Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

Country music has been in the news recently, which means that someone like me can feel on top of the country music scene, without actually listening to country music. So that’s a good thing.
 
I’m not saying that country music doesn’t have its uses. If you walk into a diner and hear a country song playing in the background, you can order grits with pork chops and eggs confidently, without even glancing at the menu. If you go on a first date with a woman that switches your car radio to a country station the minute the engine starts, she has already decided to have sex with you. I don’t eat grits and there is only one woman in my dating pool, so this info is not relevant to me, but feel free to use it if you need it.
 
There are about three country songs I like, and Dolly Parton is a national treasure. Apart from that, I didn’t have much use for the genre, until country went Republican. Country has always been a little bit Republican, of course, being listened to primarily by white guys who can’t dance, but are lured onto the dance floor anyway by leggy white girls who favor short-shorts and cowgirl boots. Often these types are staunch Republicans, until one of those cowgirls needs an abortion.
 
The serious Republicanation of country, though, started with Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” a song which threatens anybody from a bigger town who wants to attempt a carjacking or mugging in some mythical tiny burg. Of course, committing these crimes is a shitty idea in some hamlet where everybody knows everybody else. “Gollee, Clem, I ain’t seen you since you dropped out of fifth grade. And you grew up to be a carjacker! Wonders never cease!”
 
If you want to commit crime in a small town, it’s better to stick to small-town type criminal activities, like niece-fucking or being a closeted gay phys-ed coach who eventually gets busted for patting the wrong boy on the rump. Jason Aldean could have written a whole other verse about crimes you can get away with in a one-stoplight town, like smacking your woman around or embezzling money from your congregation. He didn’t, though.
 
Then came “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a song by former nobody Oliver Anthony that got to be number 1 on the country charts, which complains vaguely about wealthy snots who control the lives of poor, honest people like Oliver Anthony and his kin. Of course, this relationship between the haves and the have-nots has existed since about 6,000 BC, so Anthony is a bit late to this party.
 
Republicans seized on this ditty, and even played it at their debate in Milwaukee. That pissed even Oliver Anthony off, because while he and his friends bitch about shadowy forces that control their lives, the Republicans that were onstage in Milwaukee are those shadowy forces, trying to get Anthony and his ilk to worry about bilingual signs in Walmart and transgender hootenannies in the holler while their bridges rot and their healthcare gets ripped away.
 
Also, Milwaukee is well north of Richmond. You don’t believe me, get out your Mercator and a straightedge and see for yourself.
 
John Cougar Mellencamp, who really grew up in a small town, wrote a song about small town life that was neither racist, vaguely threatening or whiny, back in 1985. You can listen to it here.
 
Or not. I don’t blame you. Fucker sounds like a Democrat.

"If you're coming after me, I'm coming after you!" Donald Trump, last Friday.

This terrifying threat, issued by the Tangerine Drama Queen himself, has all of us shaking in our flip-flops out here in Libtard Land. Should we be constantly looking over our shoulders, fearing for a glimpse of his enraged orange visage, or at least wary of hearing the rumble of the mighty wheels of the Golf Cart of Vengeance?

Being "come after" by Trump seems like an idle threat to the most insouciant of us. How can an obese 77-year-old, a man who looks like running a hundred feet would give him a brain aneurysm, catch up to us comparatively fleet-footed Democrats? The answer is, of course, that Trump himself does not have to chase us down. His army of supporters, men armed with automatic weapons and powerful trucks flying anywhere from ten to fifteen Trump and "Don't Tread on Me" flags, depending on bed size, are standing by, waiting for his command to blast away at our treacherous bodies or run our pitiful Priuses off the highway.

These men, people with birth names like Lew, or Booney, or Cled, are willing to leave their loved ones and their catfish ponds behind to respond to the clarion of Trump's voice, echoing over hill and holler, commanding them to save real 'Murica' from Marxists, transgender athletes competing in any sport from track to pickleball to cornhole, pregnant immigrants and little old lady Democrats harvesting ballots.

Except maybe not. The specter of the last citizen army Trump tried to raise sitting in DC jails, awaiting long prison sentences, deprived of all human companionship besides Marjorie Taylor Greene's, is causing a drop in numbers of MAGA's willing to physically fight for Trump. That's the speculation, anyway. But when Trump calls, and people who bought hats and flags and yard signs from him sigh and say, "Love to be out there with my gun and pepper spray for our real President, but my catfish look hungry and my old lady took the keys to my truck away," who is going to come after Jack Smith and the rest of us?

Trump has even begged the Supreme Court to "intercede" for him. Nobody knows what that means, but, rest assured, it's nothing Brett Kavanaugh is going to put down his beer to do.

So, who will come after Trump's enemies? Possibly nobody. Lock him up.

Governor Ron DeSantis, in his bid to become an even nastier and more despicable version of the Tangerine Drama Queen, only without his pool boy getting indicted, gave his imprimatur to the new version of racial history in Florida, which states that, among other things, that slavery taught slaves valuable life skills, like blacksmithing.
 
I called up my old pal, veteran Republican political operator Joe Redstate, and asked him if blacksmithing slaves were going to become a touchstone for all Republicans from now on.
 
“Sho ‘nuff,” he replied, in a pitiful attempt at dialect. “The personal benefits slaves got from slavery have been concealed by woke history for too long.”
 
What were they besides learning to blacksmith? I mean besides whippings, rapes, and having your kids sold down the river? And I mean, the Mississippi river. To Mississippi.
 
“Florida is going to cover the travel benefits of slavery next semester. Right now, we’re teaching the vocational gifts that slavery gave slaves. And blacksmithing tops the list.”
 
So, there would be no black blacksmiths without slavery?
 
“Oh, there would probably be a few. But slaves were not natural blacksmiths, unlike white people.”
 
That does sound like open racism, Joe.
 
“Of course, it’s not! It’s just apparent that centuries of peasanting in Europe gave white people an advantage in learning blacksmithing, and other stuff that nobody does anymore, like wagon-wheel-making and cooking whales for their oil, when they escaped to freedom in America. Whereas, what did the slaves having going for them before they were imported here? Chanting, painting themselves, making war clubs, and being so afraid of solar eclipses that they immediately quit boiling explorers when one occurred?”
 
Tarzan movies are not considered documentaries nowadays, Joe.
 
“Tarzan! One of my childhood heroes. He was raised by apes, you know, and look at all he accomplished! Vine-swinging, yodeling, knifing lions. And Jane! Ooooh, Jane.”
 
We better change the subject, Joe, before you get lost in your boyhood memories of Jane...
 
“And Tarzan, too. One of the greatest white Americans ever, at least until Jason Aldean came along.”
 
Never mind that Tarzan was British, Joe.  So, what you’re saying, before we got sidetracked, is that white people were naturally better at picking up pre-industrial skills than black people, who needed to be enslaved to learn the colonial arts?
 
“Exactly! Man, that was precise! Have you ever considered writing textbooks for the state of Florida?”

The discovery of a gram of cocaine in a public area of the White House has set off a storm of speculation on the right that the blow belonged to a member of the Biden family, with the beady eye of suspicion falling mostly on former coke fiend Hunter Biden. The more blithering members of the Fox newsroom, along with Donald Trump Jr., no stranger to accusations of partying in the snow himself, immediately identified Hunter as the source of the baggie.
 
Had to be, although the Biden scion was apparently not in the White House when the toot was found in a heavily trafficked room in the building.
 
The Orange Ex himself, always the calm voice of reason and restraint, immediately pointed the finger at Biden Sr., switching abruptly from his usual characterization of the President as a narcoleptic dodderer barely able to keep his eyes open long enough to infuse America with Communism, to Amped-Up Joe, smoking crack with Merrick Garland in the Situation Room while giggling over their latest batch of subpoenas, or hoovering up rails off the Resolute Desk while caving in to China. The Indicted One added Hunter as a suspect, natch, and, somewhat out of left field, special prosecutor Jack Smith.
 
That’s a lot of people to be railing up a single bag of coke, especially since they apparently lost it in a cloak room somewhere in the depths of the WH, but that didn’t occur to Trump. The possibility that a random visitor or employee at the Presidential residence was the kind of social animal that pulled out his cell phone in that cloak room with a hand trembling with substance abuse, and didn’t notice that his coin bag of party powder had come out with it and fallen to the floor, also didn’t occur to the Tangerine Tyrant.
 
Trump loves to accuse people of what he is dead solid certain to be up to himself, and the list of his associates that appear to be always coked out of their minds, most notably his two boy children and pardoned criminals like Mike Flynn and Roger Stone, who seem to dwell in an alternate reality that could well be fueled by crack nuggets, is longer than the list of people Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to impeach. How much sniff has passed through the gates of Mar al Lago? And do guests have the option of snorting it off a hooker’s ass or a Top-Secret document?
 
There are certainly more people abusing drugs in this country than are willing to participate in say, the Iowa Caucuses, although there is bound to be some crossover there, and people who use drugs like to have their drugs with them. Losing a small part of your stash to a mishap is like leaving your laptop in Delaware. It happens, especially when you are blasted on that nose-tickling Peruvian powder.

The Secret Service admits it may never know who dropped the blow, even though they are suspects along with Hunter. The SS tend to be hard partiers at times. They might have been tempted to snort the snow themselves and pretend they never found it at all, if they hadn’t been worried that it might be anthrax.
 
So, they didn’t. Fox, Trump, the House Republicans et al, certainly are grateful for that.

In a series of rulings that had people all over the US saying, “STFU! Really?” the Supremes decided to kick a bunch of citizens in the groin, before boarding some friendly billionaire’s private jet to fly off for summer vacation.
 
Gays took it in the nads first, as the Court ruled that it was perfectly okay for web designers to refuse to design webs for them, because God invented the Internet and He hates gay people. This is what Lori Smith of Colorado believes, and she is entitled to that belief under the First Amendment, say a majority of the justices. Lori’s God is the Great Fag Smiter, and while she’s content to wait until Judgement Day for Him to whomp all those gay souls into Hell, in the meantime she’s secured the right to tell gays, “Git out dat door,” if they come to her for web designing.
 
Now, embarrassingly, it has come out that no gays asked Lori to work on their wedding webs anyway; the person named in her suit is straight and a web designer himself, who says he never asked Lori to design for him, since he can design his own web pages. Also, Lori features her motto, “Jesus loves you, unless you’re a homo,” prominently on every page of every web she designs, which some customers find wearying.

​The fact that the harm in this precedent-setting lawsuit was entirely imaginary did not stop the court primitives from eagerly ruling that gay wedding URL’s disgust them nearly as much as they disgust Lori, and if American citizens find gays revolting, they are perfectly free to claim that the Word of God commands them to sneer at the queer.
 
The Court spoke on affirmative action by taking great delight in slamming the doors of the Ivy League shut on black people’s toes, while leaving them wide open for white people whose SAT results are no higher than a nice bowling score, but have names like Whitmore Chillington Terrarium III. Clarence Thomas, who got his current job because of affirmative action by Bush the First, wrote in his concurring opinion, “Ain’t no black folk ever invited me to a private island for golf, lobster tails and a welcome break from looking at my wife’s face. Fuck ‘em.”
 
The Supremes also said no, no, NO to student debt relief, finding it more important that banks continue to get paid even if they have to take it out of people’s Social Security checks, rather than the debtors be able to afford to buy houses and have children and do other things that would insure that America has a future.
 
The Court did all this in the name of the Founding Fathers, who lived when it was considered natural that only rich people were educated, blacks were slaves and being gay just wasn’t an option. A return to Colonial times is what the Six wishes for wistfully. I wonder if, like the FF’s, they all want to wear silk stockings.
 
Under their gowns, of course.

​I’m a white, senior citizen, cisgender male who lives in the suburbs. By demographic, I should be an angry right-wing ideologue, counting the minutes until Hannity comes on at night. Why I am not, I do not know. Painful childhood, repressed sexuality, or just hard-core stupidity have been offered as possible explanations by my critics for my wayward political leanings, but I have no clue.
 
But if I was a Republican, gnashing my teeth over CRT, DEI, AOC and other liberal acronyms for stuff and people, and raging at the existence of transgenders and eager to punish behemoth corporations for trying to sell stuff with rainbows on it I would be SOOL (Shit Out Of Luck), because I already don’t buy any of that stuff.
 
I remember vividly my last can of light beer, so transcendent was my dissatisfaction with it. It wasn’t even a Bud Light. I was on a party fishing boat, and they had run out of every other kind of beer except the C-word Light. Natural alcoholism overcame taste, and I forked over four bucks for the silver can. As soon as the boat docked, I rushed over to the nearest bar and rinsed the insipid near-beer out of my mouth with a hearty, frothy craft brew.
 
So, I’m not buying a Bud Light, no matter how many rainbows you inscribe on it, or how convincing the drag queen trying to hand it to me is.
 
I’m not shopping at Target. If I want cheap Chinese crap and shoes made by slave labor, I’m not too proud to go to Walmart, where the crap is even cheaper and the shoes are even slavier.
 
I don’t eat at Chic-Fil-a already. Pickle chicken and cardboard waffle fries. Not for me.
 
Cracker Barrel? Even though it has my ethnic group right in the name, I never go there.
 
Black Rifle Coffee? Never heard of it.
 
Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes? I’m old. I have to watch my blood sugar.
 
The LA Dodgers? I’m a Padres fan. Intercourse the Dodgers.
 
So, I’m lucky to be a liberal Democrat, also called a Communist and a Marxist by the spittle-flecked shouters on the right. In my spineless lefty way, I want everybody to have a festive Juneteenth today, even though many Republicans are furious about it. They don't think that the end of slavery should be acknowledged by a national holiday, since they believe Lincoln ended it way back then, and things have been cool, race-wise, ever since, so just don’t bring it up, okay?
 
But you know what? No matter how mad you may be at critical race theory, The Color Purple, Lizzo's dress size, Snoop Dog smoking a joint at the Super Bowl, or just black in general, if your boss gave you Juneteenth off, you’re not coming to work in protest.
 
For sure. Remember, I know you guys. 

Last year, as wokeness raged across all of the Sunshine State, a man took a stand. His name was Ron DeSantis, and he was the governor of that peninsula full of gators and bugs, and he decided wokeness, whatever it was, would not prevail. He arrayed the forces of the state against its biggest business, which was of the Disney variety, and proclaimed, “Thou shalt not say gay!”
 
And when Disney World refused to stop saying gay, he revoked all the cozy deals the state had made to get Disney to come there in the first place. Thus did DeSantis think he had slain the dragon of wokery, and he went off to Iowa to brag about it.
 
But while Meatball Ron was boasting on his triumphs, not only against the Magic Kingdom, but against immigrants, drag queens, school libraries and old black guys that tried to vote, Disney World struck back, and when Ron’s attention was drawn to measuring the White House shades, the children of Walt filed a few reports, had a couple meetings, and got all their cozy deals back.
 
“That’s about what you should have expected,” a Disney PR man told me. “People think of Mickey Mouse and they think of Steamboat Willie and Mickey’s disastrous role as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but what they don’t know is that the Mouse is one of the finest legal minds in the United States, especially when it comes to property law and sixteen-dollar cheeseburgers.
 
“And Minnie is the Gloria Allred of rodent attorneys, tough, sharp, and with that reserve of sneering feminism that made the governor’s legal squad wet their pants.
 
“Goofy? Everyone says he’s not the sharpest member of the team, but when he pulls that ‘Oh, garsh,’ routine and starts shuffling his feet in front of any jury, you’ve lost that case, my friend.
 
“Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck are the detail members of the office. They churned out the research that made Disney World’s case implacably strong. And Disney never had to worry about the deep pockets of the state of Florida exhausting their resources, because the company has always been financially backstopped by Scrooge McDuck. Sure, you might think of McDuck as just a harmless old drake who enjoys bathing in tubs full of gold coins, but that’s what the New World Order wants you to think. In reality, he’s the George Soros of the Happiest Place on Earth. He’s got his bill in nearly every liberal cause there is, and is a bottomless source of funding for Critical Poultry Theory, especially as it applies to wealthy mallards.
 
“So, nobody should be surprised that they took on a bunch of guys from Swampy University Law School, or wherever it is that DeSantis gets his legal team, and cleaned their clocks. It’s a happy outcome for all Americans. They can sleep easy knowing that any time they want, they can go to Orlando and have all the fun they want for seven or eight hundred dollars a day, for a family of three, plus maybe three hundred extra for each additional child.”
 
I’ll keep that in mind. Do you think DeSantis has learned anything from being bamboozled by Disney?
 
“Hope at least he’s decided not to mess with Warner Brothers.”

Republicans, who feel covered in glory after one of their pet judges declared mifepristone, one of the two drugs women use to pharmaceutically end their pregnancies, illegal in all fifty United States, are now setting their sights on Narcan, the medication that people overdosing on fentanyl, can be administered to prevent them from going into “Hey, What Was In That Joint Anyway?” Heaven.
 
“Just like mifepristone, the use of Narcan is interfering with God’s will,” said a spokesman for the GOP. “When the Lord decides it’s time for that dude who shoots up behind the monument every weekend to come home to Jesus, it’s not the taxpayer’s responsibility to make sure he gets a pass from cops carrying emergency Narcan. Just let him stand before the Throne of Judgement while our police force focuses on its main duties, writing tickets for busted taillights and manning that speed trap at the city limits so the judge can afford to gas up his bass boat.
 
“Same thing for people who want to get Narcan at the Rite-Aid because they don’t know what’s in the wacky weed they think their kid is smoking in the rec room, only that it smells like the taxidermist’s does when he opens the door. They think a drug will solve their problems, but It’s plain the problem is they didn’t take him to church enough when he was growing up. It’s time for them to drop to their knees and beg the Lord for forgiveness when they find their boy turning blue underneath the head of that twelve-point buck his grandpa bagged in ‘58. Anything else means they’re just enablers, and like the pastor at the Creekside Church of Jesus’s Ever-Flowing Love says, there’s nothing that God hates more than enablers, except for homos, of course.
 
“It’s the exact same situation as when 14-year-old girl gets pregnant by her half-brother in the tool shed while her momma is working a double at Dollar General. That’s the mysterious ways of Providence asserting themselves. Of course, that half-brother is a little touched and it’s likely that gift from God that is on its way as a result of that sacred moment will never be able to count higher than four, or be trained to wear pants, but the Lord loves that genetic misfit as much as He loves you, me, or Kid Rock, and no legal morning-after pill should keep him from being born to praise Jesus.
 
“And we never know. That child could easily overcome its genetic burden and grow up to be a useful member of society, or at least learn to cook meth or run pills in from Florida like his daddy.
 
“We are all subject to the workings of the mysterious ways of the Almighty. Y'all got to admit that. Unless you’re a Democrat.”

​In the current Republican party, the general itch is to make laws that nobody wants. They daydream about cutting Social Security back to dog-food once a week rates and paring down Medicare until you’re only entitled to a couple free Advil’s a month.
 
But don’t just accuse them of granny-starving. They’ve got plans for the younger generation, too. Loosening child labor laws has always been a dream for them. Instead of happy children playing video games or running around outside committing small acts of arson and sneaking puffs off swiped cigarettes, like we did, Republicans think kids ought to be working for the minimum wage, or, ideally, the minimum special child wage in a perfect Republican economy, in giant dangerous factories, and only smoking cigarettes during designated breaks.
 
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the newly minted governor of Arkansas, is leading the league in getting minors off their asses and toiling on poultry farms. Of course, Sanders herself can’t be accused of hypocrisy on this account, as everybody knows Sanders worked as a trained circus pig every summer of middle school. Other Republican hands aren’t so clean. Iowa legislators are considering a bill that would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work certain jobs in meatpacking plants and shield businesses from civil liability if a child laborer is sickened, injured or killed on the job. A bill in Minnesota would permit 16- and 17-year-olds to work construction jobs.
 
It is dead solid certain that these various Midwestern legislators aren’t envisioning their own kids working in a meatpacking plant, or some other dangerous industry. It’s not like they’re telling their kids at the end of the school year, “Boy, this is the summer you find out what a working crop thresher smells like,” or “There’s nothing a face full of chicken feathers in the morning to make you feel like you’re alive, son.” Hell, no. They’re all enrolling their kids in summer sessions at Country Day Something School, hoping they can raise their grades enough to stumble into Stanford, or at least TCU.
 
No, child labor is for brown children, particularly brown children whose English isn’t so good and their illegal parents or guardians don’t much like filling out paperwork. Meat-packing executives look out their office windows at these kids playing soccer with a ball made of taped-up rags and think, “Look at those little slackers. We could put them to work, and nobody would care.” So, they give them jobs at meat-packing plants full of sharp saws and knives, and keep them until they’ve lost enough fingers/limbs so they can't be a successful team member any more. Then they let them can drift back to the border and hold up a begging cup with what remains of their digits, so people crossing back into the US can throw their remaining pesos in them and think better of themselves for it.
 
Republicans seldom cross the border by foot or car—they usually fly in and out of Cancun, a la Ted Cruz. But if they are stuck in the border line, they gaze out of the tightly-rolled up windows of their Land Cruisers and say, “Look at that kid with one arm and one leg! And he’s probably trying to get into our country so he can get welfare!”
 
He’s already been here, you know. He’s been here.

The downing of two “unknown” objects over the far north has raised a question that, so far, that our cowardly politicians and mealy-mouthed military have failed to answer.
 
Are we shooting at Santa?
 
Those among the captive media who pooh-pooh this hypothesis by pointing out that it has been almost two months since Christmas, when Kris Kringle is sure to take to the Arctic skies, must be reminded of the North Pole’s need to maintain its preparedness for the holiday season. The popular view of Santa gorging himself on milk and cookies and cuddling with Mrs. Claus for all but one night a year is obviously a carefully cultivated image. Flying sleighs must be rigorously spot-checked. Just because they are magical does not mean they are not subject to maintenance schedules and fluid changes. They may very well have to be flown on a regular basis. And there may be more than one.
 
Not only the sleigh, but the reindeer must be kept in shape. Do you expect these small northern ungulates to pull a sleigh full of toys and goodies around the entire planet once a year if they spend the rest of it lounging around eating candy canes with elves and polar bears? Hell, no. They have to be worked into a lather at frequent intervals. The efforts of a thoroughbred at a racetrack are nothing compared to the stupendous mission of Donner, Blitzen, Rudolph, et al, on Christmas Eve.
 
The authorities have kept this pretty buttoned up, but several ominous clues have emerged. One is that the mystery objects shot down were said to be “car -size.” Well, “car-size” is about the same as “sleigh-size,” isn’t it?
 
The other is that the downed objects “did not appear to have surveillance equipment.” Bullshit. He knows when you’ve been sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. This is obviously a cover-up.
 
Be prepared for never seeing photos of the downed “objects,” because they are probably gruesome tableaus of fragments of a red suit trimmed in white fur scattered across the icy wilderness, together with a pitiful debris field of dolls, toy trains and Legos, a “test payload” of next year’s holiday season’s giving.
 
But all cover-ups collapse eventually. I don’t like Joe Biden’s re-election chances, though, if he has to stand before the nation and say the words no American wants to hear:
​
“There is no Santa Claus.”