America’s CEO/Dictator, twice impeached convicted felon and pathological lying man child Donald Trump is preparing his cabinet o’ clowns for his coronation as dictator in just a couple of days. We’re just a small time satire site. The thought of four more years of this doofus making stupid statements on an hourly basis is mind numbing to us here at the Bucket and we just can’t take four more years of this crap. They say stupidity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. We’ve done the Trump thing before and he was a catastrophe for our country and yet here we are again, just like in 2017 with the GOP controlling everything. There are many who are saying that Trump and the Republicans broke satire. Unfortunately, we think that’s a fairly accurate assessment. Ever since Dubya’s administration we’ve been joking about how far the GOP has drifted into fascist oligarchy territory and the conservatives have taken it as a hold my beer challenge. This is what they’ve always wanted; unquestioned authoritarian hegemony of the United States. But they couldn’t have done it without the help of corporate America, the plutocrats and the evangelical christians, an unholy alliance we’ve called the Holy Corporate Empire. Think about it, folks. Who doesn’t have to pay taxes in this country? The top 1%ers, top corporations and the church. They have all the money and power and no accountability or responsibility, which is what paying taxes is all about when you get down to brass tacks. Under Trump, the oligarchs will continue to get richer and the sanctimonious, anti-science evangelical christians will get to shove their repressive archaic agendas and dogmas down everyone’s throat with the power of the government behind them. Think of these bullies as the American Taliban, because that’s exactly what they are.
We’d like to take a little bit of time to praise the efforts of current President Joe Biden. The conservative news media and propagandists have already kneecapped his accomplishments and Trump is already taking credit for his infrastructure bill. We have no doubt that Trump and the Republicans will trash Biden’s legacy, trying to do to him what Reagan and the GOP did to Jimmy Carter in the ’80s. We’ve talked about the historic legislative session from January 2021 to January 2023. Not since Lyndon Johnson’s first term has there been such a productive session. Compare that to the current GOP lead House, under self-proclaimed ‘Moses’ Mike Johnson, which has led the league in incompetence and yet somehow they’ve maintained control this past election – which was definitely not rigged (wink, wink). But Biden’s done some amazing things as President, certainly more than we thought he could when his presidency started. He deserves to be thanked. Most historians rank James K. Polk as the best one term President. We think the factually educated, objective historians will rank Biden right up there with Polk.
Which brings us back to the election and how the Democrats once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. We’ve consistently criticized the Dems for never attacking the Republicans and rolling over like submissive puppies every time the GOP conservatives raised their voices. This happened many times during Dubya’s administration. But they didn’t do that the past two elections and we think they were absolutely right to attack the Republicans. In our opinion, the Dems finally did everything right. So what went wrong? Forty years of Republican brainwashing propaganda in the corporate media is what went wrong. Reagan’s deregulation in the 1980’s and the continuation in Clinton’s and both Bushes demolished fair play in the media. The right wing propaganda machine rose in the late ’80s with radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh at the forefront spreading propaganda that the media was ‘liberal’ and demonizing any one on the left. This after the news media fawned over the Gipper during the ’80s, especially after his assassination attempt in 1981. The right wing targeted the die hard religious conservatives in the Midwest and the South repeating the same mantra ‘the liberal media’ is evil. The Moral Majority under the leadership of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell repeated the diatribe with laser focus on Reagan’s old stomping grounds in Hollywood as proof positive that liberals controlled the media. Now there are different branches of the media, folks. There’s the sports media which isn’t political but definitely has a coastal bias. Sports pundits love to crow about the LA, Frisco, New York, Boston or Philadelphia teams, while midwestern teams (other than the current Chiefs) are usually ignored. The film and TV branch (especially late night talk shows) does have a liberal bias but there are many prominent Republicans in the movie making biz – Stallone, Willis, Norris, Woods, Voight, etc. If you think of all the shoot-em-ups and blood-fests over the last forty years, you’ll find gun loving conservative Republicans behind them. Then there’s the news media. We’ve commented repeatedly over the years about how the news media has a very conservative bias. If the news media had a liberal bias why did we only sparingly see Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or any Democrat giving their opinion during the last four years. They were virtually non-existent. But we saw an overwhelming coverage of Trump, Cruz, Graham and the host of other dipstick Republicans like MTG(MTHead), Lauren Boobert and Matt Gaetz. Republicans complain about George Soros, but he’s outnumbered by tons of conservative tycoons like Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, Leonard Leo, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Timothy Mellon, Linda McMahon, etc. With the establishment of Fox News, a.k.a. the Republican Propaganda Network, in 1996, the conservatives could regularly spread their biased opinion masquerading as news to the masses. And now there’s been a proliferation of other prominent outlets like Newsmax and OAN that are vilifying anyone who leans even slightly to the left. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton(who was a Goldwater girl) were not socialists; they were corporatists and all in for capitalistic endeavors – but that didn’t stop the right from labeling them as such. Of course they ignore the fact that Jesus taught socialism to his followers (you mean Jesus was a socialist? – shocking!).
There’s one thing that works with propaganda; repetition. The Nazis knew it and the modern day Republicans know it, too. Like we mentioned earlier, Limbaugh repeated it on a daily basis. Remember Dubya repeating 9/11 and the war on terror over and over and over again. The conservative christian sheeple ate it up because they are prone to following the leader, you know, the lord is my shepherd and I am but a sheep. Trump repeated the fearmongering, this time with illegal immigrants as the scapegoats and it worked like gangbusters again. But why did it work so well? Because the corporate news media is bought and paid for by rich conservatives like Murdoch and the Sinclair Group. Thanks to the Citizens United decision by the conservative Supreme Court, rich right wing people with money can buy all the politicians they want and spread whatever misinformation they want and not pay any consequences. The average Joe and Jane don’t stand a chance.
This brings us to the current economic system in place not only in America but it many other countries around the world – capitalism. We’ve commented before about how unregulated capitalism is nothing more than indirect cannibalism. That’s what’s happening in America. We’re not only killing each other we’re killing the planet, too – all for fun and profit. And who’s in the driver seat when it comes to capitalism; syndicates. We remember syndicates being the boogeymen in a lot of ’60s and ’70s TV dramas. But they are real and there are several of them. There’s the military industrial syndicate (Ike called it a complex), the financial syndicate (stock market and investors), the energy syndicate(only fossil fuels need apply-screw the environment), the media syndicate(all major networks owned by just six companies), the insurance syndicate(price collusion on a massive scale), the political syndicate(only Democrats and Republicans need apply), the religious syndicate(this means christians), the transportation syndicate(only gas guzzling automobiles and trucks need apply-screw mass transit), the healthcare and pharmaceutical syndicate(death panels are already here, folks), the gambling syndicate(we can’t believe sports gambling is legal everywhere now), the sports syndicate(the biggest grift in America), the real estate syndicate(trying to make all public lands private), the software and technology syndicate(tracking people, their data and their money like it’s 1984-Big Brother is watching you) and some other less powerful entities – it’s basically all the investment sectors of the stock market. The commonality amongst all of them: making as much money as possible. That’s why we see all sorts of wheeling and dealing between all of these syndicates – it’s called business, folks. The most obvious connections are the ones between politicians, lobbyists and, with recent revelations, Supreme Court justices. Laws aren’t made on Capital Hill, they are made on K Street where the lobbyists from these syndicates offer sweet deals to make everyone rich at the expense of us poor suckers in the middle and lower classes and to hell with the environment. It’s become painfully obvious over the past forty years (especially the last twenty) that the Republicans and Democrats (the political syndicate) have been playing good cop/ bad cop with the American people. Thanks to deregulation by both Republicans and Democrats, the gap between the rich and poor have widened so much, that many historians are saying we’ve entered another Gilded Age, when plutocrats are worshipped as gods and, like Napoleon once said, the sheeple are kept from murdering the rich because of religion. Like we’ve said before, because of cannibalistic capitalism, we’ve become a nation of SEGUMUCAs: Selfish, Egotistical, Greedy, Ultra-Materialistic, Ultra-Competitive Assholes. Thanks to our greedy capitalist leaders, we’ve become so desperate that we’ll do anything for a buck. Our greedy capitalist leaders have shamelessly pulled the Shock Doctrine on its own people. Instead of Americans helping other Americans, we’re screwing each other to the wall for fun and profit. And now even basic necessities are becoming too expensive. Yes, you could say that capitalism is the anti-christ. We think in the coming years we’ll be seeing a lot more people like Luigi Mangione trying to even the score with the uncaring, unsympathetic corporatists who are running the syndicates, this country and the world and turning everything into a cesspool. We the people have been had by the greedy corrupt capitalists. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to get a lot uglier that it already is, folks.
We don’t want to say this is our last post ever. We reserve to right to post new material if we feel like it, so let’s call this a hiatus for an unspecified period of time. We’ve mostly had a blast making content these last twenty one years. If your check our archived posts, our satire and analysis has been mostly spot on. But our sanity just can’t take another four years of Trump and his troop of MAGAMorons. We’re already busting blood vessels with his inane Greenland and Canada drivel and he’s not even dictator yet. We’re old, retired Boomers. We don’t have much time left on this planet. We want to try and enjoy our final years without banging our heads on the wall every second and gulping down vials of antacid. After the Bush years, Trump and the pandemic we have zero faith in the this country’s institutions, zero faith in our corrupt judicial system, zero faith in our corrupt elected officials(Republicans or Democrats), zero faith in our corrupt financial system, zero faith in our corrupt healthcare, zero faith in our corrupt community leaders, zero faith in our corrupt education system, zero faith in our corrupt society, zero faith in our corrupt civilization and zero faith in humanity. We’re destroying each other and our home planet and our so called leaders won’t do anything to save it because it’s not cost effective. To all the people who voted Republican or didn’t vote at all (almost 90 million) and those who believe in putting profit over people and the environment – we’ll put this as politely as we can – SCREW YOU!!! To all our progressive and secular brethren, we wish you the best. Disconnect from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter(we refuse to call it by its new moniker), fact check everything the corporate media spews out of its vile mouth and don’t let the fascists gaslight you about Trump. As any educated historian will tell you, Trump is objectively awful. He’s a self-aggrandizing, petty, vindictive, greedy, egomaniacal, narcissistic, misogynistic, bigoted, bombastic, materialistic, callous, rude, deceitful, oppressive, pathological-lying, sociopathic bully. We all know it. Don’t let the greedy corporate media normalize him. Finally and most of all, take care of yourself. Feel free to check our archived posts if you want to get some chuckles from the stupidity of the first Trump term or the last twenty one years of GOP idiocy.
Lotsa luck, America – you’re going to need it!!!
