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theliterateape · 6 years

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American Shithole #11 — Scott Pruitt: Ambien From Oklahoma

By Eric Wilson

“I don’t want to write about these bloviating, Machiavellian fuckfaces this week!” I raged, as Monday morning slid unproductively into Monday afternoon. I nervously plucked at my guitar while watching the news cycle blitzkrieg on my monitor a few feet away — a now daily ritual.

Mostly, I love writing this column. Some days though…

Later, from underneath the covers, I howled the muffled words “I don’t want to write about these soul-sucking servants of the shitgibbon every seven days for seven more years!” as I buried myself under a mountain of pillows.

On Wednesday I cried, “I’m staring into the void!” as I fumbled around my closet looking for a comfortable pair of pants. There was no reply from the darkness within.

“You’re fine,” I finally thought to myself, “you’re just reading too much about that conniving motherfucker, Scott Pruitt.”

Ugh, Scott Pruitt — bane of the Environmental Protection Agency. I never would have imagined that someone could actually bore me to death. Is this how he's killing the environment? Is he boring it to death?

He is a slow internet connection personified.

I’ve read nearly 50 articles about the head of the EPA over the last few days, along with ingesting and digesting a fair amount of CNN coverage about the man — and I was uncharacteristically disinterested with all of it.

Even writers for the New Yorker and the New York Times were unable to capture my attention, as they, too, failed to bring color and life to a man will all the charm and allure of an abandoned Porta Potty.

It was the most painful slog so far, and I’ve already spent a week reading about Stephen Miller!

Never has there been a more boring villain in the Trump rogue’s gallery, than this litigious Jesus freak. Reading a bio piece on Scott Pruitt is like reading a 40-page white paper on the chemical properties of Vaseline.

I have been distracted this past week; I admit that could be part of it. A week dominated by the dangerous surgery my father was forced to undertake. (I love you, dad! Get well soon.)

But this Pruitt goon is just such an ordinary, run-of-the-mill bad guy that he can’t compete with the hyperbolic carnival barkers and legitimately terrifying shadow figures that have all come out of the woodwork. I fell asleep reading about him two nights in a row, and I’ve successfully read Moby Dick!

Okay, I haven’t. Fuck that tome. But you get the point.

In the age of comic supervillains, Pruitt comes off less like an evil genius, and more like a creepy office temp — the kind of guy that’s always looking at you when you happen to glance in their general direction.

Stop creeping on me Pruitt!

Conversely, if Pruitt were a superhero, you would find yourself constantly asking what his powers were. He’s just sort of, there. If the Trump administration were the Avengers, Pruitt would be Hawkeye.

I can just imagine eavesdropping on the conversations about Trump’s Avengers at Comic-Con:

“So what’s this Pruitt character do again?”

“He furthers the conservative agenda from within his department, he abuses housing, finance and travel privileges on the tax payer’s dime, and in general he behaves like a bought and paid for horse’s ass, born of the cronyism era of political yore.”

“So basically, he’s just a republican.”

“Yes. One that can skewer libruls with a nifty composite bow, and also turn invisible.”

“C’mon now, he can’t turn invisible, he’s just really, really boring.”

“Yes, but if his boringness results in what would effectively be invisibility, then that should be considered a power.”

“I disagree. That would be like saying…”

Ah, Comic-Con. How I long for your Nerdspeak. Someday I shall find you as crowded, overpriced and befouled by virgin body odor as I imagine you to be…

I managed to read enough about Pruitt — through caffeine-assisted focus — to understand that he is clearly another incompetent and grossly overconfident fool within this administration. They are all terrible fools, but some of them are so spectacularly inept in their villainy. Following the lead of Trump’s almost laughable bungling of everything he touches, I suppose.

What kind of fucking idiot disobeys this White House when they expressly forbid you to give lavish salary increases to friends in your department? What kind of numbskull defies this president by circumventing the law with an obscure loophole via the Safe Drinking Water Act to get two buddies roughly an extra 70K a year?

What kind of muttonhead lies about a private email account used for communications with his ties to the oil and gas industry, during the Senate confirmation hearings on his appointment to the EPA? – a crime itself.

What kind of fool perfectly positioned to dismantle Obama era EPA initiatives and regulations — something he’s worked years to accomplish — breaks the law by accepting the gift of cheap D.C. housing as quid pro quo for awarding a lucrative pipeline contract?

The boring, invisible kind of fool, apparently.

“So what’s his origin story?”

I’ll handle this, Comic-Con nerds.

Scott Pruitt is a lawyer (J.D.) and politician from Oklahoma, so his origin story is that he’s a good ol’ boy. I lived in Oklahoma for four miserable years in my youth, and if there’s a barren and lifeless place filled with more wingnuts and whackadoodles, I have not seen it.

I do not wish to ever visit such a place.

Here is a brief aside offering insight into the mindset of Oklahoma’s educational system. When I was in sixth grade in Oklahoma, they gave the incoming class various aptitude tests, and then separated the exceptionally high-scoring kids from the herd, to be educated elsewhere, along with the children exhibiting behavioral problems. I have always found it interesting that the troublemakers and the intellectually gifted were considered the same in that cultural backwater.

That was 40 years ago. I couldn’t possibly imagine what Oklahoma’s public schools have devolved into today. Oh wait, yes I can imagine, as the teachers for the entire state are on strike, due to the gross undervaluing of their services, among other indecencies and injustice.

Pruitt wasn’t formally educated in Oklahoma, he grew up in Kentucky, but you couldn’t possibly care about that, dear reader. I certainly didn’t. He moved to Tulsa in the early '90s, but no one really cares about that either. Or that he was a State Senator and then Oklahoma’s Attorney General. Zzzzzzz. Boring. He’s the Benadryl of Evil.

His whole life story is boring as shit.

I hope he gets fired so that at the very least, I never have to read about him again. Reading about this stone-faced conservative boor actually made me care less about the environment he so desperately wants to destroy; so please universe, no more Pruitt.

Unless I have insomnia, then get me that bio, pronto.

He is dangerous though, and he certainly seemed devious from the get-go. Not only did he spend several thousand dollars sweeping his new offices for bugs, he also built a super-spy silent phone booth in his office with 43K of tax payer funds.

I’ll save you all the usual links; trust me on this one, I did the fucking reading for you, and I am a less-interesting man for the effort.

There is a lot of conjecture over whether or not Pruitt is next on the chopping block. Opinions are all over the place on this one, so I’ll throw in my two cents. If he were from a family of billionaires, I would say no, he stays. This is one of the reasons DeVos will be around for a while. Pruitt is not from upper-crust wealth though. Trump ultimately sees the Pruitt types of the world as lesser, and therefore expendable; and considering the amount of bad press he’s generating for the administration, well, Trump has gotten rid of people for far less.

So, unless the heat dies down, its adios, you boring motherfucker!

Breaking News: Pruitt on the controversial pay raises for his staff: My staff did it, not me!

Here's Pruitt hammering nails into his own coffin Wednesday evening, and in an environment you would expect to be simpatico. This is a FOX News interview with Ed Henry, no less. My new prediction is he is gone by the time this posts Thursday.

B.S. Report

In case you missed it, another conservative talking head looked to belittle one of the Parkland survivors in the digital arena — this time it was Laura Ingraham gunning for David Hogg. She was outmatched. She came damn close to losing her show.

These assholes are dropping out of elections, losing advertisers — losing their jobs — every damn time they say some evil shit about these kids. THAT is power. That is their own beloved capitalism biting them in the fucking ass. Taking out a good chunk. How’d you like them apples, Laura Ingraham? I’d wager you shit your spanks when those advertisers started dropping like flies. I bet your knees were shaking like twigs in the breeze when the boys from the FOX News home office called to inform you if you still had a job.

So this goes out to all of the Fox News family, and their ilk.

Enjoy scrutinizing and fretting over every miserable fucking thing you used to be able to say with impunity — for the rest of your miserable lives — you overvalued, right-wing, shitgibbon-blowing, squawk-box media whores.

You sold out our country for ratings, and eventually America is going to make you pay for that, dearly.

#Scott Pruitt #Oklahoma Teachers Strike #Laura Ingraham #David Hogg

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literateape · 6 years