Show us on the little snowflake doll how her big bad word made blood come out of your wherever, pussy-boy

Remember this photo?

It circulated on social media two years ago toward the end of trump's campaign. I wrote about how disturbing it was at the time--disturbing for its vulgarity, disturbing for its public invitation to apparently consensual rape, disturbing for the Zeitgeist of near-normalized, something-to-be-seen-as-humorous sexual assault that it represented.

It popped up in my Facebook memories this morning ... just as we as a country are being newly assaulted by avalanches of revelations about institutionalized, systemic, cavalierly-dismissed-male-privilege sexual assault wrought by Brett Kavanaugh and his ilk. The coincidence that this Facebook memory appeared now is odd in itself for its almost-years-to-the-date timing, but it's also horrifyingly disturbing for the fact that trump's 2016 pussy-grabbing braggadocio has been buried--albeit under two full years of his almost daily acts of catastrophic, psychopathic incompetence--to the point that we as a society have almost forgotten about it ... or at least become numbly inured to it.

Many of the facts of what I wrote two years ago have changed--I am now among the legions of people who have all but permanently ended relationships with trump-defending friends and trump-apologist newsfeeds, and I cringed as I saw that in this post I'd tempered my outrage over this picture and what it represented by mentioning cat videos and me looking at pictures of men in speedos--but my underlying incredulity, repulse and outrage have only grown in the last year.

Here is what I wrote, without being edited to reframe the snapshot of my mindframe and emotion a year ago. Re-reading it has both shown me how I've evolved in my white-male-privilege-I'm-never-going-to-do-it-and-it's-never-going-to-happen-to-me subconscious attitudes on the issue in the last 12 months and alerted me to the fact that I'm still not done purging those subconscious attitudes:

I subscribe to both liberal and conservative newsfeeds on Facebook and I have thoughtful, principled friends and acquaintances on here from multiple locations across the political continuum. As such, when I scroll through my personal Facebook feed, I see about 3% share-if-you-love-your-sister memes, 4% I-bet-you're-not-smart-enough-to-pass-this-egregiously-stupid-quiz clickholes, 9% adorable cat videos, 17% pictures of hot guys in speedos, and 943% political memes, forwards, rants and breathlessly dire warnings about the future of our very galaxy if X or Y becomes president. Aside from the occasional legitimate news article or mini essay from a thoughtful friend, most of what's on my feed is just noise between adorable cat videos. But it's still noise I pay attention to.

It's no secret that I have a visceral loathing for everything related to Donald Trump, from his willful ignorance to his inability to form a coherent sentence to his national isolationism to the sense of legitimacy he gives to racists, misogynists, homophobes and proud low-information voters. I realize there are deplorables on both sides of the aisle--along with gotcha pictures and footage documenting their collective stupidity--and I'm inured enough that I'm able to ignore the extremes in an attempt to form what I admit is a highly biased but still open-eared personal knowledge base as a citizen and voter.

But.

This picture of a Trump supporter in her hand-lettered shirt has appeared from multiple sources in my feed. At first I just scrolled past it like it was so much extremist noise. But it kept appearing, as more and more sexual-assault accusations piled up against Trump. It kept appearing as Trump dismissed some of his accusers as not hot enough for his tastes. It kept appearing as the idea of consent was thoroughly parsed by everyone from Morning Joe to Rush Limbaugh.

And this picture ... this gleeful woman giving pretty explicit consent for Donald Trump to sexually assault her ... this overweight woman presumably knowing full well that her body is nowhere near Donald Trump's beauty-pageant-level standards of attractiveness ... this judgment-impaired woman who not only found nothing wrong with wearing her message of consent with an arrow pointing to her vagina in public but who happily let herself be photographed in it by someone who obviously let it go viral on the Internet ... this picture thoroughly sickened me.

This woman willingly lowered herself to Donald Trump's lowest form of low. She let herself be mocked and vilified and humiliated on the world stage. And for what? Did she change anyone's vote? Did she elevate the national dialogue? Did she impress her family and friends? Did she advance her cause?

Was it worth it? Did she get her wish?

Is it too late for his parents to get an abortion?

Remember this picture?

It circulated on social media late last year toward the end of Trump's campaign. I wrote about how disturbing it was at the time -- disturbing for its vulgarity, disturbing for its public invitation to apparently consensual rape, disturbing for the Zeitgeist of near-normalized, something-to-be-seen-as-humorous sexual assault that it represented.

It popped up in my Facebook memories this weekend ... just as we as a country are being newly assaulted by avalanches of revelations about institutionalized, systemic, male-privilege sexual assault wrought by Harvey Weinstein and his ilk. The coincidence that this Facebook memory appeared now is odd in itself for its almost-year-to-the-date timing, but it's also horrifyingly disturbing for the fact that Trump's 2016 pussy-grabbing braggadocio has been buried -- albeit under an entire year of his almost daily acts of catastrophic, psychopathic incompetence -- to the point that we as a society have almost forgotten about it ... or at least become numbly inured to it.

Many of the facts of what I wrote a year ago have changed -- I am now among the legions of people who have all but permanently ended relationships with Trump-defending friends and Trump-apologist conservative newsfeeds, and I cringed as I saw that in this post I'd tempered my outrage over this picture and what it represented by mentioning cat videos and me looking at pictures of men in speedos -- but my underlying incredulity, repulse and outrage have only grown in the last year.

Here is what I wrote, without being edited to reframe the snapshot of my mindframe and emotion a year ago. Re-reading it has both shown me how I've evolved in my white-male-privilege-I'm-never-going-to-do-it-and-it's-never-going-to-happen-to-me subconscious attitudes on the issue in the last 12 months and alerted me to the fact that I'm still not done purging those subconscious attitudes:

I subscribe to both liberal and conservative newsfeeds on Facebook and I have thoughtful, principled friends and acquaintances on here from multiple locations across the political continuum. As such, when I scroll through my personal Facebook feed, I see about 3% share-if-you-love-your-sister memes, 4% I-bet-you're-not-smart-enough-to-pass-this-egregiously-stupid-quiz clickholes, 9% adorable cat videos, 17% pictures of hot guys in speedos, and 943% political memes, forwards, rants and breathlessly dire warnings about the future of our very galaxy if X or Y becomes president. Aside from the occasional legitimate news article or mini essay from a thoughtful friend, most of what's on my feed is just noise between adorable cat videos. But it's still noise I pay attention to.

It's no secret that I have a visceral loathing for everything related to Donald Trump, from his willful ignorance to his inability to form a coherent sentence to his national isolationism to the sense of legitimacy he gives to racists, misogynists, homophobes and proud low-information voters. I realize there are deplorables on both sides of the aisle -- along with gotcha pictures and footage documenting their collective stupidity -- and I'm inured enough that I'm able to ignore the extremes in an attempt to form what I admit is a highly biased but still open-eared personal knowledge base as a citizen and voter.

But.

This picture of a Trump supporter in her hand-lettered shirt has appeared from multiple sources in my feed. At first I just scrolled past it like it was so much extremist noise. But it kept appearing, as more and more sexual-assault accusations piled up against Trump. It kept appearing as Trump dismissed some of his accusers as not hot enough for his tastes. It kept appearing as the idea of consent was thoroughly parsed by everyone from Morning Joe to Rush Limbaugh.

And this picture ... this gleeful woman giving pretty explicit consent for Donald Trump to sexually assault her ... this overweight woman presumably knowing full well that her body is nowhere near Donald Trump's beauty-pageant-level standards of attractiveness ... this judgment-impaired woman who not only found nothing wrong with wearing her message of consent with an arrow pointing to her vagina in public but who happily let herself be photographed in it by someone who obviously let it go viral on the Internet ... this picture thoroughly sickened me.

This woman willingly lowered herself to Donald Trump's lowest form of low. She let herself be mocked and vilified and humiliated on the world stage. And for what? Did she change anyone's vote? Did she elevate the national dialogue? Did she impress her family and friends? Did she advance her cause?

Was it worth it? Did she get her wish?

Yup

Our most-presidential president is faithfully carrying on his modern-day presidential tradition of forcing parents to have awkward conversations explaining to their kids what grabbing pussy means and then draining the swamp by surrounding himself with the best people who force parents to have awkward conversations explaining to their kids what sucking cock is. And that, in a nutshell, is the entirety of his fucking strength as a president.

Jesus fuck. Get assassinated already.

With all your catastrophic bullshit #InfrastructureWeek and #MadeInAmericaWeek failures, THIS is what you focus on? Lying about medical costs to hate transgender soldiers?

Transgender soldiers actually serve our country in the military. Chickenshit pussies like you run away because your heels hurt.

CedaRound: Kingston Square

The trump trash from tonight's rally has pretty much cleared itself, though I did just hear a "grab her by the pussy!" yelled proudly to nobody from a passing car as I walked to mine after rehearsal.

Speaking of, I'd grabbed the first spot I saw when I got downtown tonight, which ended up being about six blocks from the theater in Kingston Square, a long-neglected neighborhood that's making a slow but gorgeous recovery after drowning in almost 10 feet of water in the 2008 flood. There is a layered boxiness that visually links the architecture in the area, from the 1911 People's Bank Building designed by Louis Sullivan in his fortressy "jewel box" style to the post-war brutalist commercial spaces clad in corrugated concrete to the new mixed-use residential construction profiled with broad crenellations and proud cornices. There is a relentless horizontalness to the neighborhood's rooflines and setbacks, and someone somewhere in the neighborhood's recent revitalization decided to trace all that horizontal geometry with simple, bright white lights. And the effect at night is at once austere, majestic and stunning. So stunning, in fact, that I go out of my way to drive through the neighborhood every time I'm in the area at night. I've stopped and parked and wandered around with my camera a couple times to try and capture the magic, but I could never find the right spot to capture the full expanse of everything I find so beautiful. When I got to my car tonight, though, I discovered I was in an ideal location to capture most of it, which -- since I've finally accepted that all that grand horizontalness is just too horizontal to squeeze into one picture -- is still perfectly breathtaking.

So here, after almost a year of attempts to find the perfect angle, is why I always reroute my nighttime trips through downtown Cedar Rapids to make sure I approach the area of 1st Street and 3rd Avenue SW from every angle:

Ain't nobody gonna be grabbing this one while you-know-who's in town today

And we're back!

When he's not grabbing pussy, blaming everyone for his catastrophic failings or screaming FAKE NEWS! every time he doesn't get his way, Bachelor #2 enjoys concocting meaningless catchphrases and desperately searching for validation everywhere he can find it.

"It makes me nervous."

It turns out that pretending to forget everything that ever happened to you is extra-annoying when you lie it with a Southern elf accent.

Sick

What Kathy did was immature and grotesque. But when you've spent the last year-plus doing immature, grotesque things like encouraging your swamp followers to murder your opponents, mocking disabled people, actively fueling a resurgence of white nationalism, wasting billions of dollars on golf trips and your failing third marriage, threatening to imprison your critics, and choking yourself in an impenetrable cloud of lies and treason, your sudden concern for the child you never see is where you should start, at last, to finally show that you even have a capacity for shame.

Oh -- since YOU brought him up, how is Barron doing after seeing naked, sexualized pictures of his mom all over the Internet?

#TheCognitiveDissonance

Oh, Scott. Scott, Scott, Scott. Bless your heart. I'll try to keep this short so you can get back to showing off your import:

1. The fact that you feel obligated to state that you're not afraid is tacit acknowledgement that we're well past the tipping point where most of your swamp friends are afraid to admit they support Melania's Profound Regret and all thinking people are afraid for reasons that are apparently beyond your understanding.
2. Speaking of understanding, "tacit" means "understood or implied without being stated."
3. Really. One little sticker is more than enough to proclaim to the world your catastrophic lack of judgment. But five little stickers AND an entire bottle of rub-on shoe polish? That just exponentiates your bad judgment about your bad judgment.
4. "Exponentiates" means "raises one quantity to the power of another."
5. Don't worry. Betsy DeVos took that last one off the test. Math is apparently too Satany.
6. Your car photo doesn't show your license plate so I can't discern what state you live in -- gratuitous "of denial" and "of delusion" jokes notwithstanding -- but a perfunctory google search just showed me that obstructing your rear window outside of a varying allowance of a few square inches in each corner is considered dangerous and illegal in all of the state traffic codes I read.
7. STATES' RIGHTS! YEAH!
8. "Perfunctory" means "carried out with a minimum of effort."
9. I apologize. I know I promised to keep this short. But there are so many things profoundly wrong with you.
10. Mazda is a Japanese multinational automaker based in Fuchū, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. Four of the five little stickers on your Japan-is-not-America Mazda clearly -- CLEARLY! -- state "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" In all caps! With exclamation points! One has to wonder the level of cognitive dissonance required to put multiple pro-America stickers on an imported car and declare a "love" of "showing off" that car in presumably pro-American "support" of a by clear implication pro-American "president."
11. "Cognitive dissonance" means ... oh, never mind. Betsy won't allow it on the test either. Enjoy your metaphorical obstructed-view drive.
12. "Metaphor" means ... oy ... let's just say it's one fewer than metaphive so you won't have to count so high.

You know what I like to do? Hate you.

"My big foreign trip"? "That's what I like to do"? You're a president, not a foreign-exchange student to Mexican finger-painting school.

Things the president has said or done that are praiseworthy

As requested by The New York Times:

• He knows more about ISIS than the generals do.
• He could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters.
• He's so good at leadership and deal-making that he almost brought his entire majority party together to pass a piece of legislation that didn't involve an executive order.
• He could have prevented the Civil War if Andrew Jackson would have just trusted those deal-making skills.
• He bombed Syria. Or Iraq. Whatever.
• He traveled through time to the year 3010, fought the evil robot kings and saved the human race again.
• He's fathered the eminent scientist and knockoff shoe designer Ivanka Trump, who as we speak is packing her vast, unbiased scientific knowledge into a genuine alligator clutch with a logo-jacquard lining and a pearl-inlay pinch clasp trimmed in signature rose gold to meet with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to review the United States’ commitment to the Paris Climate Change agreement.
• Speaking of the eminent scientist and knockoff shoe designer Ivanka Trump, he's so open-minded that he let a Jew into his family. Still no word on his approval of the blacks, though.
• Speaking of eminent, he's an eminent (as all Trumps are) scholar of religion who's learned enough to pronounce it "Two Corinthians."
• He ushered in an exciting new hairstyle that put an end to the man-bun.
• He saved himself money by having all his pro-American-jobs campaign hats made in China.
• He saved the whole country money by golfing in New Jersey instead of New York last weekend.
• He somehow made Kellyanne Conway go away.
• Speaking of disappearing women, has anyone seen our First Lady? Has anyone seen ANY praiseworthy evidence of Trump's third marriage?
• Speaking of Trump's marriages, he generously pays his used wives so much money that they never need to talk to anyone about their relationships with and insights into him, the president of the entire United States.
• He can probably name all of his wives and children. In order.
• He opened a state-of-the-art Holocaust center.
• He gave an entire generation of parents the opportunity to explain to their young children what a pussy is.

Where to start?

1. You're the PRESIDENT. I'm just a citizen in Iowa. Don't tell ME to intimidate a federal witness in a Senate investigation. Quietly instruct your corrupt administration to do it, like you do in your collusions with Russia. Telling me to do it via Twitter makes you look like you're four and you're trying to make me get your sister in trouble.

2. Besides, if I had access to directly grill current and former members of your administration, in three questions I'd have you under a table in the fetal position sobbing in a terrifying web of your own lies, where it would take every ounce of my self-restraint not to kick you repeatedly in the kidneys.

3. Based on your grammar, I'm beginning to believe you actually ARE four; your tweet as written demands that *I* be under oath when I execute your command to intimidate a federal witness in a Senate investigation.

4. I know this next one is tricky -- and it's hard to master homonyms AND golf, especially when you're worried that homonyms will molest your children in Target bathrooms -- but even children reckless enough to go into Target bathrooms know that it's spelled "counsel." For the record, "council" is defined as "an assembly of women so enamored of your celebrity and your thoughtful use of Tic Tacs that they want you to grab their pussies." Councils traditionally convene in the middle of heavy traffic or at the bases of erupting volcanoes. Don't forget to take off your wedding ring!

5. If classified information "got into the newspapers" and you're tacitly confirming it in this tweet, are you lying about it being fake news or are you lying about not reading it?

6. I think five failures is enough for one tweet tonight. Go home not to your wife, get some rest, and we'll start addressing your personal and professional failings again in the morning after tomorrow's 5:00 am tweet storm.