And how about that Jeremy Corbyn? If he’s not the next elected PM of Britain, I’ll eat my jolly old bowler hat. (Okay, maybe not a bowler, because I don’t own one. But I’ll definitely eat one of my berets!)
Now, heeeeeere’s Donnie’s:
The latter has already spawned a metric crap-tonne of memes. Which, unfortunately, WON’T touch Donnie very deeply, because the US doesn’t have a parliamentary system of government, and therefore, no Question Period. Otherwise, he’d be grilled to death on his stupid-ass panic-mongering crapaganda.
And the whole world, I’m sure, would be there for it.
Boris Johnson’s brother has dramatically quit the government – and parliament – in an apparent protest at his leadership.
Jo Johnson, a higher education minister, said it was impossible to reconcile “family loyalty and the national interest”, adding: “It’s an unresolvable tension & time for others to take on my roles as MP & minister #overandout “
It is only six weeks since the younger Johnson faced fierce criticism for returning to serve his brother – despite resigning for the first time late last year, to campaign for a Final Say referendum on Brexit.
It leaves the prime minister with the painful task of trying to explain why even his own sibling has lost faith in his handling of the Brexit crisis, as the criticism of Tory MPs grows.
Christmas dinner this year at the Johnsons’ should be especially interesting. That is, if anyone’s going at all.
PPS: Quite possibly the best Sharpiegate meme yet:
…something that sounds like a bad joke, and it IS bad, but it’s no joke:
Yup. The Very Stable Genius had a brainfart, and one that was already shot down at the height of the Cold War:
During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” according to one source who was there. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” the source added, paraphrasing the president’s remarks.
Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
Trump replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene before they make landfall.
The briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” the source in the room added. “You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?'”
Do the same thing that they did when Eisenhower was president and cooler heads prevailed, people…dismiss the idea on the grounds that it’s dumber than dog turds. Which could be dropped into a hurricane with better results than any number of motherfucking NUKES.
PS: Holy shit, how did I miss THIS? It came out two weeks ago:
…one of the two hydra-heads of the Kochtopus is dead:
And bless David Doel for not sugar-coating anything about this lousy fucker’s life. Including his early adventures in the not-so-fine art of screwing people out of their money (in this case, his brother Fred).
Alas, the OTHER half of the Kochtopus, Charles Fucking Koch, is still alive and kochin’. Meaning, yup, we’re not done with these mofos yet.
And if the will is read and turns out to contain the anticipated plummy posthumous donations to all the usual Kochtopus tentacles, we’ll likely be stuck with hideous, world-wrecking Koch crapaganda for years or even decades to come.
Still, ding fucking DONG. My only sorrow is that it didn’t happen long ago. Like, right around the time these bastards started financing shitty economic and political doctrines via their pet stink tanks.
If by any chance you believed that Jeffrey Epstein’s rich, powerful former cronies had him killed in order to keep him quiet, you might want to calm down, wipe away that lather, and watch this:
Don’t worry, people, this legal fight has just begun. The victims — the REAL people that the rich cronies feared would speak out — are still coming forward. Far from being intimidated by his jailhouse death, they are now empowered. When Epstein hung himself, he released them from the non-disclosure agreements he’d had them sign (under duress, no doubt). They are speaking out, and they are suing his estate…and they stand a good chance of being witnesses in more than one criminal trial in future, too.
Epstein is NOT the victim in this case. He is not even A victim. The exploited girls — recruited by Epstein via Ghislaine Maxwell and who knows what others — are the victims. They are grown women now. They are survivors.
And if anyone thought they were quashed and silenced and would make no trouble, those fools are about to be proved terribly wrong. There is no conspiracy big enough to hold them back any longer.
PS: Here’s the final verdict on how he killed himself:
Seems like there was a perfect storm of factors at work to make it possible. But I don’t doubt that it WAS suicide, even so.
Easily. According to Jeanne Theoharis, interviewed here, the conditions in the facility where he was being held, pending trial, were atrocious:
And let’s not forget that he was in solitary…a fact that’s significant in itself. A mentally healthy individual would have trouble living like that. Epstein, as the circumstances of his life should make abundantly clear, was NOT mentally healthy. Far from it. A man who has murals painted on the walls of his mansion, of himself inside the razor-wired walls of a federal penitentiary, is not a well man. Even truly tough guys, like El Chapo, who is also currently imprisoned in the MCC, find the place to be a hellhole. So it’s not surprising that the conditions in there would be sufficient to push a more vulnerable individual over the edge.
Moreover, there are the salient facts that Epstein’s own lawyer pushed for him to be taken OFF suicide watch. A defence attorney would presumably be acting on the orders of his client. I can only gather that Epstein WANTED to kill himself, and was looking for an opportunity. Whether he did so out of despair, driven to it by a depressing environment that would crack even a tough nut, or whether he did it with some obstructive purpose in mind, either way, it’s clear to me that he offed himself. And that the jailhouse conditions proved infinitely helpful to him, with or without the nefarious background influence of such despicables as Bill Barr, and all the powerful types he pimped those girls out to.
Welp. It’s a rare day when I’ll actually give Marco Fucking Rubio credit as being a voice of reason. But today I’ll do it, because just this once, the shoe fits:
Yeah, folks, there’s no need to formulate elaborate conspiracy theories here. No need to blame Bill Clinton, who was so inept at keeping even a few lousy blowjobs a secret, and certainly no need to make him out to be some kind of mastermind in this. No need to blame anyone else, either. Jeffrey Epstein’s death was indeed suicide, and not murder. The known facts line up in that direction already. And I’m going to share what I think the likeliest scenario is, based on those facts.
How did he do it?
Epstein didn’t kill himself while supposedly on suicide watch; he was taken OFF suicide watch, at the urging of his own defence attorney. I’m going to make an educated guess that he gave every sign of compliance after his first effort went awry, so that his jailers would relax their guard — literally — and thus give him a chance to make good on his bid the next time around.
Why did he do it?
Epstein had every reason to kill himself. All his dirty laundry was being ignominiously aired in public, and he knew it. His victims have been coming forward for years, telling their stories to any journalist who would listen; Virginia Roberts, in particular, has been admirably persistent. Those accounts had finally gained enough traction to result in his arrest.
And, after years of pooh-poohing of those victims by the media, and sweetheart deals with local prosecutors, Epstein was finally on the verge of facing actual justice for his crimes. There would be no opportunities left to escape to his Virgin Islands villa for unimpeded further indulgences, as he had done in the past. Nor would he merely be jailed at night, and allowed to “work” (at WHAT?) during the day, as he had done after his first conviction. There would be no more chances to slip away from his keepers and be found, hours later, soaked in sweat and wandering the streets. This time, Epstein was well and truly caught. A fact which, by itself, would have made him desperate for any escape. And since all the other escape routes were now closed to him, death was his only way out.
But how do we know that he would want to kill himself? Simple: He left one hell of a trail of breadcrumbs. And it starts right on his own doorstep in New York.
In a report on the mansion, valued at more than $55 million, The New York Times noted that its artwork includes, on the second floor, a commissioned mural of a “photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.”
The Times quotes R. Couri Hay, a public relations specialist who recently met with Epstein at his home, as saying, “(Epstein) said, ‘That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again.’”
The home also includes such oddities as a hallway covered with artificial eyeballs originally made for wounded soldiers, a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier, and a chess board with custom figures, many dressed suggestively and modeled after one of Epstein’s staffers, The Times reported.
Glass eyes in the walls, a creepy chess set, a chandelier with a life-size nude female mannequin suspended from it, and murals of penitentiary scenes featuring Epstein himself? Yeah, I’d say he was definitely obsessed with SOMETHING. Several things, in fact: Sexualized control over women (in this case, very young girls), a personal sense of being omnipotent and omniscient — and the terror of having all that taken away from him, and him being under the all-seeing eyes of the prison wardens himself, instead.
Epstein wanted to rape his way through life. He had delusional fantasies about being some kind of sexual Svengali, spreading his “seed” throughout the world (thankfully, nobody seems to have propagated any of his “seeds”, so far as we know). He cultivated the powerful, the influential, the wealthy and the titled, all in an effort to gain the power he sought for himself but did not actually have. Does anyone seriously think that one so obsessively full of himself would NOT kill himself if it were all stripped away by the authorities?
And there is no doubt that he knew what lay in store for him, and dreaded life in prison. The mural was one indicator of where his mind was at. Another is the well-known fact that sex offenders, particularly those who have molested children, do not last long in the prison population if ever they are taken out of solitary confinement. Lots of prison inmates were themselves abused as children. Since these angry guys have little left to lose, any one of them would have cheerfully beaten up Jeffrey Epstein or even killed him. In fact, they’d be more than happy to do it en groupe. Imagine the horror of knowing that THIS is how you could expect your high-flying life of crime to end.
It is unlikely that Epstein would be formally executed for what he’d done, but very likely that a life sentence would be nasty, brutish, and short. To prevent that, Jeffrey Epstein did the one thing he still had the power to do: He took his own life. And in so doing, he took his fate out of the hands of the justice system. It was also final fuck-you for all his victims, robbing them of the satisfaction of confronting him in court. In short, he was a coward, and he died a coward’s death.
No conspiracies necessary, and no elaborate theories required.
Maybe that perpetually dumb look on his face is because he’s punching himself in it constantly? I dunno…judge for yourselves:
Oh, Bowtie Boy…when you have such blatantly racist luminaries as David Fucking Duke and Richard Fucking Spencer defending you…you really need to wake up to yourself. Not only is white supremacism a real thing (and a real PROBLEM), you’re soaking in it.
Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next.
--Arthur Miller, "Why I Wrote 'The Crucible'", The New Yorker, October 21, 1996
All opinions here are the brain-wrackings of Sabina C. Becker, unless otherwise credited. If you cite them, please give credit where due.
