I just want to help people

I got into public service because I want to help people. As you may have heard, I recently made several hundred million dollars selling my column to Lee Enterprises. Now that I am rich, I can do whatever I want, and what I want most is to fight for you, the ordinary, struggling, not-at-all-rich stupid asshole. I love you, and that’s why I am running for governor. I’m also up for US representative, and I wouldn’t say no to the Senate or even a judicial appointment, if it’s federal. I just really, really want to help people. Sometimes I want to help them so much I attack one of them.

I don’t want to do it, of course. I apologize for doing it, in the past and, unavoidably, in the future. It’s just that so many things are fake, especially questions. Don’t you hate it when somebody asks you a fake question? I come into public life full of cold-pressed juices and good intentions, with a message anyone can understand: “I’m here to help. Put me in charge.” But immediately people start in with the fakery, asking “how do you plan to help?” and “what do you think about this other plan to help?” until I’m just like SHUT UP YOU FAKE SON OF A BLLLEEAARGH! And then I help them through a coffee table.

Anyway, I think politics is a natural fit for me. It’s certainly the the most direct way to help people, by making laws for them and stuff. I would also like to create jobs. Ever since I got rich, I’ve been worried that not enough people are working. You can read all about my new life as a helpful and violent multimillionaire in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. As with all my columns, I wrote it six months ago, so I’m lucky that recent events unfolded the way they did. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!

I’m in the Times and the Indy, talking that mess

A newsstand seen through Roddy Piper’s magic glasses in They Live

It’s a big Thursday for Combat! blog, because I am in the New York Times. Apparently everyone who works there drinks, since they deigned to publish my Letter of Recommendation: Pedialyte. Do you know Pedialyte? Our hypocritical modern society markets it as a formula for children, but really it’s for adults. Specifically, it’s for adults who drink and work out to the point of vomiting, even though they are old now and should probably know better. I am old now. But I know nothing! Head on over to the Times and see how I somehow manage to make a living anyway.

In other news, literally, I wrote about John Carpenter’s misunderstood 1988 horror-satire They Live for the Missoula Independent. I first saw They Live in 2006, when it was presented to me as a so-bad-it’s-good eighties misfire. It is that. But at the time, I completely missed the subtext about Reaganomics and the amoral materialism that inspired Carpenter to make the movie in the first place. Today, Reag-o-nomical horror feels relevant again. The country is in the midst of some sort of nightmarish eighties throwback, but the people who most need to hear They Live‘s message have determined the alien conspirators who live among us represent…Jews. Seriously—Carpenter had to go on Twitter to tell internet Nazis it was about yuppies and not the Rothschild conspiracy. That, right there, is a neat encapsulation of our political moment. Even if you don’t care about politics or weird-toned eighties camp, They Live is worth watching for this the greatest fight scene in film history:

Meanwhile, in yet more news or at least opinion, Rep. Barry Usher (R–Roundup) has begun to walk back a bill that would ban bicycles from most of Montana’s public roads. Usher claimed his proposal, which would make it illegal to ride a bicycle outside of a municipal area on any two-lane road without a paved shoulder, was in the interest of bike safety. It seemed more like a motorist convenience bill, designed to save drivers from the danger of having to slow down and wait to pass. Little did he realize that almost none of the highways in the state have paved shoulders. Because the bill also applies to pedestrians and people in wheelchairs, it would make it a crime for people in rural areas to leave their properties, unless they were in cars. For once, though, public outcry has carried the day, and Usher now plans to rewrite his bill if not scratch it entirely. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent.

Victory is sweet. This is the last Combat! blog of the week, because I am going to Seattle tomorrow morning for a fencing tournament. Will I win? Absolutely not. There will be Olympians and shit, and I started fencing last year. But will I have the opportunity to frustrate vastly superior fencers with my weird style, throwing them into the tantrums characteristic of the preppie class? You bet your sweet, unguarded hand I will. I’ll see you Monday, probably with a bunch of weird bruises on my leg.

There’s no such thing as a disposable Trump voter

Voters

Voters

Life hack: skip the alarm by waking suddenly in the middle of the night to think about how Donald Trump is the next president. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last week, and it really cuts down on unnecessary neck mobility. It’s hard to decide which is worse: his presidency or the knowledge that people voted for him. Handed the reins of our democracy, a little under half of Americans failed to see a lying egomaniac for what he was. Or they did and thought, “At least he’s not a woman.”

It sucks to think about all the people who voted Trump, because the reasons they might have done so seem awful. In the search for the most likely explanation, the contest between misogyny and racism continues. If you prefer to think the best of people, the sunniest plausible narrative is that “economic anxiety” scared people enough to turn against the system but not enough to learn about it. If people only voted for Trump because they’re scared of going broke, they still couldn’t grasp the candidates’ platforms well enough to recognize their own interests. Economic anxiety voted to cut taxes on the rich.

Yet you cannot contemn these people, because we need them. Without at least some of the people who voted for Trump, you can’t put a women in the White House. You can’t make public college free. You can’t fix Obamacare. You can’t even keep a reality TV celebrity from taking the Oval Office. If we intend to run this democracy better, “half of voters are stupid assholes” cannot be our operating principle.

Racism, misogyny, and Republicans’ ongoing hypnosis of the white working class made a lot of people vote for Trump, but did they make every person vote for Trump? It’s dangerous to say there’s no such thing as a good Trump voter, because it puts the blame for this disastrous election on everyone the Democrats failed to convince. Maybe they’re not the problem.

If I could say one thing to the Democratic Party: It’s not our job to vote for you. It’s your job to convince us. Hillary Clinton and the DNC did a good job of convincing me to vote against Trump, but they never gave me a clear sense of what I voted for.

Trump said he would deport immigrants and watch Muslims. That’s disgusting and I voted against it, but what was Hillary’s counteroffer? The college thing was nice, although she kind of stopped talking about it after the primaries. More intervention in Syria sounded both bad and likely—more likely than financial regulation or taxing the rich. Her central promise was to continue the Obama legacy. In a year that saw 16 experienced Republicans wrecked by an anti-establishment bomb thrower, offering voters more of the same seems like electoral suicide.

In retrospect it seems that way. At the time, we all knew she was going to win. Now our comfort feels like complacency, and everything is fucked. Birds crawl along the ground as our blood flies up into the clouds. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Impeach Judge McKeon? Sure, but he’s retiring anyway

District court judge John McKeon sentenced a man to 60 days in jail for raping his own daughter.

Judge John McKeon sentenced a man to 47 days in jail for raping his own daughter.

Last month in Valley County, Montana, a man pled guilty to repeatedly raping his 12 year-old daughter and was sentenced to 60 days in jail, with credit for 13 already served. The state-mandated minimum sentence for incest is 100 years, but judges are allowed to mitigate that at their discretion. In this case, a psychosexual evaluation found that the defendant was not likely to reoffend. Judge McKeon also cited the support the defendant had received from his “family, friends, church and employer.” These supporters included the victim’s mother and grandmother, who requested that he not be sent to prison.

A petition calling on the Montana Supreme Court to impeach Judge McKeon for this sentence now has nearly a quarter million signatures. But it doesn’t really matter, because he’s retiring at the end of November, anyway. It’s frustrating. No sanction we can impose on him now would satisfy us. Like the crime itself, this situation wrecks our sense of justice, partly because nothing can balance the scales but also because it’s kind of our fault. You can read all about it this week’s column for the Missoula Independent.

For lighter fare, or at least for fare that does not center on the most awful crime imaginable, this is also the Indy’s election issue. You can read my introductory essay here. If this feels like the longest election of our lifetimes, it’s probably because it is. Ted Cruz announced way back in March 2015, and sixteen other Republicans followed him—the largest slate of primary candidates any American party has ever fielded. Somehow, we would up with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the two most disliked major-party candidates in history. It’s tempting to view these options as both and therefore equally unpalatable. But it is a choice between licorice and shit, and in such moments, it is imperative we not surrender to the luck of the draw.

Besides, there are plenty of exciting races further down the ballot. In Montana, voters can choose between another multimillionaire with no experience in politics and a lukewarm Democratic successor to a more popular executive, in the race between Greg Gianforte and Governor Steve Bullock. Our limited polling suggests that contest is close, and so is the supreme court election between Dirk Sandefur and Kristen Juras, who has never served as a judge. She did try to shut down a sex advice column in the student newspaper, though. Politics may be gross this year, but it’s gross like Chthulhu, which is to say gross but also interesting and potentially apocalyptic. We’ll be back tomorrow with the very last Friday links of this election cycle. I hope it is, anyway.

Donald Trump is a symptom of the GOP’s disease

Donald Trump hears a doorbell on TV.

Donald Trump hears a doorbell on TV.

Here’s a fun fact: the New York Times found that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters are “self-identified Republicans who are nonetheless registered as Democrats.” The’s bad news for the billionaire’s prospects in Iowa, where registered Republicans will participate in the nation’s first caucus a scant three weeks from now. Trump is crushing his opponents in national polls, but there is no national Republican primary. His path to the nomination goes through each state individually, and his organization lags behind his popularity. It’s possible that polls finding Trump is the Republican front-runner tells us less about the GOP’s future than its present.

And yet, whom do rank-and-file Republicans like better? The establishment wing of the party and the donors who support it have thrown their support behind a series of governors—Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush—voters just don’t like. Trump’s two closest competitors have flamed out (Ben Carson) or alienated their colleagues (Ted Cruz.) And all of them have proposed massive tax cuts for the very highest earners at the expense of those Americans who don’t make enough money to pay income tax—many of them the working-class, less-educated whites who compose Trump’s base.

What we have here is a split in the Republican Party. All the enthusiasm is on one side, and all the sense is on the other. Because he has never won an election in his life, Candidate Trump is less a disease afflicting the GOP than a symptom of its unhealthy division. He won’t be president, but he might be a warning. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!