Kindest, Bravest, Warmest, Most Wonderful

To start, just a note that this is the first time I've used my writin' laptop since I upgraded my home internet. It turns out that whatever sort of service you set up for yourself, whether it was fairly recently or, say, like 15 years ago when you moved into the place you currently live, the phone company providing your internet service is more than happy to let you keep paying 2001 prices for DSL as long as you're too lazy to pick up a phone or click like two things on their webpage to see what other options are available. Could I be congratulating myself for striking a deal that more than triples my internet speed while costing me something like $50 less per month? Maybe. But only if I can mentally wall off the part that realizes I could have had all that like five years ago. Which... nope, not yet.

It's weird to think about the things we can bend into an acceptable status quo, no matter how horrible. This is of course the most first world of first world examples, me and my download speed. It is nice and a little embarrassing to realize I was paying extra to maintain a state of affairs where I had to yell upstairs for my kids to get the fuck off YouTube for a minute because dad was having trouble accessing the car insurance company's website. Right now I'm just enjoying the responsiveness and access to all world knowledge now that I've taken destiny by the scruff of the neck and dragged my family all the way forward into about 2008, back when this U-Verse shit was first becoming popular and affordable. I know it makes us all feel plugged-in and current and, since I live in a house with three teenage boys, will complete revolutionize the way they secretly consume porn. With download speeds like this, it's going to be like the transition we all made from the static days of Playboy to the VHS tapes you'd buy at the liquor store.

The only downside is now I get my political news way faster, which I'm not sure I want. I was already having trouble keeping up with all the twists and the turns, or I guess more accurately the lack of twists and turns. Ever since the heady days of the post-convention Khizr Khan Gold Star Family fight that led to the giant Hillary bounce, the media drumbeat has been insistent on turning this back into a horserace, taking Donald Trump at his word about increased message discipline (despite all evidence to the contrary) and forcing the Clinton campaign to play defense in a series of ginned up "scandals," the most serious of which so far has seemed to be that she let herself be invaded by bacteria while campaigning.

The unfortunate part is that contracting pneumonia dovetailed with the unkillable talking point from the right about Hillary and her secret disease. I'm not going to put any links in to the sites making these claims seeing as they are mostly constructed around the central idea of the non-threatening nature of the white penis, but trust me when I say I've seen claims for everything up to and including AIDS. Reagan actually had Alzheimer's while in the White House and pushing 80, but let's name another fucking airport after that guy. Hillary is only a candidate, but working through illness is a sin equal to having been secretly born in Kenya.

And that's what this is about really. With Barack Obama (for those of you who claim not to see color, a black man) he was burdened with the unproveable negative of somehow showing exhaustively that he was NOT born in Kenya and/or a Muslim. When the actual birth certificate was not enough, the jig was up: satisfaction of the question was obviously not the point. The black candidate was the other who didn't "share our values." Not only was he secretly foreign, but also a secret Muslim, not just different, but a sleeper agent in league with the enemies of Anglo-Saxon Christian America. We didn't distrust him because he was black, no, that would be racist. We distrusted him because he was the Manchurian candidate. Not the good Frank Sinatra one either, we obviously mean the one with Denzel.

Hillary was probably born here, OK, but you know, is she really strong enough to hold up? I mean, sometimes she looks tired or coughs or whatever, so probably there's something we're not being told, right? And just like that, she's got her very own unproveable negative: show us how you're not secretly infirm, keeping in mind the natural caveat that any evidence produced by you (that we have specifically demanded) will be immediately dismissed because we can't trust anything you say. It's probably just part of the political/elites/Jew media conspiracy that got her this far in the first place.

Obama's "secret" speaks directly to the complications of the prejudice he must bear by being a black man, no matter what his record: deep down, he's not one of us. Hillary's charge of congenital weakness not coincidentally associated with the type of thinking that made women start marathons from out of the bushes as recently as 50 years ago because they were widely understood to be too frail to withstand a distance run of that length. An institutional and, more importantly, social power structure reserving its own highest seats for the doughy, pasty buttocks of white males is, not surprisingly I guess, having a tiny bit of a freakout over successive candidates who are black and female, respectively. And like everyone else before them, the nature of their own bullshit spells out the specifics of their panic.

There are less than two months left in this interminable election cycle, so you'd hope that this kind of rhetorical garbage would die out in the dumpster it was born in, but nope, I guess we can't expect that any time soon.