@usefewersyllables
As Lily Tomlin said: "No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."

I say the same thing about
smoking pot. . .

to nobody's ear, unfortunately. They aren't listening: they now believe that they are completely independent of voters, what with their ability to set the vote totals anyway they wish via machine-hacking and ballot-box stuffing. They believe that they can create any outcome they want, even with the undead meat-puppet "leading the charge".

It's been a long time coming. It is time for the quadrennial reposting of my favorite Hunter S. Thompson quote from "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" covers it pretty well:

But what about next time? Who is going to explain in 1976 that all the people who felt they got burned in '72 should "try again" for another bogus challenger? Four years from now there will be two entire generations - between the ages of twenty-two and forty - who will not give a hoot in hell about any election, and their apathy will be rooted in personal experience. Four years from now it will be very difficult to convince anybody who has gone from Johnson/Goldwater to Humphrey/Nixon to Nixon/Muskie that there is any possible reason for getting involved in another bullshit election...

Credulity is the only reason the dems get any votes. Period, full stop. There are always starry-eyed new people coming into the process who believe that Their Generation Will Be The One That Will Make The Difference, as the old ones burn out and tune out or die off. "This time for sure!", and all that.

I know whereof I speak: I was one of those starry-eyed types, even though I should have been one of the two generations that HST said would be done with politics after '72. Took me over 40 years, and Bernie's abject capitulations in 2016 and 2020, to finally come to the following realization: "No, your generation won't be the one to make the difference." The difference can no longer be made electorially.

Not a fan. This ex-dem will not be returning to the fold.

As Lily Tomlin said: "No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."

@Anya @Anya

I've tried to put into words my utter disdain for the Jan 6 kabuki. The entire country fell for this staged ploy, and bought in to the televised investigations with the sloganeered pontificating by the biggest hams in Congress spewing their outrage for the cameras. Until then, I didn't believe anything could top the phony Mueller investigation, which I saw as the pinnacle of government corruption on parade. All of it accompanied by the US fake-news media, blasting propaganda about Russian collusion, election meddling, and phony terrorism threats. It was unbearable.

It was no coincidence that Ukraine was at the center of Trump's impeachment shitshow. The period from 2014 to 2024 (including the pandemic) has been a long and elaborate lead up to the conquering of the world by the US Empire. The American Century was at hand. and Ukraine was the patsy. The plan was to break apart and scatter rival nations such as Russia and China, which would not submit to US rule and hegemony. Israel's critical role for Empire was to suppress uprisings in the Middle East. As delusional as it sounds, the Neocon's point-of-view is that they hold all the power and they are poised for immediate global victory.

Although — Russia and its economy was supposed to collapse by now. And the massive Western propaganda against China should have make it the enemy of the world.

The US Empire has gone silent this month. USians are focused on their their mentally-defective candidates and their flawed election spectacle. In the meantime, the people are starting to realize they have not had a competent President in charge. Soon, they may demand to know which Elected Leader has been running the country? Which Elected Leader was planning to declare war? After all, the US has been engaged in endless aggression and economic attacks against both Russia and China, trying to provoke one of them into an act of war against the US.

Instead, American aggression is forcing a different question upon the global population: "Would the world be a better place without the US?"

Totally agree the Dems (I left the party in 2016) have been gaslighting the electorate in every way. But also believe that extends to Jan. 6.
C.J. Hopkins gives a good description, I think. This is an excerpt from something he just wrote:

“Anyway, here’s that piece from the archives. I wrote this in January 2021, i.e., shortly after Biden’s inauguration, which, as you may or may not remember, was staged in a locked-down, military-occupied DC, during a fabricated “state of health emergency,” in the aftermath of a fabricated “insurrection.”
This was the moment when the New Normal Reich was officially ushered into being, with a “field of flags,” a full-blown Nazi light-show, and the whole nine yards. Not to put too fine a point on it, they rolled out the soldiers and the urban-assault vehicles and installed a muttering, finger-sucking, global-capitalist puppet in office. They did not hide this. They publicized it. They wanted us to know that “democracy” was over, that the “populist” rebellion was over, and that they were installing a human stalk of celery in the White House, and there was nothing that we could do about it.
The message could not possibly have been clearer.
As they used to say at the end of all those wacky Looney Tunes cartoons, that’s all folks! The show is over.
Literal Russian-Asset Hitler, the Latest Greatest Threat to Western Democracy, the Monster of Mar-a-Lago, Trumpzilla, Trumpenstein, the Ayatollah of Orange Shinola, has finally been humiliated and given the bum-rush out of Washington by the heroic forces of the GloboCap “Resistance,” with a little help from the US military.
The whole thing went exactly to script.
Well … OK, not quite exactly to script. Despite four years of dire warnings by the corporate media, the Intelligence Community, Hollywood celebrities, the Democratic Party, faux anti-fascists, fake-Left pundits, and pretty much every utterly deluded, Trump-obsessed liberal with an Internet connection, there was no Hitlerian “Reichstag Fire,” no Boogaloo, no Civil War II, no coup, no white-supremacist uprising. Nothing.
The man simply got on a chopper and was flown away to his Florida resort.
I know, you’re probably thinking … “Wow, how embarrassing for the GloboCap ‘Resistance,’ being exposed as a bunch of utterly shameless, neo-Goebbelsian propagandists, and liars, and hysterical idiots, and such!” And, in any other version of reality, you’d have a point … but not in this one.
No, in this reality, “Democracy Has Prevailed!” Yes, it was touch and go there for a while, as there was no guarantee that the Intelligence Community, the military-industrial complex, Western governments, the corporate media, supranational corporations, Internet oligarchs, and virtually every other component of the global-capitalist empire could keep one former game show host with no real political power whatsoever from taking over the entire world.
Still, Trump’s failure to go full-Hitler, or even half-Hitler, was somewhat awkward. I mean, you can’t whip millions of people into a four-year frenzy of fear and hatred of a clearly powerless ass-clown president, and portray him as a Russian Intelligence asset, and the Son of Hitler, and all the rest of it, and then just drop the act cold and laugh in their faces.
That would leave them feeling like total morons who had just spent the last four years of their lives being lied to and emotionally manipulated, or like members of a cult, or something.
Fortunately, for GloboCap, this was not a major problem. All they had to do was produce a cheap simulation of “Trump going full-Hitler.” It didn’t even have to be convincing. They just needed a semi-dramatic event to plug into the official narrative, something they could call “an attempted coup,” “an insurrection,” “an attack,” and so on, and which millions of credulous liberals could hysterically shriek about on the Internet.
The “Storming of the Capitol” did the trick.
They held a dress rehearsal in Berlin last August, and then gave the real performance in the Capitol Building (this time it was for all the money, so they went ahead and got a couple people killed). It wasn’t very hard to pull off. All they actually had to do, in both Berlin and DC, was allow a small fringe group of angry protesters to gain access to the building, film it, and then pump out the “attempted coup” narrative.
It made no difference whatsoever that the “domestic terrorists” (in both Berlin and Washington) were a completely unorganized, unarmed mob that posed absolutely zero threat of “staging a coup” and “overthrowing the government.” It also made not the slightest difference that Trump didn’t actually “incite” the mob (yes, I put myself through the agony of reading every word of his speech, which was the usual word salad from start to finish). We’re talking propaganda here, not reality.
The so-called “Violent Storming of the Capitol” set the stage for the main event, which was the show of force we have all just witnessed.
Someone (I’m not entirely clear who) ordered in the troops, tens of thousands of them, locked down Washington, erected fences, set up roadblocks and military checkpoints, and otherwise occupied the government district.
It looked like any other US-military post-“regime-change” occupation, because that’s what it was, which was precisely the point.

As I have been repeating for … well, for over four years now, it was always going to end this way, with GloboCap making an example of Trump and reminding everyone who is really in charge….”