“Hey, baby–you lookin’ for a way into the Washington political establishment?”/Image: Licensed Adobe stock, Microgen.
Federal law enforcement agencies shut down a popular website Wednesday for adult classified ads, alleging it enabled prostitution and sex trafficking, including that of minors, as reported by The Verge and every other news outlet in the multiverse. While this is morally, ethically, and legally advisable, it’s a real bummer for Congressional Republicans. They need somewhere to shake their political moneymakers, letting people like President Donald Trump know their services are up for rent or sale. So, Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) readers and Alt-whack jobs, we must give them a place to trumpet–nay, Trump-et–that they can be had for the right price (pun intended), and apparently a rather low one, which is their perception that their work still has meaning.
If Reps. Paul Ryan (R-Wi.), Trey Gowdy (R-S.C..), Darrell Issa (R-Ca.) and other fabulous Republican examples of humanity don’t have a tawdry e-publication like Backpage to post sexy pics and come-hither text on, it’ll be that much harder for them to let Trumpian Johns know they’re available for frolicking fun. They need a space, a “safe space,” as the Liberal Loonies say, to advertise, to announce, and to promote their political whore skills. We can’t expect them to do it on the corner of 28th and K in Washington, D.C. in 2018. That’s not safe, clean, or a far-reaching enough platform. Also, a class-act publication like Backstage allows for super-thin veneer of acceptability for people like Devin Nunes (R-Ca.) to shroud themselves in as they sell their services to not even the highest bidder, but any bidder. Working the block like a two-bit tramp is just a step we can’t ask them to take. There is a bottom for the right wing, and openly skanky behavior is it.
There’s nowhere else but Backpage for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Ca.) to post an ad like the following: “Hot, ambiguously Latino stud looking to put his moral and ethical cowardice to good use for sexy, blond, blue-eyed father figure for the sake of political expediency. Drug, disease, and personality-free. Could I be your ticket to power, popularity, and pay-off? Message me to find out. No standards at all, except your interest in me. ‘Memos’ full of fake info possible, too!” After Craiglist took down and banned prostitution-based ads, Backpage was one of the few places for Republi-hos to go.
Related: Remain centered even as the FBI raids your office–here’s how!
One of the favorite logical fallacies we on the right love to employ these days in our desperate attempt to keep our political predator claws dug into the flesh of our American-culture victims is The Slippery Slope. If we allow x, then soon after will come y, then z, and on and on. Fear, not facts, and a dearth of valid arguments, animate our resorting to this. But we love fear-based stuff, as conservatives. Moral panics have always been kind of our thing. So I offer you the following slippery slope argument. If we allow the concern for people that have to sell themselves to survive to take away a necessary forum for political streetwalkers, like Backpage, next will come Fox News, the ideological stomping ground of the ultimate example of whore behavior, National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch. And after that will come our dear Breitbart, which gives unhinged lunatic Milo Yianoppolous an e-place to call home sweet home.
And: Our advice columnist counsels a reader who feels he can’t do anything Alt-right.
Finally, the ultimate in horror will occur: Senior White House Adviser Kellyanne Conway may have to get a job besides her current one of justifying, rationalizing, and enabling every disgusting Trump act. There simply aren’t that many such positions in the world that pay the same amount of money she can do!
“We can’t ask the flotsam, jetsam, and general detritus of human morals, the Republican right wing, to simply go out on the street in skimpy political clothing, haggard and bone-thin, making it clear to everyone that they’re doing nothing more than whatever they have to for a buck, not advancing a political agenda as they are able to convince themselves and others of if they can continue to call themselves ‘politicians,'” said Dr. Lorna Ingleside, a psychotherapist whose practice treats Beltway insiders who work oh-so-hard for their money. “‘We better ‘treat them right,’ as the 1980s Donna Summer classic goes.”
Unfettered, unmoored, and unmitigated Late Capitalism requires everyone to spend most of their lives in soul-crushing toil to barely scrape by. It needs to demonize prostitutes, who are, of course, simply trying to get by like everyone else. But their desperation, degradation, and economic insecurity laid bare in the act of selling their physical person, which is such an obviously self-violating act, is too much for us. So we criminalize their behavior instead of that of the people who take advantage of them. We don’t offer them solutions, we just penalize them and look the other way. We cast them out, throw stones, point and accuse, yet we don’t actually try to create a cultural situation in which they don’t have to sell themselves to survive. We can’t do the same to Congressional Republicans, though! After all, most of them are white men, who we prize so highly in the United States of America. Our golden boys, our old boys network, our boys who will be boys can’t be humiliated by the expectation that they openly ask for some sort of payment in exchange for the political influence they offer.
Prostitution is, as they say, the oldest profession. It was the start of a great human tradition–treating everything like a transaction, thereby cheapening it. It deadens the soul, inserting stress, humiliation, and the feeling by the seller that he or she is unworthy of better, even as he or she is worth so much more. But, hey, it’s just business–nothing to take so personally! He who prides himself on allegedly being an amazingly amazing businessman is none other than President Donald Trump. So, if we right-wingers don’t do all that we can to ensure that Congressional Republicans don’t have a space to let the next con artist, swindler, or scam artist know they’d love to mortgage their “principles” in exchange for money, power, and popularity, we can’t be sure we’ll be able to repeat the Trump Era over and over like political Groundhog Day. And we need said certainty–we need it!!!
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© 2018 Akbar Khan
