A long Good Friday

A cursory reading of history suggests that most American presidents have been idiots, punctuated by intervals of Jefferson, Lincoln, etc.  Even so, we will have to re-calibrate idiocy.

"I really liked him.  We had a great chemistry I think.  I mean at least I had a great chemistry.  Maybe he didn't like me, but I think he liked me."

That may sound like a twelve-year-old girl who just met the captain of the high school football team at her cousin's wedding.  Actually, it's the president of the United States describing his encounter with the president of China over chocolate cake.  Mao help us all.

Trump did try to warn us:  The chocolate cake is the only safe thing to order at Mar-a-Gag-o, at least according to the Palm Beach County Health Department.  They found raw fish and meat being stored in coolers that were not cool enough, which means the Japanese prime minister (and his hot interpreter) could have been felled by sushi last month.  So what do people want for $200,000 a year, to live forever?  Regulations -- they're crippling this country, although maybe not as much as e-coli.

The bigliest event of the week in every way was, of course, the destruction of some tunnels in Afghanistan by the 21,000 pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast or Mother Of All Bombs, which is very definitely the yugest bomb ever dropped since maybe Nagasaki.  Apparently it killed 36 "bad hombres," which is not quite as impressive as Fat Man, but these were super-evil ISIS fighters and not Japanese housewives.  Probably ISIS fighters.  Possibly Afghani shepherds getting out of the rain.  We'll see.  Americans love bombing, as Robert Bateman wrote over at Esquire, because no one has ever bombed The Homeland.  When a ground-level bomb destroys a building, as in Oklahoma City, we lose our fucking minds, so it's just as well the air-raid drills have only ever been drills.  It's not clear how this will deter the "radicalized" from continuing to kill people in Europe with ordinary trucks (London and Stockholm in the last three weeks), but an Ohio sheriff and Trump Elector is so thrilled, he wants to MOAB the Mexican drug cartels.  And maybe Janesville, Wisconsin, where a crazy guy with a bunch of stolen guns and a fondness for manifesto writing continues to elude police.  MOAB is my washpot, motherfuckers!*

Judge Andy Napolitano is back on Fox, where he told the other numbnuts that he "doesn't believe" the FBI had a FISA warrant to monitor Carter Page, yet another Trump-Putin go-between.  I am so glad I was never in this clown's courtroom.  He couldn't adjudicate a dispute over broken hair clippers on daytime TV.  (Maybe "judge" is a courtesy title in New Jersey, like "colonel" in Kentucky.)

Mike "Benghazi" Pompeo, the former Oklahoma congressman, sure has changed his tune since becoming director of the CIA.  Now he calls WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia."  Amazing the way access to actual evidence can turn a perfectly ordinary right-wing politician into a tool of the "deep state."  When it was dispersing material harmful to the Clinton campaign, WikiLeaks was next to godliness. 

And don't think that ol' devil Hillary doesn't continue to haunt the regime.  Asked why he continues to employ the dastardly (and Obama-appointed) James Comey as FBI director, Trump sputtered, "Don't forget when Jim Comey came out, he saved Hillary Clinton.  People don't realize that.  He saved her life."  First, this hardly answers the question, but Trump's responses seldom do.  Second, how did Comey "come out"?  With his email October surprise, which clearly cost her the election as much as anything?  And how did he "save her life"?  Had she won, would it have been necessary to kill her?  If she is as guilty of stuff as Trump still insists, why has she not been indicted by his gruesomely politicized Justice Department?  She doesn't look worried.

Follow in your books as we learn our next word of Newspeak:  "re-accommodate" (v.)  To eject people from an airplane to make room for the airline's employees.  And if you ever find yourself on United and they want your seat, give them your seat.  You may be late getting home but you won't need surgery.  I mean it.  Give. Up. The. Seat.  They have scorpions.




*Moab Is My Washpot is a perfectly delightful memoir by the legendary Stephen Fry.  You should read it.