A crossroads clusterfuck

This morning, the news site NOTUS titled its newsletter's subject line, "Comedy Is Legal Again." This is accurate, yet the story that follows is a mismatch. It's about Jimmy Kimmel's late-night return, which is indeed a hoot, but the much funnier story is that Trump & Co.'s lethal injections of comedic bumbling — some, illegally made legal — have again stretched into another day. The 246th, to be exact.

I suspect the Trumpkins will cause us to expire from chronically induced laughter before they can finish us off in far darker ways. I refer to the site's accompanying story in which a suspended FEMA employee (she had signed a letter warning Congress about the agency's disasters) "described flyers and handouts covering the walls of offices and break rooms advertising mental health resources like suicide hotlines."

America may yet come to the offices' anticipated end by failing to make the call. That, I can't say with any accuracy. After all, I botched my prediction that Kimmel would return to the airwaves when Trump joins the ACLU. Instead, Disney announced that “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday."

Be that as it may, I've yearned to read this similarly worded but much more joyous news report: After spending the last days having (admittedly one-sided) thoughtful conversations with Donald, America has reached the decision to return the comically floundering fascist to his Florida swamp — before, that is, we all die from cruelly induced laughing, or fail to make that call. Yet be that as it may, my yearning remains unappeased.

Delivered unto America instead has been a shoulder-to-shoulder clusterfuck of Trump & Co.'s once-unimaginable, hilarious ineptitude. With no fear whatsoever of committing cheap hyperbole, I hereby affirm with the very highest historical confidence that no half-assed, hare-brained junta of an even third-rate banana republic ever conducted itself with the Naked Gun stupidity of Generalissimo Trump and his always filipendulous squad of unequaled numbnuts.   

This particular display of the transcendently doltish comes from — brace — Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, a.k.a Mrs. Baghdad Bob. In February I noted that the 20-something is "a veritable robot, programmed in Newspeak," and in harmony, yesterday she said — strike that, she doublegoodly vowed — that señor T's border czar and FBI-recorded malefactor Tom Homan "never took the $50,000 [bribe]."

Wait, it gets doubleplusgoodlier. Although Ms. Leavitt/Mrs. Bob feverishly denied that bagman Homan took the cash he was caught taking, the White House's deputy press secretary, señora Abigail Jackson (formerly Berschtesgaden Sprechenfrau Janssen) had already undenied his bag-grabbing. What's more, post-Karoline denial, Homan went on — what else? — Fox News to bloody well admit he had taken the boodle. But hey, in his brainy assessment, conspiracy to commit bribery was a legal act.

Also yesterday, though barren of any training in the science of prenatal care and lacking as well the grown-up ability to articulate "acetaminophen," the Bobby K-pixilated generalissimo announced to the pregnant women of America that they ought not take Tylenol (that he could say) because of a "very increased risk of autism," notwithstanding decades of medical journals containing deeply researched articles titled "That's Bullshit."

Again traveling somewhat afar from his own special training in God-only-knows-what, it may well have been Bobby T the sombrero sophist who advised supremo T to also announce that antifa is hereby designated a "domestic terrorist organization," even though it's neither an organization, nor thus designatable by law, nor responsible for the much broader far left's mere fraction of the far right's number of terrorist acts.

Another, strong possibility. El Supremo conceived his domestic war on antifa — which to some sounds better in its original German, antifa — as a smashingly successful spinoff of George W.'s smashingly victorious war on foreign terrorism, not realizing that W.'s crusade sent us packing into that netherworld of unbeatable reality, since terrorism as an operational thing doesn't exist. Nevertheless, T can now go about prosecuting all peaceful leftist organizations by just as farcically designating them as antifa-like.

So yes, as the newsletter heralded, "Comedy Is Legal Again." Then again it has been for 246 days. And it's proceeding along those fearsome darker lines. But though America hasn't yet tossed the floundering fascist back into his gilded swamp, America also hasn't yet failed to make that suicide hotline call. Every day.

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