Nothing but sexism can explain the fixation on Betsy DeVos when there are real evildoers among those cabinet picks. Vouchers, charters – who the ef cares when the damage they can do is non-existent compared to the grim reaper of Alabama, the Putin lap poodle, the mad dog creepo, the ACA Kevorkian, and the rest of them.

You know who’s dumb? A person who teaches a baby how much fun it is to press a big red button on a fire engine book. Because you know what she wants to do next? Press the button on your desktop again and again. And distracting a baby from something she has already set her mind on is pretty much impossible. 

The reason why I’m so stuck on the pink-ear protest is resentment. For two years I’ve tried to get out the story of what’s happening in Illinois. It got so bad that I started talking about it at the MLA. My elevator pitch is not “By the way, a second book of mine is coming out” but “Have you heard about Illinois’s Governor Rauner?” And you know what people respond every single time? “Oh wow, I had no idea! How come this isn’t a national story?” 

Yes, I’d like to know that as well.

So it drives me up a wall that the antics of rich dumb broads who are going crazy with boredom and putting cat ears on their empty heads are a huge national story while little kids with Down syndrome who can’t see a doctor get no coverage. The silly comment about “blood coming out of her whatever” was the story of the year while the suffering of real people, workers, elderly folks, kids is never covered. 

What do I need to do? Put a vulva on my head to get noticed with this story? I don’t want anything for myself. I’m getting off state insurance for good in a month. But I want this to be known for the people who can’t get out. 

It’s so obvious that even David Brooks has noticed it:

The sad part is that so many people treat Trump’s tweets as if they are arguments when in fact they are carnival. With their conniption fits, Trump’s responders feed into the dynamic he needs. They contribute to carnival culture.

A fart joke of a presidency, a mean, cruel joke of a cabinet, a joke of a protest, everything is so funny, ha ha. 

Well, as long as everybody is having fun. 

If people really wanted to resist they’d 

A) become active in local elections;

B) refuse to read, listen or watch any more stories about Trump’s tweets, celebrities who refuse to attend inauguration, what Meryl Streep said and Trump responded, and all this sort of crap. We already pissed away an election on this garbage. Enough already. It’s all distraction tactics. Time to stop.

One of the organizers of the women’s anti-Trump protests said protesters will march because “women carry the family on our backs” and then ranted against sexist stereotypes. 

This would all be less awkward if the protesters had any idea what goal they want to achieve with their protest.

After liberating parts of Mosul, Iraqi soldiers found passports belonging to terrorists who came from other countries to join ISIS. Most of them were, of course, from Russia. And not just from Chechnya and Dagestan but from the European part of Russia.

Somebody knows how to play a long game. And that somebody hasn’t been American for a long time. The best this country has had in terms of geopolitical strategy was Kissinger, and he was fucking horrible. 

It’s very sad to see a novel that’s so bad that its own author realizes it and tries to explain its meaning in a postscript. Rosa Montero is not one of my favorite writers but I didn’t expect something quite as lousy from her.

The novel’s protagonist is a 60-year-old Soledad, the whiniest, most superficial and entitled character I’ve encountered in a while. I’ll give just one example to illustrate the caliber of this human being. Soledad’s neighbor, a young single mother loses her job and can’t pay her bills. When she shares with Soledad that her electricity has been cut off, the well-off Soledad concludes that the dramas of the unemployed during the economic crisis are nothing compared to the hardship she experiences as a result of being dumped by yet another casual boyfriend. 

Montero didn’t even bother doing research for the book. The male prostitute in her book is Russian but he couldn’t behave less Russian if he tried. He doesn’t celebrate New Year’s, speaks several languages fluently in spite of having no education and having been raised in a Russian orphanage, and is desperate to marry a black woman and adopt her child. If this is normal behavior in a Russian electrician / prostitute, I’m Montserrat Caballe. 

God, what a shitty, shitty novel.