I was out of commission for a while, but damn it all to Cthulhu, people, none of us can sit back and swath ourselves in our privilege and wait it out.  And by “it” I mean the apocalyptic reversal of every liberal gain of the last 80 years.

No, I’m not really a prepper in this regard (nor in any regard).  The apocalypse is not upon us.  But we are facing some serious challenges in many areas.

To that end—and I know I’ve made this vow before—I’m going to pester the hell out of my elected representatives.  Yesterday I made it a whole lot easier to do that on impulse.

You know how it is: you’re just reading along and suddenly there’s an article about the neo-Nazis supporting the president-elect; or Ken Blackwell being in charge of “mental health issues” for the transition team; etc.  There’s not a damned thing you can do about it, of course, and it’s not as if your elected representatives are going to do anything about it, but BY CTHULHU THEY’RE GOING TO KNOW THEY’RE PISSING ME OFF, KENNETH.

But first you have to go to their congressional website, click through to the “Email Me” page, and then input all your information in the online form.  (Congresscritters don’t have published email addresses that you can just yell at directly.)  It’s tedious and would certainly deter you from responding when the mood strikes you.  I’m not so conspiracy minded that I would suggest that this is deliberate.  But it’s deliberate.

So here’s how you regain the upper edge.

Step 1: Open your macro program

I use a program called Keyboard Maestro, and it’s magnificent.  I can automate almost anything I do on my MacBook Pro.  It’s magic.  Macs also have a built-in macro program called Automator, but I’ve never used it, and it appears to be not as flexible or powerful as Keyboard Maestro.  There are other macro programs, like QuicKeys (which I used to use).  Find one you like. Trust me, if you do a lot of work on your computer, especially work that you have to repeat on a regular basis, you’ll be glad you learned to use it.¹

Step 2: Open the congresscritter’s email page

Every one is different,² so you will have to construct your two macros for each critter separately.

Step 2A: Create a macro to open this page.

This is an easy one.  You just have to create a macro that opens the page.  In Keyboard Maestro, it looks like this:

1. Create a new macro.  (In KM, you can create groups of macros that are available only in specific programs, in this case my browser.  This will keep it from triggering if you accidentally pull the trigger in your word processor, for example.)
2. Name it: goIsakson, for example.
3. Add an “action”: Open URL, in this case.  Copy and paste the congresscritter’s page URL in there.
4. Save.

You can, in KM, add a trigger of your choice.  My Lichtenbergian trigger is simply typing four L’s in a row; KM then backspaces over those four L’s and types Lichtenbergian for me.  I have other macros that are triggered when I type a key combination, like my macro (ctrl-opt-cmd-R) to resize and save an image in Pixelmator to my website.  In this case, I’m going to trigger goIsakson by first triggering KM’s “Trigger Macro By Name” option (ctrl-opt-cmd-T) and typing in g-o-i, which is enough to bring up goIsakson.  Hit return, and presto! the webpage opens.

Step 2B: Create a macro to fill in all those fields

This one isn’t hard, but you have to pay attention.

I recommend starting with your cursor in the first field.  Because reasons.

Then it’s a simple matter—no, really—to add actions that a) type in the requested info; and then b) tab to the next field.

So on Isakson’s page (http://www.isakson.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/email-me), I would build this:

1. Create a new macro.  Name it Isakson.
2. Insert text by typing: Mr.
3. Type a keystroke: TAB
4. Insert text by typing: Dale
5. Type a keystroke: TAB
6. repeat till done

You may find that you have to insert a Pause for x seconds after the Insert text action.  Otherwise, your macro may trip over itself because the website is slow to respond.  Better to wait those few extra seconds than have it get all tangled up.

Step 3: Get to work

Now, when some news item makes you want to hurl Molotov cocktails, you can pull up the congresscritter’s page and zap its form with your person info in no time at all.  Then you can select a topic (there doesn’t seem to be one for fuppery) and type in your demands message.

So far my emails to my two senators³ have been to demand they repudiate the crap that’s surged up from the sewers since the election.  I end each brief message with a direct question: “Will you repudiate this?”  or “Do you agree with this mindset?”  My sign-off is my new mantra: Not in my name.  Not in my country.  SPEAK UP. Last night in discussing my project with my Lovely First Wife, I decided I would add to every email the cheery message that I would be publishing my question and the critter’s response on my blog and on social media.

Which means I’m off to create a macro to type all that for me.

—————

¹ For example, I never type Lichtenbergian or Lichtenbergianism or Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy any more.  I just type l-l-l-l or l-l-l-m or l-l-l-t and Keyboard Maestro does it for me.  Or more extremely, I can create an Alchemy art fundraiser project page in seconds just by triggering a macro that fills in all sections of the backend page, including all the HTML, pasting all the individual artist info which another macro has copied from the spreadsheet into named clipboards, Kenneth.  NAMED CLIPBOARDS!

² Which means that every congresscritter hires its own IT staff, surely a reduplicative effort if ever there was one.  And how many security clearance nodes does that create, eh?  Party of small government, my ass.

³ At the moment I don’t have a representative.  The old one has quit, and the new one hasn’t emerged from his pod yet.

America, you are A Idiot.

This is all I am going to say about it: you elected George W. Bush because he was a manly chest-thumping cretin, and it got you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a budget surplus turned into a record deficit, ruinous tax cuts, and the Great Recession.

Now you’ve done worse.

I truly don’t understand why Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan aren’t actively campaigning for Hillary Clinton right now.

Let’s face it, I think they have long since realized they personally would be better off if she won the election.  After all, what are the possibilities?

1. Trump is an enormous drag on the downballot races.  At the moment, there’s a real chance the Republicker Party could lose the Senate and a non-zero chance of the House as well.  Republicker candidates all across the nation are distancing themselves from their candidate for President, even to the extent of running ads that they would “stand up to” Trump if necessary.  A few have gone so far as to actively endorse Hillary Clinton.
2. And if Trump wins the White House?  What’s it going to look like for McConnell and Ryan when they either have to vote against their President’s legislation or (more likely) are unable to control the crazies in their own party who will surge forward with truly appalling ideas which Trump would sign?  And in the next election?  Do they think they will survive primary challenges from their crazies?
3. Then we have the problem that the Republickers don’t currently govern or legislate anyway.  They seem to have lost the knack for doing their jobs: the current Congress is the least productive ever.  They can name a post office or two, but they can’t even pass funding to control the Zika virus, much less anything more broadly useful.
4. They are far more comfortable — certainly more experienced in — opposing the person in the White House.  If they got their candidate in there, they would have to work with him and even, maybe, govern — if they weren’t consumed by mopping up his messes.  [See 1 & 2.]  If Clinton were elected, they could just sit back and continue being whiny-ass titty-baby obstructionists like they are now.

So clearly it would be in their best interests to endorse Hillary Clinton so as not to rock their little boat.

Except for how all the amygdalas they’ve stampeded about Clinton being Satan incarnate would run right over them.

Hm.  Sounds like they’re screwed.

What a pity.

Is Donald Trump on drugs?  I don’t know, I’m asking.  So many people think, you know, it’s interesting, that there he is, unable to resist the tiniest criticisms,  lashing out at Mr. and Mrs. Khan as if it were a natural thing when you know it’s not, nobody not on drugs acts like that, do they?  I’m just asking. Many people have told me they think he is because how else do you explain the explosive, petty behavior, the lies, have you noticed how much he says that apparently he just makes up on the spot and then he won’t say he goofed, is that even normal? Is that meth is that how people on meth behave, I don’t know, it’s just a thing I’ve heard.  Rich people don’t use meth, maybe it’s cocaine, could be, or maybe something else. It’s a disgrace if he’s on drugs, but I don’t know, he probably isn’t.  Is he?  I mean, if he were, so many people, but I can’t really tell.  The media should look into it.  I don’t know.  It’s troubling, very troubling. Sad.

I’ve done a thing.

Whether it turns out to be a Thing remains to be seen, but if it does, I want this on the record.

Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate for President of the United States, has been saying outrageous, jawdropping shit since the very beginning of his campaign: Mexican immigrants are rapists; we should kill the families of terrorists; on and on and on, until yesterday’s¹ snarky comment requesting that Vladimir Putin hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

In other words, a candidate for the highest office in the world invited a foreign power to a) cyberattack his opponent, thereby b) influencing an American election.

Jebus.

Can you imagine, I thought, how the howler monkeys would react if Hillary Clinton had said or done any of these things?

We would never hear the end of it, would we?

Can you imagine…

And so I did.  I made up “screenshots” of Fox News with a chyron at the bottom framing Trump’s words and actions as if they had been said by Clinton.  Often I used Trump’s own words.

Here you go:

I then posted all of these on Facebook, without comment.  My liberal friends were puzzled at first, then one by one they caught on.

Here’s one consequence that I think is possible: these are going to get shared, and at some point, one or more of them is going to take on a life of its own.  It’s going to become one of those memes that infect your stream, and probably it’s going to be shared by conservative amygdalas who want to hammer Clinton as hard as they can.²  Since they have spent the last five months practically ignoring Trump saying these things, it won’t even dawn on them that they’re being lied to.³

So if any of these go viral and it all starts getting crazy, then Snopes, here I am.  I did it.  I did all of them.  None of them are true.  They are performance art: imagine if a Democratic politician, particularly Hillary Clinton, had said or done the things that Donald Trump has done.  Fox & Friends would have gone apoplectic.

And for those who got suckered in: no, Snopes is not a “liberal” website.  It’s unfortunate that, as Stephen Colbert always said, “facts have a liberal bias,” but there you go.  Hillary Clinton never said any of those things.  And Fox didn’t gig her for it.  I made it up.  Snopes is correct.

BTW, here’s the original image:

You can find it via Google Image search: fox news chyron

Incidentally, I’m not sharing this post on Facebook, the more better for the joke, I hope.  However, I don’t think it would matter to some of the amygdalas if they followed a link here.  Some of them I’ve dealt with recently would read that these things are not true and that I know because I created them to be deliberate lies, and they would still believe that they could be true.  Even after reading that sentence, they wouldn’t believe it.  Watch and see.

—————

¹ Today’s?  I can’t keep track.

² Or Bernie/Busters.  They can be pretty amygdalan as well.

³ It never dawns on them.  See my post on the NFL banning the National Anthem, or the recent idiocy about the Democratic National Convention banning the American flag.

Here was an interesting legal theorem that I had not encountered before, that affirmative action plans and slavery are morally and legally the same gambit, i.e., that both involve one person forcing an “unwanted economic relationship” on another.  (Needless to say, this happened in Wisconsin under the odious lizard-man Scott Walker.)

I’ll make this short.  They are the same in the sense that +5 and -5 have the same absolute value, i.e., |5|.  But even a Republicker —especially a Republicker— would rather have +5 in his bank account than -5.  And that, O Scott Walker, is the difference.

It seems that, last night at the Republicker National Convention, Ben Carson asked if America was willing to “elect someone as president who has as their role model someone who acknowledges Lucifer?”

::sigh::

What he meant, of course, was that Hillary Clinton admired Saul Alinsky, since she interviewed him and did her senior thesis on the man and his work.  And of course, as we all know, Alinsky is Satan himself.

Hold on, this gets tangled.¹

Saul Alinsky was a renowned leftist community organizer back in the day.  His most famous book is 1971’s Rules for Radicals, which you can read in its entirety here.

Essentially, Rules is nothing more than a guidebook for rabble-rousing and in-your-face-itude.  In it, he says such horrific things as:

The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.

…and…

We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one. These pages are committed to splitting this political atom, separating this exclusive identification of communism with revolution. If it were possible for the Have-Nots of the world to recognize and accept the idea that revolution did not inevitably mean hate and war, cold or hot, from the United States, that alone would be a great revolution in world politics and the future of man. This is a major reason for my attempt to provide a revolutionary handbook not cast in a communist or capitalist mold, but as a manual for the Have-Nots of the world regardless of the color of their skins or their politics. My aim here is to suggest how to organize for power: how to get it and to use it. I will argue that the failure to use power for a more equitable distribution of the means of life for all people signals the end of the revolution and the start of the counterrevolution. [emphasis mine]

You can see why the Republickers of all stripes weep and gnash their teeth when they hear his name.

Most have never read his book, of course.  Most think it is more along the lines of this bogus email.  In other words, most Republickers think that Alinsky, in 1971, somehow specifically targeted everything they would hold dear in 2016.²   Very danger.  Much radical.

What the bogus email and Dr. Ben Carson have in common is the belief that clearly Alinsky was Satanic in his desire to DESTROY AMERICA, KENNETH, and their evidence is prima facie right there on the dedication page:³

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer. —SAUL ALINSKY

Mercy.

Let me tell you a story.

Years and years ago, when I was media specialist at East Coweta High School, the assistant principal in charge of curriculum bustled in, needing my assistance.  A mother had come in to complain that her son was being taught Satanic literature in his college-bound senior English lit class, and they wanted my recommendations for an alternative assignment.

I raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips and inquired as to exactly what Satanic literature this woman could possibly be objecting to in the British Lit textbook.  The asst. principal turned to the page and showed me.

It was Paradise Lost, by John Milton.  Right there, opposite the first page of text, was a full-page woodcut illustration of a leather-winged Satan being cast down from Heaven.  There was more: the text contained such damnéd names as Lucifer and Beelzebub. LUCIFER AND BEELZEBUB, KENNETH!

Really?  Really?? I asked the asst. principal.  We’re going to confirm this woman’s crazy, superstitious, ignorant error?

Well, Day-uhl, we have to accommodate parents’ requests, came the reply.

We’re not going to explain to this woman that she’s wrong, that in fact John Milton was a Puritan and wrote Paradise Lost to prove that Christian themes could support epic poetry?  (Leaving aside the fact that Satan is by far the most interesting and dynamic character in the whole piece…)  That her son is in a college prep English class and that he kind of will be expected to know at least something about the poem when he gets to college?

Oh, Day-uhl—as if I were the one who needed to be humored…

So I assigned him “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso“.  Served him right.

Here’s my point.  Alinsky’s “dedication”³ to Lucifer is a witty, ironic reference to Milton’s grand anti-hero Satan, not some grand, evil, bloodsoaked LaVeyan credo.  As others have commented, one could hardly expect Dr. Ben Carson to get it.

And that, unfortunately, seems to be the predominant Republicker mindset on display in Cleveland.

—————

¹ This is Ben Carson’s thought processes we’re talking about here, after all.

² Which, I would like to remind everyone, they did not hold dear in 1971.

³ Only not: it is not a dedication. The Lucifer quote —and two other quotes from Rabbi Hillel and Thomas Paine — are epigraphs, not dedications.  The book is dedicated to his editors and to his wife, on the previous page, the actual dedication page.