I'm here in my busted-ass easy chair in a climate controlled room at the start of a very new Inland SoCal Summer tap-tap-tapping away on the keyboard of my busted-ass 2012 MacBook Pro a little earlier in the day of a Thursday than normal because tomorrow is a holiday. When you work in my agency of the federal government, that means you (sometimes, at the discretion of management) get what they call "59 minute rule" where you're allowed to leave one minute into the final hour of your shift. I wanted to say something snarky here about how the benefits of public sector work after a full winter and spring of being hit over the head with the bureaucratic and political equivalent of a sock full of oranges have been reduced to slightly less than an hour off up to 11 days of the year,* but I'm home at 2 pm (including the commute!) on a Thursday before a long weekend; it's hard not to feel a little bit of "fuck yeah."
But I'm not off the hook for the weekend yet, because I've set this recurring task for myself to provide this ABSOLUTELY FREE (unless you don't want it to be, no pressure) content for you, my single-digit readership. That means I'm professionally obligated to be ENGAGED and EARNEST and GIVE FULL EFFORT, but it's a little difficult when the only thing happening in national news right now is this fucking stupid bullshit cringey cruelty-forward omnibus bill passing. Mostly it makes me feel relieved to have chosen not to be born like 15 years earlier than I actually was so I don't immediately have to worry about the dismantling of (more) social programs that make it possible to do things like not die from sepsis because my cold turned into a sinus infection and none of the hospitals or clinics in my area could afford to stay open without that support. Still being viable working age in 2025 turned out to be real strategic coup on my part.
The pundit class are already talking about how this is going to be the fuel that fires the Democrats to big wins at least in the next Congressional election cycle in '26, which, you know, great. The contemplation of the immediate consequences of the bill AND all the other horrifying anti-human shit that was going on before that (also known as "right fucking now") doesn't really put me in the mood to start throwing Sun Tzu or Napoleon quotes. I think that's some beta-male shit these days anyways, disqualified for being too old and dusty and not concerned enough specifically with daily protein intake. Real men only want to talk about how much raw organ meat they should be weighing out to eat and nothing else. Besides, Napoleon couldn't even qualify as a short king as a) he apparently wasn't that short and b) technically an emperor.
Plus, being fully honest, I don't really know what's in this bill. And yes, it's clear Trump doesn't really know what's in it either, but to be fair to him (just this one time), I don't think anyone on the whole earth read all 900-whatever pages of it. Like everything else this administration does, the details are for nerds and losers. It's the winning that's the point. You can just do whatever you want, as long as it's not losing. And if you do lose, you frame it as cheating and you move. On after maybe jailing one or two of your political opponents.
So that's what I'm going to do here: we (America as a whole) didn't lose a bunch of necessary stuff just now, what happened was the powers that be, occupying all the levels of government, animated by a radical death-obsessed ideology, conspired to pretend to have a functioning legislature and just ran through a rigged vote, thwarting the will or the needs of the people they pretend to represent.
Oh wait, I was trying to make that sound all whiney and conspiratorial in the Trump style, but in this case, it's a pretty fair assessment. Shit, I accidentally did a punditry. I keep forgetting satire and irony are almost completely inert forces. I guess it's true, everything is politics now: prescriptions, gas prices, going to the Home Depot, writing explicitly about politics on the internet... at some point, someone's going to try to take every innocuous thing and make it seem partisan. It's getting so bad, even Joe Rogan is starting to notice.
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*back down to10 when Trump inevitably cancels Juneteenth as a holiday for being whatever the successor racist buzzword is that replaces antifa/woke/DEI next
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