Friday and ... oh, never mind

I don't know why I bother.  My good friends at Mock Paper Scissors won the weekly prize when they described Devin Nunes as "Renfield to Trump's Dracula."  I should leave it alone and go read a book.

The stuff writes itself.  Crazy Mike Flynn's remark from way back in 2016 -- "When you are given immunity, that means that you've probably committed a crime" -- has come back to haunt him as he offers to testify to the Senate Intelligence Committee in return for, say it with me, immunity.  The second most popular hoisting petard of the week came from his former boss, over and over last year:  "Anyone being investigated by the FBI is not qualified to be President of the United States."  If you say so, Donnie.  Perhaps you should spend all your time making with the golf sticks and let the kids run the executive branch. 

That might not sit well with your disciple Alex Jones, who regularly warns about the "Jewish mafia," which is headed by, you know this one, George Soros and is "out to get Jews."  I'm a little confused here -- is Jared Kushner part of the mafia or one of the Jews it is out to get?  Or not?  I suspect the inside of Jones's head resembles the outside of Steve Bannon's, but with more flies.  And how does Bannon feel about taking orders from Kushner?  This has "pie fight" written all over it.  As for Kushner's brothers-in-law Greasy and Sleazy, I don't expect them to be around very much.  The Tasmanian Tiger, thought extinct since 1936, has been sighted in northern Queensland, Australia, and you know the boys will want to kill them a couple of those.

Meanwhile, although I'm sure a sparse crowd witnessed the swearing-in of somebody else, Hillary Clinton continues to be the root of all evil, the answer to every impertinent question, and very possibly the Napoleon of crime.  Instead of being unhealthily obsessed with Trump's Russian connections, Sean Spicer says the media should be investigating her policy toward Russia.  Let's see, we're both private citizens, sixty-something, maybe they should ask about my policy toward Russia. I'm here most afternoons.  Fire away.  Equally cornered, Trump reiterates his campaign lie about how she "sold uranium to Russia."  (At least ten government departments and agencies signed off on a one-time sale of uranium, the State Department was one of them, so....)  James Comey (R-FBI) has yet to apologize for sticking his big fat thumb on the election scales, which is partly why we're in this mess.  And what really went on in the basement of that pizzeria that doesn't have a basement?  Benghazi, people, Benghazi! 

This is serious.  Yesterday the Senate passed a bill allowing states to block federal grants to family planning centers, but it was how they passed it that reeked.  Mike "Lab Rat" Pence rushed in to break a tie after two Republican senators voted with the Democrats.  Say what you will about Trump, and I will, he's not a theocrat.  As we saw hilariously last summer, the Bible is one of the many, many books Trump has never opened.  He was going through the motions like every other politician to the right of Bernie Sanders.  Pence is on a mission from god.  Is what Trump brags of doing to women any worse than what Pence dreams of doing?  Women die from lack of cancer screening, and from septic abortions.  Women and their fetuses die from lack of pre-natal care.  Women don't die from being groped by an insecure man-baby with advancing impotence.  Women can fend off a Trump with a thumb in the eye or a hatpin to the groin.  (Do they still make hatpins?)  What Pence and his fellow fanatics have in mind is far nastier and harder to stop.  
 


   

Hell week

"If I've lost Cronkite I've lost Middle America," Lyndon Johnson supposedly said after the CBS anchor's documentary/essay on the Vietnam War.  And now Donald Trump has lost the Trump Troubadour.  Kraig Moss sold his business and ignored his mortgage to follow the Orange One around the country, literally singing his praises with a guitar.  Now he says, "He's turning his back on all of us."  Moss's moment of Zen was the late health care act, which contained no provision for substance abuse treatment (Kraig's son Rob died of a heroin overdose).  Americans respond to that which touches them personally -- like the Trump fan in Indiana whose husband now faces deportation for a minor infraction of the law.  And one by one, they drop away.

What else?  Are you sitting comfortably?

The Republicans have spent the last seven years dementedly repealing the Affordable Care Act but when victory seemed at last to be theirs, they couldn't agree on how cruel its replacement should be. They saved face by not even allowing a vote.  Not easy to get cats to march in a parade, eh, Pauly?  Especially the rabid cats of your Free Dumb caucus.

Mike Flynn registered about a week ago as a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government, but we learned that last year he was in on a plot to kidnap Fethullah Gullen, the cleric who lives in Pennsylvania, and take him back to Turkey.  Recep Erdogan wants to blame Gullen for plotting last summer's coup attempt, which some people think Erdogan himself was behind -- a sort of Turkish Reichstag fire.  People like James Woolsey of the CIA, a more credible source than some so-called judge on Fox News.

Nancy Pelosi called Devin Nunes, the in-over-his-head chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a "stooge" for rushing to the White House to blab what he knew about the Russia case before briefing the rest of the committee. I for one am prepared to overlook this insult to the memory of Moe, Larry, Curly, and sometimes Shemp.

This one will make you spit out your beverage of choice.  We now know why Angela Merkel had that "What a Scheisskopf!" expression.  Drumpf -- I mean Trump -- actually handed her an invoice for $300 billion -- plus interest -- for Germany's share of NATO.  Here's what a minister said;  “The president has a very unorthodox view on NATO defense spending. The alliance is not a club with a membership fee. The commitments relate to countries’ investment in their defense budgets.”  He politely failed to add, "This grifter still owes money to the contractors who worked on his bankrupt casinos.  Interest?  Really?"  So I will.  By the way, Merkel's party did very well in the Saarland election today.

The watchword of fascist Italy was "Mussolini ha sempre ragione" ("Mussolini is always right").  The watchword of Trumplandia is "I'm president and you're not," articulated as Michael Scherer of Time tried to pin down the concept of "alternative facts."  If you're going to resurrect the catch-phrases of comedians, Donnie, you might want to forget Chevy Chase and go with Steve Martin:  "Well, excuuuuuuse me!"  Or perhaps Jimmie Walker's "Dy-no-mite!" would complement your threat to have Obamacare "explode," whatever that means. 

Spring cleaning at the Kremlin picks up speed, as a total of eight prominent Russians who might have had something to say about the Manafort-Flynn-Putin connection have died.  A ninth "fell" from a fourth-floor window but is alive in a Moscow hospital, as of this writing.  The object of their efforts pronounced himself vindicated when it was revealed that there were indeed wiretaps of Trump Tower -- legal ones on tenants suspected of gambling and money-laundering.  This is why criminals who are smarter than Trump don't talk on the phone. 

There was more foolery yet if I could remember it, as Casca said.  There is plenty of foolery to come.  And now, Comcast permitting, we'll go to press.

 

 

Quotation of the day

“Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We have to build that up a little more. Let's take an ad. Let's use one of those PACs."

                                                 ---- Donald J. Trump on Abraham Lincoln


Wait until he finds out he's been speaking prose all his life.  Mind blown apart!

Aha!

 

Remember this guy?

He's Stephen Rogata, 19, who used ropes and suction cups to scale Trump Tower last August, reportedly telling police, "My intention was to get a meeting with Mr. Trump to give him secret information."  In February he entered a plea that included mental health treatment.  As far as I can tell, he was a one-day story that was promptly forgotten -- or deliberately buried.  Ladies and gentlemen, here's your wiretapper.  It's so obvious.  Isn't it?  What was on the laptop that fell from his backpack?  Who has it?  Why was he hustled off to a psychiatric facility?  Since when is it crazy to put on shorts and climb a building?  Microwaves, people, microwaves!  That's how they murdered Andrew Breitbart and Antonin Scalia!  Keep your tinfoil helmet strapped on tight.     

Distractions

The first law of Trumpism:  Everything is a distraction from whatever you believe to be the number one scandal of the moment -- the Russian hacking, the Three Stooges federal budget, the Muslim ban, the wiretapping slander, the HHS Secretary's insider trading, the Attorney General's perjury, etc., etc.  No one can concentrate on just one; it's like watching the Flying Karamazov Brothers juggle chainsaws.

There were many this week, and some were even amusing.  I particularly enjoyed watching the Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, school Trumputin on the topic of immigration.  (By the way, Sean, it's pronounced "tessick."  You couldn't know that unless you took ten seconds out of your busy schedule of snorting Xanax and cavity-searching the staff and, you know, called the Irish Embassy.)  Orange Fats couldn't interrupt or grab for his magic tweeter; he had to stand there and take it.  Then, with uncanny timing, Angela Merkel arrived a day after the Dutch rejected their racist neo-Nazi.  Standing beside ours, she implicitly asked German voters, "Will you re-elect me or return to barbarism?"  We'll see.  At the photo-op she brought out all Trump's fear and loathing in the presence of strong women -- he wouldn't look at her or shake her hand, because that's how you treat an equal.  He had already tried to rope her into his lunatic obsession that he was spied upon in the Fortress of Turpitude; the Chancellor ignored him, something our media must learn to do.  Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, called Merkel "the leader of the free world," and it's hard to argue.  Trump waited until she left town to whine that Germany ought to pay more for NATO.  "Such a nasty woman," he didn't add.

Oh, and the lunatic obsession?  Another country got dragged in, when Trump decided (prompted by yet another Fox fantasist) that British security services were doing Obama's dirty work:

The comments prompted a furious response from GCHQ, which in a break from normal practice issued a public statement: “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

(Yes, they should.  This guy was a jerk in high school and he's a jerk now.  Don't ask me how I know.)

Everyone with access to actual intelligence has pronounced the wiretap claims to be purest dung, but facts don't interest this gang.  James "Emails" Comey will be testifying on Monday.  Won't matter. 

The budget is, needless to say, an affront to all human decency, but the item that caught everyone's eye was the elimination of Meals on Wheels, which was pronounced a failure by the Budget Director, decked out like a centerpiece for a St. Patrick's banquet.  Let's see, hundred of volunteers bring food to thousands of Americans who otherwise would not eat, and it costs less for a year than hauling your boss's fat ass to Florida every weekend.  What improvements would you suggest, you disgusting pile of shit?  Oh, and pogue mahone.

The dumbest distraction of the week was the mysterious appearance of some fragmentary ten-year-old Trump tax returns in the mailbox of David Cay Johnston, and their subsequent overhyping by the normally sensible, if didactic, Rachel Maddow.  Clearly leaked by Trump himself (marked "client copy," for fuck's sake), they told us nothing about the sources of his income or the circumstances of their filing except that he paid taxes.  MSNBC really needs to calm down.

There's a real outrage plaguing the Marine Corps with the discovery of nude pictures of female Marines posted at several websites.  I recommend the aggressive recruitment of more gay Marines.  If the movies have taught us anything, it's that ISIS wouldn't have a chance against female Marines and their gay best friends.  I know I sound facetious about this, and I'm sorry, but so many women in all the services have been assaulted and raped, photos seem a minor problem.  Young men get a lot of mixed signals.  When the First (for lack of a better word) Lady displays her cooch on the Internet, some men may think all women are like that.  That's the problem with trash in prominent places -- when they go low, others feel licensed to do the same.  When you hire Nazis to work in the White House, you don't get to act shocked at bomb threats and vandalized cemeteries.  Yeah, it's still going on.

Distracted.  Outraged.  Exhausted.  I haven't even mentioned Rex "Nap Time" Tillerson, North Korea, the famine in Sudan, the sudden dearth of U.S. Attorneys, or the horrifying probability that Neil Gorsuch will soon join the Dread Pirate Roberts and his theocrats on the Supreme Court.  Another time.   

 

Trumpcare

Normally I'd say he needs to have a doctor take a look at those lesions, but...ahh, it's probably nothing.

Jackpot!

Let's agree.  Trump is a rich target for parody, which is why I always start my cyber-day at ALL HAT NO CATTLE, the invaluable source of nourishing snark.  (They're having a fundraiser. Give.)  I laugh, I cry, I steal like crazy, and I feel a little better.  Today they -- look, it's one woman who lives in Costa Rica -- alerted me that China chose International Women's Day to approve some 38 trademark applications for Trump-branded businesses including hotels, golf courses, real estate companies, and what they delicately call "hospitality services," which apparently means massage parlors and escort services.  Forget the Emoluments Clause -- Congress has.  Forget all the China-bashing of the campaign.  Forget Trump's phony concern about human trafficking.  The President of the United States is an international pimp.

I wouldn't want to suggest that the gutting of the Affordable Care Act and the 5 am shitter-twitter about "wire tapps" were intended to distract from this interesting development, but the timing, as they say, is suggestive.  Of course, with this baboon colony in the White House you only need to wait fifteen minutes for something even more breath-stoppingly outrageous, but I thought this one would at least find its way onto the MSM.  No, Rachel Maddow was still tracing the Russian treason and Lawrence O'Donnell was parsing the Twenty-fifth Amendment as if Dense Pence would ever grow a pair, and there's nobody else worth watching.  Who cares if Trump makes seventy-five cents of every dollar a tourist in Guangzhou pays for a happy ending?  How much lower can this country sink in its own esteem and the world's?  I guess we'll find out.



all-hat-no-cattle.blogspot.com

See you there. 

 

Private communication

Rep. Eliot Engel
The Bronx

Dear Eliot,

I have to write to you here because your email does not accept messages from outside your district.  I am prepared to lie about any number of things, but not about living in The Bronx.  So anyway, I respect your decision not to shake hands with The Leader when he appeared before the Reichstag Congress.  People see the word "syphilis" and they get anxious.  Also that weird handshake, like he's seen humans do it but doesn't know why.  Brrrr.  But if you read the Newsweek article closely, it says he is no longer contagious.  So if you ever find yourself in a place where you have to make contact, don't panic.  Wash your hands as soon as you can and you'll be fine.  No Purell, plenty of soap and hot water.

Regards,

Buttermilk Sky