Brain freeze

 

THIS IS IN NO WAY -- sorry, this is in no way a threat of violence against Jack Smith, his family, and his friends.  Or his associates in the Justice Department.  Why would you think it is?  Is it the all-caps format, or the mysterious reference to someone called "Joe Bidden," possibly a coded message?  Is it the citation of the legal precedent known as "US v. Clinton and the cassette tapes he may have stored in his sock drawer while working on a book with Taylor Branch"?  Is it only Tuesday?

The wheels have come off the tricycle.  Nothing is true, everything is permitted.  If you can say it, someone will believe it.  In fact, someone probably does already.  

Is this some sort of anniversary?  Because the Obama birth certificate libel has suddenly re-appeared, unprovoked and unsupported.  Barack Obama gave an interview to Christiane Amanpour on CNN which ranged from the Titan implosion to the future of democracy and that was enough to set them barking.  Kari Lake, Empress of the Southwest, has forgotten that she campaigned for Obama in 2008 and now insists he had a "a mysterious past and virtually no accomplishments on his resume" when some sinister force placed him in the presidency, while preventing investigative journalists like her from giving him "a proper vetting."  Lake is about to issue a book and if it's all that compelling, my beach reading is locked in.  (I never go near a beach.)

Jesse Watters, winner of the coveted 8 pm slot involuntarily vacated by Tucker Carlson at Fox News, saw the interview and was angry because Obama compared the wall-to-wall coverage of five rich white guys' death by misadventure with the boatload of immigrants that sank off Greece around the same time, largely unnoticed although more than three hundred Pakistanis drowned.  "When you're a citizen of the world," he sneered, "you always think of the world instead of the United States.  Remember, this is a guy whose father has roots in Africa.  This is a guy who spent a lot of his childhood in Southeast Asia.  And then spent a lot of time in Hawaii -- was that the last state to get a star on the flag?"  We get it, a foreigner.  Not like, say, Ted Cruz, whose father has roots in Cuba, who was born in Alberta.  Watters passed the racism test, let's see how he does in the Russian propaganda event.

If you wait long enough, everything comes around.  More than twenty years since America's offshore concentration camp opened, UN investigator Fionnuala Ni Aolain was allowed to visit Guantanamo and confirm what was never in doubt, that the thirty men still held there are subjected to "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."  None has ever had a trial, even by military tribunal, and all suffer the physical and psychological effects of torture and isolation.  The numbers are small compared to Buchenwald or Stalin's gulag, but the stain on our history is just as indelible.  

Goofy comes around, too.  In Million Dollar Legs (1932) W.C. Fields becomes president of Klopstokia by out-wrestling all his rivals.  For a while it looked like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg would meet in a cage match because that's how serious adults settle their differences in 2023.  Now it appears that Musk's mother Maye has called off the fight.  How disappointing for Hatpin Laura Ingraham, who had predicted a Musk victory.  Never mind.  Markwayne Mullin, an actual senator from Oklahoma, wants to throw down with Teamsters president Sean O'Brien, who has called him a "moron" and a "clown."  Throw in the photo being circulated of Robert Kennedy, Jr., lifting weights shirtless, and well, as one of the Firesign Theater observed, it's a little like having bees live in your head.  

Ironically, democracy got a little safer today as the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Independent State Legislature theory is so much chin music, and legislatures can't toss out election results they don't like and appoint their own electors -- exactly what Trump and his crew wanted them to do (and a few attempted) in 2020.  The three dissenters were also the justices known to be most indebted to generous billionaires (Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch), which I'm sure is entirely coincidental.  It will help if we decide to have elections next year and not some variation on the Hunger Games.

Some archeologists excavating a wall in Pompeii have uncovered a 2,000-year-old fresco which appears to depict a pizza, albeit without tomato sauce or mozzarella.  But can you call it pizza?  It's focaccia at best.

Greg Abbott can take water away from construction workers -- most of them are "illegals" anyway -- but he can't stop people pointing and laughing after he fell for a satirical article about Garth Brooks and the Texas Country Jamboree in Hambriston, Texas.  There is no such jamboree and no such city, although Texas and Garth Brooks are real enough.  Greg Abbott is an idiot.