Fired and Furious, or The Devil's Barcode

Given the size of his ego, it was a matter of time before Steve Bannon published some sort of book.   I just didn't think it would happen this soon.  But Bannon needs to distract attention from his record of failure, which climaxed with the Roy Moore debacle, so consider it the world's longest rage-tweet.  Unlike other tweeters, he figured out how to monetize it, but after all, that's the whole point of this regime:  Trumpism is corporatism.  And no, I haven't read it.  Waiting for the Netflix series.

The smart move would have been to keep him on the payroll in some capacity, maybe the "job" vacated by Ponderosa Manicotti or whatever her name is.  "Smart move" is not a phrase that occurs to anyone contemplating this Bedlam on Pennsylvania Avenue, however, and Bannon is most certainly outside the tent pissing in, as LBJ would say.  He doesn't seem to have the juicy stuff that Michael Wolff is purveying, but he did employ the attention-grabber "treasonous" to describe the now semi-legendary meeting of The Trumps and The Russians in the Fortress of Turpitude.  Would that Pelosi and Schumer were capable of such frankness.

The twelve days of "MERRY CHRISTMAS, GODDAMMIT!" are not even over, but a year of profound weirdness is already taking shape.  For example:

A terrorist attack on an Amtrak train in Nebraska was foiled last October.  You didn't hear about it because the would-be terrorist was one of the fine people who attended the "Unite the Right" fuckfest in Charlottesville.  Taylor M. Wilson was discovered messing with the controls of the train and detained by a conductor.  He was also found to be armed to the teeth and expressed an interest in "killing black people," according to the FBI.

The posse charged with looking into "voter integrity" has been dissolved, after chairman Kobach complained that most of the state attorneys general were big fat doody-heads who wouldn't provide him with information not publicly available.  He has failed to identify the millions who voted illegally (i.e. for someone other than Trump), but it is totally not his fault.  He is sad.

Chuck "Chuck" Grassley and Lindsey Graham want somebody to investigate Christopher Steele for compiling that very very bad, completely untrustworthy dossier which confirmed all the stuff Robert Mueller already knew about the unreported meetings and the freshly laundered money.  It's the season for investigations, apparently, because Devin Nunes is about to take a tenth (eleventh?) look at the Clinton Foundation and its slave colony on Mars.   And always emails!  Never stop investigating the emails.

Michele Bachmann may run for the Senate seat vacated by Al Franken, but she's waiting for the go-ahead from her god.  That's not me being snide.  She actually said that.  Possibly her god is busy persuading Roy Moore to concede, now that Doug Jones has been reluctantly sworn in by Mike Pence.  In other Moore news, one of the women who accused him of molesting her when she was an adolescent, Tina Johnson, has lost her house to fire.  Arson is suspected.

Trump marked the holidays with a medley of insults against other countries, including Haiti ("they all have AIDS") and Nigeria ("they'll never go back to their huts" once they've tasted America); egging on anti-government demonstrators in Iran; cutting aid to Pakistan, the country US forces need to traverse to reach Afghanistan; and ramping up tensions with North Korea after Kim Jong-un's New Year's speech suggested a willingness to talk to the South Koreans on the occasion of the Winter Olympics.  Who says he never does anything but watch television and play golf?  He's also disappointed that China continues to ship oil to North Korea.  Although he has no apparent problem when Russia does the same.

Most Puerto Ricans still lack electricity and clean water, but the Army Corps of Engineers is optimistic about March.  This March.

And now some good news:  Ringo Starr finally got his knighthood.  About bloody time.