Hollow laughter

 Sometimes the joke is buried too deep.  The Grantville, Georgia, Police Department actually offered prayers for Richard Hawk and his wife and grandson, who were killed during a robbery of their gun range.  Forty guns are missing.

There was a hate rally in Selma, North Carolina (they meant to hold it in Alabama but Giuliani made the arrangements) and Pillow Mike showed up to promise the mob that the arrests of all the media CEOs who "tried to cancel our voice forever" are imminent:  "crooked YouTube and Google and Zuckerbuck's [sic] Facebook."  So that was fun.  Then the cancelled but perpetually squawking Trump arrived to aver modestly, "I think I'm the most honest human being, perhaps, that god ever created, perhaps."  But he didn't say positively.  Then he endorsed Mehmet Oz for the Senate because he's on television.

There's a NASCAR driver named Jerrod Sessler running for the Senate in Washington.  That's not the joke.  He thought "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Dee Snider of Twisted Sister represented "traditional, conservative American values."  That's not the joke either.  Sessler pronounced himself "bummed" to learn that Snider had approved the song for Ukraine but not for a bunch of anti-maskers who invaded a department store in Florida.  And he got an answer from Snider:  "One use is for a righteous battle against oppression; the other is infantile feet stomping against an inconvenience."  Now I'm laughing.

Sessler is hardly the only humor-proof Republiclown.  Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about Empty Greene's pedophiliac ravings ("Where's Will Smith when you need him?") and "Klan-Mom," as he calls her, sicced the police on him.  I'll bet she dialed 911.  To which Kimmel responded, "She's a snowflake and a sociopath at the same time."  Margie, there's an old saying about answering newspaper criticism: "Don't pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel."  That goes double for someone whose audience is in the millions.

Ron DeSantis took time out from rescinding the rights of LGBTQ people, women of childbearing age and children who like to read and turned his eyes north, threatening "a cold war between Florida and Georgia" should Stacey Abrams be elected governor.  A journalist named Craig Pittman dismisses this as "trying desperately to get attention from Fox News for saying something outrageous to own the libs and diss Black people."  I'm hoping for border patrols and maybe a wall.  Searchlights.  Machine guns.  Florida starting its own coast guard to go along with the new anti-voting commandos.  

It seems that among the records Trump ate, flushed or both, are details of all the goodies he got from other countries because their leaders like him so much, and in no sense bribes.  The National Archives and Records Administration would also like to know what Mr. Valiant-For-Truth a/k/a Mike Pence strolled away with.  And to think the post-bellum period was called the Era of Good Stealings.  

The plans of Russian oligarchs to profit hugely from the Sputnik V vaccine have been derailed by the war against Ukraine.  Pity.