with. TWENTY-FIVE. They probably gave one to Kid Rock when he visited the Shart House, because they ran out of commemorative pens and couldn't figure out how to open the supply cabinet.

You know, I'm starting to think Republicans weren't acting in good faith when they cited national security concerns in attacking Hillary Clinton over her e-mail server.

I see Mitch McConnell is getting under everybody's skin again, with his latest bullshit excuse for blowing up Senate norms to facilitate his Turd Emperor's efforts to stuff the government with dolts and grifters. I admit I find it rather charming whenever somebody throws some old speech in Wrinkly Gamera's face, demonstrating his hypocrisy for all the world to see...the dude understands he's a hypocrite, and he does not give a single fuck who knows it.

Mitch McConnell plays the politics of power, and he does so very very well. I say, don't get mad, take his power away. In 2020, send the old bastard home, or at the very least to the Senate minority, and let him flail his little turtle legs ineffectually in the air as we undo his life's work. Don't give his trolling a second thought.

And now we learn the Shart House is considering adding an “immigration czar,” and they've narrowed the candidates down to our old chum, Failed Professional Bigot KKKris KKKobach, and Wow It Takes Being Mentioned in the Same Sentence as Kris Fucking Kobach to Make Him Seem Like the Less Insane Choice Ken Cuccinelli. Me, I think this primarily about getting Stephen Miller a friend with similar interests to hang out with, so expect both men to reject this post.

But from where I sit, the big news these days is the polling. The Tangelo-Tinted Taint Tumor was so damn sure that with the Mueller investigation behind him, his troubles were over, and life was all wall funding and overcooked steaks from here on out...but it looks like outside of his brainwashed rube base, everybody still fucking hates him, and the coalition that administered his historic midterm spanking shows no signs of fracturing. Turns out, pursuing an aggressively unpopular agenda in open defiance of the people's loudly-expressed wishes isn't some deft, 5th-dimensional strategy by a political genius, it's the boneheaded act of a cud-brained idiot who's too dumb to understand counting.

Me, I figure it's time I was counting the beers in my fridge, backwards, down to zero. Holy shit, that was one lame-ass transition, but it's too late now, here we are, in the last paragraph of the blog, and I'm certainly not getting any funnier tonight. I think it's best if we all just move on now.