Hooray, hooray...

...the first of May, outdoor fucking starts today.  All right, tomorrow.  Meanwhile, let's have some fun with today's news.

Why are relations between the US and Iran (and other places) not even worse?  Because Jim Mattis imitated Horatio Nelson.  When a signal from the Admiralty ordered him to do something he didn't want to do, Nelson would put his telescope to his empty eye socket so he could say he never saw it.  Mattis told The New Yorker, "Trump thinks out loud.  Do you treat it like an order?  Or do you treat it as part of a longer conversation?  We treated it as part of a longer conversation."  Which is a polite way of saying, "I ignored the idiot."  And that, Rod Rosenstein, is how to leave office with a modicum of dignity.

Erik Prince, Ditsy DeVos's smarter brother, is in the shit.  Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has referred a criminal complaint to the Justice Department alleging Prince lied to Congress in 2017.  Given this Justice Department, and given that perjury is a job qualification in this regime, Schiff may be whistling in the dark, but it may prevent Prince from getting a juicy government contract to send his mercenaries to Venezuela.

Louisiana's Isle-de-Jean-Charles is being swallowed up by the Gulf of Mexico, and the indigenous people who live on it, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, will soon have to leave whether they want to or not.  It's a tragedy for a few hundred people, and re-locating them will cost millions.  By contrast, Jakarta, capital of Indonesia and home to ten million, is also sinking fast.  What will that dislocation cost in money and disrupted lives?  The new capital may set up in Borneo.  The people will be on their own, I suspect.  When those Chinese create a climate change hoax, they give it everything they have.

Tweet of the day:  On Mike Pence's visit to the carrier Harry S Truman, Brendan Ponton writes, "Sailors being instructed to 'clap like we're at a strip club' (not kidding)."  Suddenly I want to see Battleship Potemkin.  I don't know why.

The West Wing of the White House now has its own popcorn machine, and the patio outside the Chief of Staff's office serves beer and wine during Friday "happy hour."  Thus Mick Mulvaney has solved the morale problem of his staff and created a new one for the custodians.

Jacob "Honey Trap" Wohl is back.  His attempt to stop Robert Mueller with accusations of sexual misconduct worked so well, he thought he'd try it on Pete Buttigieg.  The regulars at his hipster coffee shop stopped typing to point and laugh at him.   Speaking of Mueller, he has some issues with the attorney general's distortion of his Report.  Maxine Waters says William "Low" Barr should quit or be impeached, but she'll have to wait her turn for semi-literate abuse -- Trump has a new hate object.  Letitia James, attorney general of New York, is a woman of color with power, and you know how that harshes his executive time.  She's going after his beloved NRA as well as his business enterprises, so expect a withering nickname any minute now.  With plenty of these!!!!!

This is fun, said nobody in this picture.  The champion Baylor women's basketball team was forced to visit the White House and, like the Clemson football players before them, fed a lunch of junk food in elegant Styrofoam containers.  Somebody wrote a speech and put it in front of the short-fingered vulgarian so he wouldn't start ranting about Colin Kaepernick or NO COLLUSION before collecting his free jersey from the coach on the left.

As Nick Charles would say, "And how are all of your folks?"

One little word, three little letters

The Washington Post, which keeps track of such things, announced that Trump has picked up the pace and surpassed ten thousand "false or misleading claims" during his unfortunate tenancy in the house that decent men once called home.  Applying their own complicated formula, they award him at least three "Bottomless Pinocchios," which involves repeating the same "claim" at least twenty times  -- quite a feat for someone who can't remember the name of a man who is standing right in front of him ("Tim Apple") and is clearly in the later stages of dementia.  These porkies cover an impressive range of topics, from trade deficits to immigration to the medical treatment of babies who have no chance of survival, a new addition to the program and apparently a crowd-pleaser.  It's not clear if the register includes such demonstrable howlers as his own high intelligence, superior education, physical fitness, sexual prowess and awesome Aryan genes, which probably would have broken the ten-thousand barrier back in the 1990s.

It happens I've read Pinocchio.  His nose didn't grow because he made false or misleading claims, or  empty boasts, or shared his fantasies and hallucinations.  He lied.  Why is it so hard for these self-regarding newspapers to say that?  A lie is a lie.  One who lies is a liar.  A headline like TRUMP LIES AT WISCONSIN HATE RALLY might even convince me to subscribe.  (The Times just raised its online subscription price, and I'm getting tired of subsidizing crap like this.)  Trump couldn't hate you any more, or lie about you and your owner any less, if you call a liar a liar.  Do it for the English language.  Do it for a Pulitzer Prize, if that's your idea of a good time.  Do it for the children.

Today's reading assignment for the Post editorial board:  Pinocchio (Collodi) and The Emperor's New Clothes (Andersen).  Spoiler alert:  the latter is about a boy who refuses to lie.

Green

"I don't object, of course, to cutting wood for necessity, but why destroy the forests?  The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe.  Millions of trees have perished.  The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated, the rivers are shrinking, many beautiful landscapes are gone forever.  And why?  Because men are too lazy and too stupid to bend down and pick up fuel from the ground...Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished.  The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day...When I pass forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with my own hands, I feel as if I have had some small share in improving the climate.  If mankind is happy a thousand years from now I will have been a little bit responsible for their happiness."

All this was known in 1898, when Chekhov gave that great speech to Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya.  So why does it have to be re-learned every year?  Or not learned.  The new government of Brazil is determined to destroy the Amazon rain forest, for some reason known only to its mini-Mussolini.  The national parks of the United States have fallen into the hands of one deliriously corrupt Interior secretary after another.  The vortex of plastic trash in the Pacific is larger than some countries.  The Middle East is turning to desert, wildfires alternate with floods, "storms of the century" come every five years, millions of humans will soon be displaced by rising seas, the frogs and the bees are trying to tell us something.  The United States is very good at working itself into a frenzy over nothing, from the witch trials of colonial Massachusetts to the recurring anti-immigrant panics, the Red Scare, the day-care lunacy of the 1980s, and every phobia you can name, but the thought of doing anything about climate change is yawned away.  On days like this I find myself agreeing with Kurt Vonnegut, that humans are an infection and earth's immune system is marshalling against us.  Did Astrov live in vain?

Forcing the spring

April is the cruelest month, and it keeps getting crueler.  Last Sunday, ISIS suicide bombers in Sri Lanka killed nearly three hundred people in Christian churches and hotels, calling it retaliation for the March 15 mass murder of Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand (fifty dead, fifty wounded).  Today another fifteen Sri Lankans, some of them children, died in a police raid.  Then a man shot up a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one woman and wounding three others.  One of the injured was the rabbi leading the Yizkor service, commemorating the dead on the last day of Passover.  Did the killer write a manifesto?  However did you guess?  And he brags of burning a mosque in Escondido last month without getting caught and recommends it to his followers.  Calls himself a "European," but this thing of darkness is obviously ours.  Mosques, synagogues, black churches, gay night clubs, Planned Parenthood clinics, Democratic politicians, newspaper offices, television studios, all now targets of opportunity for the life-forms that crawled out from under the rock and into the bleak light of Trumpism.  

I want to write something funny.  Maybe later.

Do I hear twenty-five?

Paranoia:  A mental disorder characterized by systematized delusion and the projection of personal conflicts, which are ascribed to the supposed hostility of others, sometimes progressing to disturbances of consciousness and aggressive acts believed to be performed in self-defense or as a mission.

"Really it's a coup.  It's spying.  It's everything that you can imagine...this was an attempted overthrow of the United States government.  This was a coup.  This was an attempted coup...He didn't mention Strzok and McCabe and Comey and the lies and the leaks and the overthrow and the whole with the Hillary Clinton got the win one hundred million to one, two lovers, two sick lovers, especially the one, I mean these were like children."

Repeat the Thorazine every two hours, nurse, and use the hard restraints.

Translation:  "This" is the Mueller investigation, which completely and totally exonerated him much more than anyone in the world has ever been exonerated.  Strzok is Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who exchanged joke emails with his girlfriend about the "wire tapps" in Trump Tower.  McCabe is the FBI director who was sadistically fired hours before his full pension would have kicked in, although Trump's syphilitic brain may be conflating him with McCain (who came up later in the rant).  Comey is the FBI director who was fired after refusing Trump's demand that he stop the investigation of Michael Flynn, which the Mueller Report cites as an obstruction of justice.  I have no clue about the "one hundred million to one" odds, possibly a reference to the bankrupt Trump Taj Mahal casino, possibly a random number retrieved from a dying synapse.  The listener/enabler is Sean Hannity, who would have been performing an act of mercy had he said, "We seem to have lost the connection, we'll be right back after this message from Survivor brand pork slurry" and hung up.  Instead, he agreed that all non-Murdoch media owe Trump an apology for reporting what he says and even recording it so it's harder (not impossible) to deny later.  Also they should be investigated.  Hillary should be investigated.  Obama should be investigated.  One of them definitely ate the strawberries.

Sorry, I couldn't help it.  Which could be Trump's defense when the sick old moron is finally tried for treason, corruption, perjury, obstruction of justice, money laundering, and violating every line of the Constitution except the Third Amendment.  It would be simpler to declare him mentally incompetent, wouldn't it?    

Stolen and shared

If Lee was "a great general," what was this guy?

Hollow laughter, the best medicine

Today's guest editorial comes from Lara "I got life in me, Big Daddy!" Trump, who wants us to know that accepting refugees was "one of the worst things that ever happened to Germany."  Mrs. Eric wins our Thursday prize, a used copy of Schindler's List.  (The movie, of course -- we don't expect her to read, which makes your eyes go all funny.)

It's time to play "Who's Attacking Hillary Now?"  The latest empty threat comes from presidential consigliere Rudolph Giuliani, who didn't like Secretary Clinton's Washington Post op-ed about how the Mueller Report detailed "a serious crime against the American people."  In other words, she read it and understood it.  "Ms. Clinton better get a lawyer," he snarled, because they are for sure coming after her now so Trump can tell the glue-eaters that he LOCKED HER UP.  He supposedly ordered Jeff Sessions at least three times to trump up some charges (see what I did there?), but even Beauregard ignored him, like most of his other flunkeys.  But an essay for the Daily Bezos, with her name signed and everything unlike "Anonymous"?  That's it, the uranium is about to hit the Benghazi.  This time, definitely.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders has scheduled a rare press briefing, but she is tired of adults calling out her bullshit so this one is only for children.  And if they ask about anything more controversial than her recipe for Ozark roadkill, the next one will be open exclusively to fish.   The ones who say, "Good, I like living in water that's full of mercury and cyanide."

Joe Biden has announced that he is going to announce he's running for president.  (That's why these campaigns go on for years.)  He has already been flooded with endorsements like "Wonderful thing for all America, run Joe run, I am not Russian bot why would you even be asking LOL."  So last year's election was a mirage, and what the voters really want is more old white men, I guess.

Self-pity is an indulgence of the rich and privileged.  The poor have no time for it, and the great don't seem to be afflicted with it.  Trump is the Rembrandt of self-pity, constantly victimized by "haters" and Deep State Coup Plotters who fail to recognize his awesomeness.  Self-pity requires a huge, suppurating ego and a total incapacity for humor or self-awareness.  Comparing yourself favorably with George Washington because he wasn't smart enough to write his name on his house is -- frankly, it's hilarious, and I hope you never lose that, Donzo, I really do.  So don't take this personally, but you have a serious rival.  Yes, Steve King (R-Fuhrerbunker) compares himself to Jesus.

It happened around Eastertide in Cherokee, Iowa.  I can picture it:  the feed stores, the boarded-up video rental place, the fast food outlets, the nineteen churches, and not a single Cherokee or other POC.  A town hall convened by, I shit you not, the Reverend Pinky Person.  Stripped of his committee assignments by his own party leadership for being an unapologetic racist, King has had more time to bewail his outcast state and contemplate the obvious parallels with the King of Kings.  "I have a better insight into what he went through for us," he told the congregation.  Needless to say, this insight does not including feeding the hungry, welcoming foreigners, caring for the sick or  throwing the CPAC donors out of the Temple.  It's almost as if there are two Christs who never even met.  Or maybe, as John Allegro once suggested, Christ was really a hallucinogenic mushroom* and everybody's trip is different.  King's Christ apparently had, as Stephen Robinson put it, "a soft spot for Nazis."  He's the ultimate literary character, except that no one was ever tortured or killed in the name of Hamlet.



*John Marco Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross:  A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East, Hodder & Stoughton, 1970

My book report: Curtain coming down

Heidi Waleson, Mad  Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America, Henry Holt and Company, 2018

It is impossible to relate the full history of New York City Opera, the "People's Opera" founded in 1943, in less than three hundred pages, but Heidi Waleson does a fine job of outlining its scrappy origins, improbable rise to respectability and prominence, and final collapse as a victim of the 2008 financial panic.  Perhaps because she is the long-time music critic of The Wall Street Journal, she is particularly impressive on the financial side -- production costs, union contracts, endowments, box office revenues, and the unending search for cash (the book's epigraph is "The only thing more expensive than opera is war").  NYCO filed bankruptcy in 2013, but is slowly coming back to life despite the lack of a permanent theater or full-time chorus and orchestra.  Its favored business model seems to be people leaving it bequests in their wills.

City Opera's history mirrors that of the city around it.  The initial audience was European immigrants, chiefly Italian and Jewish, who grew up with opera but could not afford the Met, together with American-born teachers, civil servants and office workers who probably heard the Met Saturday broadcasts and were intrigued with this exotic art form.  These loyal subscribers allowed the company to survive and grow, and its musicians and singers to enter the middle class with decent (not luxurious) salaries, pension plans, and ultimately even health insurance.  The company gained a national profile with the 1964 move to Lincoln Center (which carried with it the seeds of future calamity), but by the 1970s the original audience was declining with age.  NYCO began to overreach itself, importing European directors accustomed to state subsidies and finding itself unable to hold on to bankable singers.  (Beverly Sills grew up in the company and remained to the end of her singing career; people like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Tatiana Troyanos were quickly snapped up by the big house next door.)  The question Waleson doesn't really address is, where has the audience gone?

Basically, there are two ways people come to opera:  their parents take them, or they learn about it in school.  My parents were not opera-goers; after television was invented, I don't think they even went to the movies.  But I had music class from junior high school on, and in seventh grade I saw my first opera, Barbiere di Siviglia at the old Met on 39th Street.  The Met used to do student matinees several times a year; it gave second-string casts and covers a chance to sing the major roles and put some money in the box office mid-week.  More important, it gave a few thousand kids their first glimpse of this astonishing, maddening art form.  Our music teacher, Miss Masui, played excerpts and talked about the plot and the conventions of aria and recitative, so we were somewhat prepared.  I had had years of piano lessons by then, and I vaguely recall tuning in to the NBC Opera -- yes, they did opera in English with real singers like Leontyne Price -- so I was more primed for it than most; I think I still have the program somewhere.  The next year we went to La Boheme, and the following year there was a dress rehearsal of Cosi fan tutte (Leontyne Price again!) in the new house at Lincoln Center.  I was hooked.  By the time I moved to New York and discovered the reasonably-priced City Opera, there was no turning back.

By then, in the 1970s, public education had begun its long retreat.  The Cold War had seen it stuffed with money to prove we were superior to the Soviets in the arts as well as science after the big Sputnik scare, but the Nixon administration chose to give the states cash to spend as they saw fit instead of earmarked for education.  Predictably, belts were tightened and the first things downgraded were "frills" like art and music.  Miss Masui and her colleagues found themselves asked to cover entire school districts, or retired and were never replaced.  Gradually all of public education sank to today's level, with dilapidated schools, underpaid teachers forced to buy their own supplies, bare-bones libraries, and students who understand how little they matter.    The Met no longer gives student performances; the New York Philharmonic has abandoned its Young People's Concerts.  It's been two generations since students were routinely exposed to music, except as the background to television commercials.  (We're supposed to be impressed if they even learn to read.)  So there were no riots in the streets when the City Opera went bust.  Just another elitist entertainment for rich snobs, an ironic fate for the People's Opera.  NBC Opera is long gone, though the network still presents something called "The Voice," where aspiring divas compete to give the best imitation of Whitney Houston.

There are some bright spots.  Operas continue to be composed and produced.  The Met preserved its radio broadcasts after Texaco bailed, sponsored now by an outfit that builds McMansions for hedge-fund managers.  I have some issues with Peter Gelb, but his initiative of putting live HD broadcasts into movie theaters has been wildly successful, selling out all over the country; it has replaced the long-ago spring tours, which used to bring the Met to the heartland.  The company's streaming service means I can binge-watch the Ring like Game of Thrones with less nudity.  Opera has always been a protean art form, evolving from pseudo-Greek drama in the late Renaissance to aria-driven Baroque excess to Mozartean classicism and so on up to today's eclectic post-verismo.  It works.  When the first opera was performed in Florence, Shakespeare was writing Hamlet.  By changing to fit needs and tastes, opera has outlasted blank-verse tragedy, madrigals and motets, oratorio, the classical symphony, and many other cultural artifacts.  Its reach is wide enough for Elektra, Jerry Springer:  The Opera, Sweeney Todd and The Who's Tommy.  I closed Heidi Waleson's book with the sense that even New York City Opera will be back one day.

Heroes and zeros

Several thousand New York City convenience stores are owned by Lebanese Americans, and they have had enough of the demonizing of Ilhan Omar.  She may represent only the Minnesota fifth, but she has become a hero to millions for standing up to the increasingly violent and vicious attacks of the white nationalists and their bully-boy Trump.  The store owners say they will no longer sell the New York Post after it conflated Omar with the 9/11 criminals in a particularly loathsome cover story.  Expect their boycott to be denounced as an attack on press freedom and yet another example of Islamic terrorism (though most Lebanese are Christian).  Since many of the city's newsstands are also operated by Arab-Americans, the Australian pornographer may soon be reduced to delivering his nasty paper on a bicycle.  Meanwhile, Rep. Omar has received enough death threats that Speaker Pelosi had to arrange security for her.   Thus stands democracy in the third year of the Russian occupation.

What would you save if your house was on fire?  Somebody thought the most precious object in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris (still burning at this hour) was the "Crown of Thorns," a piece of gimcrack that some illiterate Crusader bought from a wily Jerusalem merchant in the thirteenth century or thereabouts.  It looks like the fragment of the True Cross was not so accessible, or the plank from Noah's Ark or whatever other bits and bobs the faithful venerate.  Really, the rubbish in Catholic churches...well, I can see what Luther was going on about even as I grieve for the old pile.  I've never been closer to Notre Dame than the Laughton movie, but it's part of us if we consider ourselves at all civilized.  The roof, the spire, the rose windows, gone.  Of course, the French themselves trashed it in 1789 for liberte, egalite and if memory serves fraternite, even beheading the statues of kings, so the place is pretty resilient.  That the fire coincided with the run-up to Easter has resulted in endless patter about hope and resurrection, not to mention dark mutterings about conspiracy, false flags and al-Qaeda.  Trump is desperate to distract from the promised Thursday release of the heavily expurgated Mueller report, and the continued non-release of his tax returns, but would he go this far?  You may very well think so; I couldn't possibly comment.

If ever there was a day to tweet some version of "thoughts and prayers" and then leave it alone, this was it, but when you're a Stable Genius With a Very Good Brain, the impulse to offer advice is overwhelming.  Fox News must have covered the story because its Number One Fan soon urged the Paris firefighters to work faster and to put out the flames by bombing the cathedral with tons of water from a tanker plane.  The fire chief felt he had to pause in his job and point out that this would pretty much flatten the place.   He did not add, "And if I owned a building where a resident died because I was too cheap to install sprinklers, I would shut the fuck up," but others did.

Stable was full of helpfulness today.  He's got a handle on Boeing's problem with the 737 Max, which has been grounded even in this country after more than three hundred people died in Indonesia and Ethiopia:  Rebrand it and add tons of great features, like maybe something to prevent all the crashing.  "No product has suffered like this one," he thumbed, homing in on the real tragedy, the depression of Boeing's stock price.  "But again, what the hell do I know?"  Finally the right question.

Happy Sunday feel-good story

The director of Kruger National Park announced that a suspected rhino poacher was killed by an elephant and then eaten by lions.  All they left was a human skull and a pair of pants.  The alleged poacher's alleged accomplices are being held pending criminal charges, but it's certain they'll face much less in the way of justice.  Be afraid, Eric and Junior, be very afraid.

If animals are organizing across species lines to protect themselves, maybe there is hope for our species.

Friday news dump

Joe Biden says he want to be "the last person to announce" his candidacy for president.  First night of the convention sounds about right to me.

Trump doesn't seem to believe he will get a second term.  He is trying to find someone to write his autobiography (suggested title:  Memoirs of a Mangy Liar).  Also someone to read it to him.  The Trump National Library and Country Club will be the most amazing, beautiful library you ever saw, a fitting depository for all the official papers his staff recover from the waste basket and tape back together every day.

William Barr says his dog ate the Mueller report.

Bernie Sanders is too busy campaigning and being a Senator to go through all those boxes in the garage where he probably put his tax returns, but maybe next week.

A new poll shows that 70% of voters would have no problem with a gay president.  However, 85% have no clue how to pronounce "Buttigieg."  Nor can various search engines agree on the spelling.

He's back!  Herman Cain has been appointed to the Federal Reserve because Trump is already mad at Jerome Powell, the chairman he hired three months ago.  (He replaced that woman who wasn't tall enough.)  At least Cain will not be ambassador to "Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan."  No, he doesn't stammer, he's just an idiot.

"Coals to Newcastle" has been replaced by "scorpions to the Philippines."  Customs inspectors in the Manila airport found 757 of the hairy spiders wrapped up as cookies from Poland.  They're prized by Filipinos as pets but are illegal there.  Why Poland?  Why not?

Mansplainer of the Week is Paul Ryan, frequently described as the worst Speaker in history, who seems puzzled that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not taking his advice (basically, sit quietly, look through the Lululemon catalogue and let the grown-ups do their work.)

And Chuck Grassley is very upset about Trump's windmill/cancer theory.  Chuck claims to be the "grandfather of wind energy tax credits," which is maybe not as impressive as "godfather of soul" but, you know, Iowa.  He's sure the Father of Lies was being "tongue in cheek."  Ha ha.






 

Yesterday in 25th Amendment news

It's not about "origins/oranges," hilarious as that is.  I myself spent two days trying to remember who directed the unbearably awful movie Lisztomania and finally looked it up.  (Ken Russell)  Never mind why.  There's a thing called selective aphasia where words play hide-and-seek in your brain.  "Default" and "diverticulitis" are currently on my list.  If you're old, you probably have your own list.  It's not putting-the-keys-in-the-freezer level yet.

Nor is it mispronouncing countries you have never heard of and don't care about.  After all, Zambia and Gambia exist, why not Nambia?  If you work for the water department or play in a zydeco band, this shouldn't be a problem.  As long as your job doesn't involve foreign relations or public speaking, you're fine.

Being unable, on multiple occasions, to remember where your father was born could be more troubling, even if you hated the old bastard.  Of course, hearers may assume an ulterior motive if you have a long history of lying about birthplaces.  They will spend precious minutes (of airtime) wondering why you are lying now, or assume that you are not in your right mind.  (There was, after all, that absentee ballot back in 2017 where you got your own date of birth wrong...)  Which brings us to the topic of today's homily.

Stumbling over words, for whatever reason (ignorance, ill-fitting dentures, Adderall abuse) is not a serious problem.  I once heard Lyndon Johnson pronounce Penelope as "PEN-a-lope," and we could amuse ourselves all day with George W. Bush.  The problem is statements like these:

"If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75% in value.  And they say the noise causes cancer, you tell me that one.  RERRR!  RERRR!"

"Sure, [closing the US-Mexican border] is going to have a negative impact on the economy ("potentially catastrophic" is the phrase Mitch McConnell used).  Security to me is more important to me than trade."  So much for $1.7 billion a day.  "To be honest with you, we have to get rid of judges."

Puerto Rico is "a mess -- nothing works," and Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz of San Juan is "crazed and incompetent...they only take from USA."  And you thought they were the USA.

These are from this week, not the Idiot Archive.  If he believes any of this, it's time for the butterfly net.

In other news...

Mussolini defends Trump

Lindsey Graham calls collusion charge "ridiculous" because "he doesn't collude with his own government"

Puerto Rico is apparently a country

Snow fell on Myrtle Beach on April 1

Fox News generates multiple Mexicos; hilarity ensues