A long, strange week

There's a joke about a boy whose grandmother takes him to the beach.  He swims out too far and gets caught in a riptide.  A lifeguard dashes into the sea, swims to the boy just as he's going down and pulls him to safety, depositing him at his nana's feet before collapsing on the sand.  The woman looks down and says, "He had a hat."

Poor Joe Biden.  He gets an American released from Russian abductors and it's the wrong American.  His DHS stops 14,000 pounds of fentanyl at the border and half-wits want to impeach Secretary Mayorkas because more of it must have gotten through, probably, it's just science.  He gets Sam Bankman-Fried (the Bernie Madoff of imaginary money) extradited from the Bahamas and all anyone wants to talk about is how much money he gave the Democrats.  He throws a swell party to sign the Respect for Marriage Act and disabled people complain that they were left out.  You can't please everyone.

I don't care.  It's Beethoven's 252nd birthday and I want to think about good stuff.

At the Capitol they unveiled the 2014 portrait of Nancy Pelosi by Ronald Sherr.  At the same time, the House approved legislation to remove the bust of Roger Taney from the Old Supreme Court Chamber and replace it with one of Thurgood Marshall.  Now, where exactly is the dustbin of history?

Without a shred of irony, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) tried to block a bill that would allow Puerto Rico a binding referendum on statehood:  "How does it benefit America to admit a state that would be the most indebted, uneducated, poorest and least employed state in the nation?"  Easy.  We'll jettison Mississippi.  This is the party of Trump ("I love the poorly educated!"), Walker ("I don't know what a pronoun is"), Greene ("grown in peachtree dishes"), Bush ("Is your children learning?"), Quayle ("What a waste it is to lose one's mind.  Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.  How true that is"), etc., etc.  

What kind of law firm sues a client for $193,296.85?  One that represented Madison Cawthorn in the many fine messes he managed to get into during his single term in Congress.  Let's see, how many CPAC gigs, Bannon guest shots and Masked Singer appearances does that come to?  Or he could just hit the GoFundMe trail.  I think I have eighty-five cents somewhere...

Despite derision and condemnation from such wokesters as Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, the Trump make-pretend cards "sold out" yesterday, netting him a cool million.  (Peter Thiel?  Probably.)  Over at Lawyers Guns & Money they're calling it Barnum-Mencken Syndrome though even they would be stunned.  I also like Stephen Colbert's "Gropemon."  Anyone who came up with the $99 is automatically entered in some sort of lottery for valuable prizes like lunch at the Mar, dinner at the Mar, a round of golf at the Mar and a lifetime of fundraising emails from MAGA headquarters.  (Transportation and lodging not included.)

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