Well, The RNC convention in Cleveland was exactly as terrifying as one would expect, with a huge amount of bellicose roaring on matters domestic and especially foreign. Soon afterwards my friend Sandy received a survey from the RNC in the mail (he is registered Republican for various reasons, none of them that he is a Republican). He was asked to fill out this survey on issues of concern to framers of party platform etcetera and return it using a postage stamp he would purchase himself. Fine. Half the survey turned out to be leading questions (things along the lines of “Do you believe the Republican Party should lower the current ridiculously high Corporate tax rate, thereby encouraging businesses to locate and prosper here in the U.S, thereby securing innumerable benefits for all Americans?”), and a good quarter of one page was dedicated to proposals of all of the countries around the world that Republican party leadership would like to be openly at war with (for example: “Do you believe that the current provocative behavior of the Chinese Navy in the South China Sea merits a sound and unequivocal Military response from the United States?”). At the end of the survey there was a pitch to contribute money to the RNC. One of the choices you could select was: “I can’t afford to give more, but I will contribute 15.00 to pay for the processing of this survey”. Yeah, because the RNC is definitely going to pay someone fifteen dollars to spend an hour reading your 2-page survey full of leading questions. Oy.

So one can gather that the GOP has war games (and fundraising) on the brain, in addition to a seething antipathy to any kind of sensible gun control or reform of militarized police forces that are armed to the teeth and murder people with full immunity and little scrutiny every day here at home. In addition to this the candidate’s wife (a person I frankly find fascinating and would like to know more about, were she not so insistent on being a cipher, or so cooperative with those who would make her little more than a decorative touch), delivered a speech which it turns out was largely plagiarized from one given by the current first lady 8 years ago. The current first lady being the wife of the president who Mrs. Trump’s husband has suggested is a Kenyan-born Communist Muslim. After the whole scandal had broken and shattered down into intelligible parts and the plagiarism admitted (albeit with some weird and unbelievable plot-twists and a cardboard scapegoat), it supposedly boiled down to a deeply felt admiration for Mrs. Obama and her speech. Now if that is not the most crude, twisted, navel-gazing excuse I’ve ever heard from people old enough to know better, a bear does not shit in the woods. It would have been refreshingly honest if they had just come out and said “We have no respect for Michelle Obama, so we stole her speech. Whaddaya gonna do about it, huh?”, schoolyard-bully style.

But wait, things are popping on the other side of the river of shit (oops I mean aisle, other side of the aisle) as well. Wikileaks released transcripts of e-mails sent within the DNC apparatus throughout the Dem presidential primary, and it is now blatantly obvious not only that the Sanders campaign was being deliberately undermined and actively sabotaged from inside the party he was vying for leadership of from the very beginning, but also that the people running the Dem establishment are actually the kind of shitbags who will refer to the Latino youth vote as a taco bowl (“lets try to mop up some more of that taco bowl”), and mock a black woman’s name in their private correspondence (“LaQueenia is actually a name? shoot me.”). To make matters worse, in the aftermath of the leak DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Shultz resigned her position (She knows she is guilty as shit and was not about to squirm away from all this hard cold evidence of wrongdoing), and was immediately praised by both Clinton and Obama as a great public servant and given a plush new job with the Clinton campaign/likely future presidency. This is all disgusting and makes me wish that I was an animal much lower in the food chain and could not comprehend what is happening or even understand human languages. It would be nice to be a crow, in 2016. Or maybe a prairie-dog. Or a lizard, somewhere out in the desert in Utah, curled up in a nice crevice in a rock face, blinking contentedly at the wind.

But since this fond wish will most likely not come true, I await the next chapter. Julian Assange apparently said he is getting ready to release another round of documents that could dramatically impact Clinton’s rise, and possibly even lead to her arrest. I’ll believe it when I see it. Until then, more Pina Coladas are in order.

*header image is a screenshot off 4chan from 2009. The content does not express any thoughts/views/etcetera of the author of this blog.