The 2016 Brutally Honest Awards
Well here we go, another year is about to end, and it can’t happen soon
enough for this old online commentator.
As has been tradition for about 19 of the 20 years since this column has
been online, the very last column for the year is reserved to celebrate the
best of the best and the worst of the worst that has happened for the year.
A quick disclaimer: these best and worst categories are as how I, as the
author and commentator, see things through my own filters. These may not be your best or worst
categories, and the list of categories changes every year, so what may be
recognized as the best or worst of anything one year may not be there the
following year.
The Biggest Winners of 2016: Fear-mongers,
Hate-mongers, Race Supremacists, Christian Supremacists, Nationalists,
Neoconservative Media Personalities, Neoconservative news services, Donald
Trump and his family, and, of course, ‘Muricans – For
reasons that have been made obvious this past November. They managed to hoodwink their way into
power, stick their thumbs into both eyes of the power-elites, and now they’re
rubbing in the fact that they literally TRUMPED the world!
I will give them credit in that they did manage to power through their
critics, including myself. But that
should also be cause for alarm for the rest of us, because this is history
repeating itself.
The Sorest and Sorriest Winners of 2016: Fear-mongers,
Hate-mongers, Race Supremacists, Christian Supremacists, Nationalists,
Neoconservative Media Personalities, Neoconservative news services, Donald Trump
and his family, and, of course, ‘Muricans –Yes, they
get more than one award this year.
Here are a few “New Brutal Rules” that these ‘Muricans should heed...
New Brutal Rule: If you claim ownership of an insult or smear made on you,
then you forfeit any and all claims to be offended by it!
If you cheer when Trump boasts about how he loves the “poorly educated”,
then you forfeit any claim to be offended when people call you stupid and
idiots!
If you proudly boast about how you’re one of the people that Hillary
Clinton referred to as a “Basket of Deplorables”, then you forfeit any claim to
be offended by the term!
New Brutal Rule: Don’t ask for instant forgiveness after waging unholy
hell.
Remember what happened after 2008?
Did you guys simply shrug and accept the dark-skinned Senator from
Illinois? Don’t lie now! I was there
watching you pathetic “poorly educated” “Basket of Deplorables” whine about
Barack Obama and swear that he wasn’t “your” president! For eight years America had to put up with
your temper tantrums, and I will make it my mission in life to remind you of
each and every instance of you ‘Muricans claim that “he’s not my president” and
making stuff up about him and where he was born and whether he was educated and
where he was educated. There were things
that Obama did that you could have rightly complained about, but instead you
were making stuff up about apology tours that never happened, creating phony
birth certificates, and hamstringing the judicial system in ways that are
borderline treason. Eight years of that
crap! Eight years! Don’t expect that to
simply be forgiven because “you know, politics”.
Here’s an old saying: if you can’t take it, then don’t dish it out. Guess what?
It’s serving time, and I’m handing out the ladles!
New Brutal Rule: If (or when) you get Trumped by Trump, then you have
nobody to blame but your own sorry self-righteous asses!
You chose him for whatever delusional reason you had. You cheer him on, you feed his ego, so
whatever he does next is on you.
And don’t think it won’t happen!
When Sarah Palin, of all people, the Twitter Twit Queen herself, is
critical of Trump’s actions even before he is sworn in, then you know Trump
can Trump anyone!
Oh, and one more...
New Brutal Rule: If you complain that the system is “rigged”, that the
elections are in doubt, then you have no legal or moral right to question the
calls for recount!
Seriously, Trumpets, you have no shame and you clearly have no
morals! Trump did not win by a
landslide. He did not win a
mandate. He lost the popular vote and
that gap is only getting larger and larger.
He won because of a constitutional system that
Trump himself criticized back in 2012.
So if a third party candidate wants
to pay for a recount, why the hell are you throwing temper tantrums over it
if you believe it won’t change anything?
And, yes, she is raising the money for it, not the taxpayers! So stop lying about it, Heritage Hacks! Stop lying!
The Biggest Losers of 2016: The rest of the world
– Again, for reasons that have been made obvious. Like it or not, we, the whole world, have to
put up with Trump and his neo-conservative alt-right supremacists and their
propaganda machines and their rubber-stamping hacks in Congress for at least
the next two years if not longer.
And you thought it was bad when Bush Junior had free reign after 2004!
The Sorest and Sorriest Losers of 2016:
The Democratic Party and The Supporters Of Hillary
Rodham Clinton – I’m hesitant to include Hillary herself in this,
but clearly her supporters are just as much at fault as the Trumpets. You backed the wrong horse, and now the world
has to pay the price for it. And I know,
for some of you, that wasn’t your fault.
Hillary’s friends rigged the DNC side of the game so she’d win the
nomination.
You assumed that this was just a matter of which horrible choice was not
as horrible. You assumed that millions
of people would automatically pick Hillary over the orange-skinned-wacky-man. You assumed that millions of people were
Hillary Clinton’s to own as political slaves.
You are all pompous asses and you damn well know it, and now that you
are shown to be asses, you are bitter and vindictive at everyone except the
real asses who made the mistake... and that’s you.
Trump did not win because some voters voted for third party
candidates. Trump won because he spoke
to the people that you assumed were your political property and he told those
people what they wanted to hear. They needed
to hear that they were being screwed over and that someone would fix it. Your girl wasn’t going to fix it.
Remember Bill Clinton’s war room slogan from twenty-four years ago? “It’s the economy, stupid!” Well the economy is more than just Goldman-Sachs
and Bank of America and Wells Fargo and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It’s the family that has to pay hundreds of
dollars out-of-pocket because some greedy pharma exec jacked the price of
life-saving medicine five-thousand percent and the equally-greedy insurance
company that they are now forced by law to fork even more money to that wasn’t
going to pay for that medicine. It’s the
single mother that has to work two or three jobs to make ends meet while your
girl is being paid big speeches to Too-Big-To-Fail and telling them to have a
public and a private policy.
It’s still the economy, only your girl was telling people to “stay the
course” that Obama set forth (which she had a
not-so-minor hand in)... and *that*
was really stupid.
The “Too Soon And Too Late” Award: Cuban Strongman
Fidel Castro – Fidel Castro is finally dead, and his
death could not come soon enough for the countless Cuban exiles that are here
in the United States.
But, of course, none of them will even want to go home. Why should they? Fidel’s brother Raul is still running the
country. Besides, it’s much better here
than over there, right?
The “Too Late” part for me is the fact that he died before I could
formally rip his death in a standalone column in a timely manner. Some subjects do have an expiration date, and
this is especially true when it comes to deaths.
The “Too Soon” part, though, is the fact that he died before the Cuban
people finally realized what they were missing out on. I
said back in May of this year that Cuba needed this thawing of relations
with the United States, just like the Soviet Union needed “Glasnost” in the
80’s to see just how their leaders and their “ultimate society” failed them. Fidel Castro died without being told that his
“revolution” was a failure, because revolutions only work when they are
fighting against the system, not running it.
By the way, it needs to be said that there is a social media meme that
has Castro allegedly saying that he would not die until America is
destroyed.... then there’s a picture of Trump, and then Castro’s obituary. Sorry, but that meme could’ve worked even if
Hillary won. Besides, Trump didn’t
destroy America. We did that.
The Goddamned F-N Ostrich Award for 2016: The
Democratic Party – This is a political party that
needs to die, and die right now. Never
mind about shuffling the deck chairs in the DNC Titanic. This is the party that gave the American
people Hillary Rodham Clinton and then forced their members to blindly support
her even though doing so made a good portion of them into goddamned hypocrites
and then actually wonder why they lost!
You know, if Hillary won, then the party players and bosses could breathe
a sigh of relief over the scam they pulled on us. But they didn’t win. They got Trumped by Trump. And not only did they get Trumped out of the
White House, they lost seats in Congress, when, by all of their so-called
“experts”, they were supposed to retake at least one of the two legislative
houses. So they lost the White House,
they were denied control of the Congress, and now, because they did not fight
hard enough before the election to fill the vacated Supreme Court seat, they
will lose any concept of a majority in the judiciary as well.
This is a tremendous colossal *failure*
for the Democratic Party.
So what do they do about it? They
re-elect Nancy Pelosi as House Minority Leader.
No, I am not kidding. And the
failed leader of the loser party didn’t wait to
unleash her “grand plan” to get back into the majority... and that was to
wait until the GOP inevitably screws up so badly that people will opt for the
Dems again in two years. And if that
sounds like a repeat, it is. It’s the
exact same tactic she’s been using over and over again. Just wait.
Let the country suffer some more and eventually they’ll vote the
jackasses back in.
People, listen to me now... the Democratic Party has not just failed, it
has failed America!
It doesn’t need to be reformed; it needs to be replaced.
Let the so-called “Party of Jefferson” end with Barack Obama as their
last president. That’s the closest they
will get to ending on a high note. Let
the 21st Century be watched over by a new political party, one that
hasn’t given up on the American people and hasn’t sold itself out to the
corporate interests. End the Democratic
Party before it ends what is left of America.
Of course, it probably won’t because... you know... “politics”.
The Biggest Disappointment For 2016:
“Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” –
I actually explain why they got this award in
my review of the movie on the brand-new Hero Corner website. I strongly urge you all to check it out.
The really short version is that director Zach Snyder turned a follow-up
to “Man
of Steel” from a Superman movie to a Batman movie and turned Superman, the
greatest hero in our modern age, into a villain. We expected so much from Snyder, and he
basically ruined it for us.
And, yeah, the premature spoil from the reviewers in Rotten Tomatoes
didn’t help matters. I’ll get to them in
a minute.
The Second Biggest Disappointment For 2016: “Captain
America: Civil War” – Or, as it should’ve been known, “The Avengers: Civil War”, because basically this was an
Avengers movie, not one centered on Captain America.
This needs to be a Heroes Corner review, and I’ll probably get to it at
some point, along with all of the other Mouse-owned Marvel movies, but the gist
of it is this: You take a very good multi-part mega-story like “Civil War”,
which pretty much involved every Marvel character that wasn’t connected to the
X-Men, and you reduce it to a handful of characters minus two of their most
powerful ones, and you have them fight each other... and you throw in a 2nd-rebooted
Spider-Man just for the sake of fan-gasm.
Now do you see why this is a let-down?
Oh, and Tony Stark is a whiny little bitch along with Donald Trump. Needed to be said. Moving on...
The Disgusted Bastards Award For Entertainment In
2016: Rotten Tomatoes Reviewers – You know, I can
understand why people would have issues with BvS, but it seemed like the
overpaid overhyped reviewers had a general hate for DC Entertainment
movies. First BvS, then “Suicide
Squad”. I mean, what the hell,
guys? I get why people wanted the
website shut down, but, that’s really not the solution.
The problem, of course, is that the overhyped reviewers that are
responsible for all the DC-hate are not the ordinary people who like going to
these kinds of movies and post the occasional reviews (in other
words, they’re not like me).
These are the overpaid “professional” reviewers for newspapers and media
services. These are the people who get
paid to go to the movies and to review the movies, even if they are movies they
would rather not see. They didn’t want
to go see “Batman v Superman” or “Suicide Squad”. They would rather see stupid comedies and
chick-flicks.
There’s a YouTube personality called the Comicstorian that really has the
best solution to this problem, and that is to basically stop reading
reviews of movies before they come out.
Just ignore the reviews completely.
Rotten Tomatoes? Screw em! Stop visiting the site and stop linking their
links to social media and they’ll learn their lesson.
The Term That Needs To Die A Violent And Painful Death
In 2016: “Post-Truth” – The media loves to say we are
now in a “post-truth” world. And what is
“post-truth”, you ask? “Post-Truth” is
supposedly when people rely not on facts or reason but instead on emotions and
beliefs.
You know, this is far from being a new concept. We’ve had this for countless centuries.
We call that being in a cult.
So stop giving it a new name to try to “normalize” it. Call it for what it is.
We are all mired in a political death-cult.
The STFU Award For 2016: The Miriam-Webster People
– Apparently the dictionary editors are afraid that the term “fascism” will
become the most-searched word for the year, so
they want us all to stop looking for it.
The hell?!?
Listen, you should stop telling people what words to not look up! Enjoy the fact that people are using your
website and that it’s being used to look a word that they need to understand
more! I would rather have every single
person with an Internet connection look up the word “fascism” on the
Miriam-Webster website than to have them be told lies from those “fake news”
sources.
The “Eureka” Award For Finally Effen Getting It In
2016: (Tie) DC Comics and CWTV – A few years ago, The
CW network gave fans of Superman the biggest “F-YOU” with their failure of a
“Smallville” finale. A few years ago, DC
Comics hit the reboot button hard with their “New 52” garbage.
This year, they both fixed things.
First, DC Comics successfully erased the big mistakes of the “New 52”
with “Rebirth”. What the fans liked,
what the fans wanted, the fans got.
Superman and his wife Lois. The
red-haired Wally West. The original
Titans. It wasn’t a full-on “reboot”,
but it fixed things that needed fixing.
Then the CW saved “Supergirl” from the CBS ax and brought it over to
their network as part of their almost-week-long schedule of DC Superhero shows,
joining “The Flash”, “Arrow”, and “Legends of Tomorrow”. Not only that, but they re-introduced us to
Superman (and thankfully *not* played by anti-Superman Tom
Welling) and they found a way to have all four shows take part in a
four-part crossover, so Supergirl was able to interact with all the other
heroes in the DC television universe.
Sadly, it’s not a perfect fix.
They still need to integrate the “Supergirl” universe with the rest of
the other shows (they missed the perfect opportunity with
their own “Flashpoint” event) but it still beats what CBS wanted to
do to the series.
And finally...
The “Ministry of Truth Award” For Reckless Behavior In
Social Media: Fake News – “Fake News” is nothing new,
but how it is being spread is. I’ve said
it before that we are caught up in a political death-cult, and cults are
founded on myths and lies and they absolutely cannot handle truth and facts and
reason, especially when those truths and facts and reasons contradict what they
already believe is gospel.
Enter the filter-free (or “filter-less”)
social media.
It’s one thing to say that 9/11 was an “inside job” or that the
dark-skinned President of the United States was supposedly born in another
country or that said dark-skinned chief executive was somehow going after our
guns and will be throwing us all into secret FEMA camps. It’s another thing to run a fake news story
that leads to real violence and real acts of terrorism.
A day before this article was posted, a
man showed up at the Comet Ping-Pong restaurant in the District of Columbia with
guns-in-hand, looking to “rescue the children” that were supposedly being
held in a basement of said restaurant as sex slaves. Only there was no basement in this building.
Nor were there ever any sex slaves, never mind children, being held there. The whole thing was a lie, concocted by
supporters for President-Elect Donald Trump trying to come up with something,
anything to discredit Hillary Clinton.
Worse yet, this was not the only incident to befall the restaurant. Just last month, two women were trying to
tear up the patio of the restaurant trying to find supposed “secret
tunnels”. The restaurant managers and
staff and even the owners of neighboring businesses have been targeted by
people who bought into these fabrications and have had their lives threatened
over lies spread by social media.
It’s very likely that this business will be forced to shut down at some
point simply because of the lies concocted by faceless entities and spread
through social media by equally faceless supporters of Donald Trump. The digital mob is threatening real lives and
real livelihoods.
What makes this sickening is that when tracked down by real journalists
from real news services, some of these “fake news” creators actually say that
they do what they do thinking that at some point people will know they are
telling lies.
No, they don’t know, you morons!
Because you’re playing into the egotistical minds of people that have
been caught up into a political death-cult!
You can tell a cult member anything, no matter how crazy it may sound,
and they will buy it wholeheartedly if it already fits into their prejudicial
minds! Remember Heaven’s Gate? Remember Jonestown? Remember the Branch Davidians? This is the same goddamned mindset played out
on a larger scale and spread like herpes through social media.
Let’s get brutally honest here... the people behind the whole “Pizzagate”
fake news story need to be hunted down and identified and be held personally
responsible for everything that happens to the real restaurant and the real
people and real businesses in that area.
Splash their faces all over the evening news. Post their home addresses all over
websites. And let them see what is
really happening.
And if the President-Elect and the Vice-President-Elect have any sense of
morals or conscience (I suspect they don’t but
let’s presume for the sake of argument that they do) they should be
the first ones out in front of this, telling their cult members to knock off
this crap immediately. And they need to
be the ones to do this because they are the only people these cult members will
listen to.
I am a commentator, and I’ve been one here for twenty years now, and it
sickens me to know that now I have to give disclaimers telling people that I’m
not a “news service” and that what I provide is commentary, not news. It sickens me to know that there are really
stupid people whose self-righteous egos will never allow them to comprehend the
truth, who will buy outright lies by faceless entities that think this is all
just a game. It sickens me to know that
we will end 2016 with the realization that George Orwell’s cautionary tales are
becoming prophecy.
This is not “greatness”, people. This
is not making America “great” again. This
is making America, and all that it stands for, dead.
And this is what you voted for in 2016.
I hope you’re proud of it.
