Wednesday, May 25, 2016                                               6:20 PM

I saw a couple of things on the news that I’d like to discuss.

Hillary got spanked today by the State Department—but like the Supreme Court Justice non-hearings and the Benghazi blame-a-thon, the whole e-mail-server debacle could have been handled far more swiftly if competent people had had any hand in it. There was no earthly reason for all this stuff ‘just happening’ to pop up right when her presidential campaign rounds the home stretch. But the GOP has always been more concerned with the timing of their accusations than with their probity. Now, onto whether she actually did anything wrong.

Here we get a display of ingenuousness you won’t see every day—according to the State Department, Hillary did, in fact, do wrong. That she did exactly what her predecessors did is hidden in the back pages—or, as the State Department likes to put it: ‘If she’d asked us, we would have told her no.’ The implication that Hillary Clinton has to ask the State Department to do its job doesn’t seem like a weird idea to them—though it does to me.

Plus this whole business is about new tech. It reminds me of when I was a young programmer—I coded computers for almost two decades, but when I tried to get a new job, I wasn’t qualified because I didn’t have one of those new IT degrees. The fact that there were no such majors, or degree programs, until the nineties didn’t signify for anyone but me, I guess.

To accuse Hillary Clinton, who’s even older, of high crimes because she didn’t use new tech right—well, that’s something only the GOP would think to do. Emails are not mentioned in the Constitution—they didn’t even exist until a decade or so ago. Pretending that there are hard-and-fast rules about them, that only Hillary Clinton is guilty of a faulty ‘tech launch’—that’s pretty effing precious, don’tcha think?

But I’m not too worried about Hillary—her opponent is still laughable. It is only Trump’s supporters who are scary—the man himself is a joke. The idea that there are enough stupid people in this country to elect him is terrifying—but he still makes me laugh. He’s like a first-grader that managed to steal a grown-man suit, and is fooling everyone.

But back to the GOP—words fail, ya know? GOP officials in eleven states are suing President Obama’s administration over the new transgender bathroom-law issue, saying it’s a ‘social experiment’—like that’s a bad thing, by definition. I guess they forget that America was the original social experiment.

I’ve listened closely to their arguments for opposing transgender bathroom rights (wondering how anyone could seriously object without exposing their bigotry) and their main tactic is a subtle bias in the use of the word gender, as if that word still has two, and only two, meanings. Well, that and the usual BS about how they need a century or two to wrap their heads around any new idea. (‘While we’re young, people!’—as my dad used to say.)

Their insistence on repeating things like ‘one gender or the other’, or ‘boys and girls’—it’s just their way of insinuating that all this new gender-identity stuff is airy-fairy foolishness. In today’s political climate, they hesitate to say that, plainly and aloud (as if we don’t know how they feel) but they strain themselves mightily trying to say it without actually saying it. NC Governor McCrory practically injures himself with such contortions—he’d be hilarious if he wasn’t so revoltingly forked-tongued.

President Obama’s election should have put an end to excessively bigoted comments in the media—but it didn’t. The Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage should have done the same—and it didn’t. I don’t just resent the ugliness of such people—I resent that they drag us all backwards. Racism has been ruled on, repeatedly. Gay rights have been ruled on, also repeatedly. It’s fucking over. Get on the bus, or stay home—don’t parade your idiocy around like it’s a political platform. We grown-ups have got shit to do.