Outside the U.S. Embassy, Ottawa, March 2025

It’s not like the babyish attempt to rename water represents the greatest idiocy of the Trump Administration, nor its most flagrant illegality. It’s not even its stupidest departure from the real world with its many real problems, or the worst display of self-reverential pissiness by an incompetent cabal of greedy fuckups or the most contemptible display of arrogance toward other nations, societies, races, ethnic groups. But along with covering up the butthurt of being legally compelled to remove his name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts under a tarp, it’s a neon highlighter that shoves all the mental illness, petty fixations and psychiatric diseases of this man and his enablers right to the top of the heap. It tells you everything about a man with one MO — trying to steal and grab things that aren’t his, whether honor, glory, sanctity, water, women, oil, monuments, Nobel Peace Prizes — in a single-minded effort to make up pretend-history meant to conceal what a thieving, conniving, cruel little shit he really is. It’s the ultimate birthmark that screams here be one dumb, dodo desperado.

His idiotic attempt to rename lakes is being matched by what the Wall Street Journal calls “the dumbest trade war in history” — his pissy-widdle tariff war against Canada for refusing to abandon French, for insisting on making its own deals with its own trading partners as an independent nation does. How dare Canucks insist on having their own country? Who do they think they are, anyway? Our polite northern neighbor suddenly finds new purpose — a war with us over a fundamental identity never questioned or once called into review after 1867, when the Dominion itself was created, and Canada received basically the same independence from Great Britain as its more violent neighbors to the south — but without a single shot.

And now, fast forwarding to our current Reign of Repugnance, which states would actually receive the brunt of Donnie’s renewed War of 1812 by means of reciprocal Canadian tariffs? In 2025, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative, 41% of all goods exported by Maine go to our northern beavers, 36% of Michigan’s exports, 31% of Ohio’s, 30% of Iowa’s, 20% of North Carolina’s, and 11% of Georgia’s. All states that just happen to have crucial Senatorial elections this November to determine which color — red or blue — will call the shots to rein in the reigning moronarch. What an interesting koinkidink. Wonder which political party might stand to lose the most should information about the consequences of Donnie’s little diaper explosion burst out into the open a critical 70 days before the election?

In 1944, the plans for disembarkation at Normandy included setting up five beachheads — an event in history some American kids actually learn about in school and remember — Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno and Sword Beach. Each was considered absolutely critical, without which victory would not be possible during those first two or three fateful, critical days of Operation Neptune in June. Guess which country’s armed forces, unattacked by any in World War II, were assigned responsibility for protecting the American flank, for setting up a working airfield near Caen within one or two days? That wouldn’t have been the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, would it?

In 1979, hordes of Iranian “students” broke into the US Embassy in Tehran, ransacked it, and held 66 Americans hostage, most of them for over 400 days. Some were absent from the embassy that critical day in November, including 6 who ended up being spirited secretly out of the country in what became later known as the Canadian caper. Our brave little beavers to the north concocted a quiet scheme where fake maple-leaf passports, documents, and identities got created for these 6 Americans. When they got home to their families, American newspapers went giddy over the secret story of Canadian bravery and skill. Yellow ribbons around hundreds of oak trees suddenly sprouted everywhere, and homemade signs all over the lower 48 got plastered with “MERCI, CANADA!” on them.

On 9/11, the United States ordered its own airspace shut down for the first time since airplanes were invented. Inbound jets could not land in Boston, New York, Washington, and got diverted to — wait, wait, don’t tell me — Canada 🇨🇦. Thousands of Canadians in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario got pressed into sudden immediate Red Cross service, with 13 airports tasked to provide immediate hangar space, housing, bedding, food and comfort for thousands of stranded passengers arriving from Europe. A Canadian husband-and-wife team, David Hein and Irene Sankoff, wrote an award-winning play about those events from the perspective of Gander, Newfoundland where 33 airplanes landed on a base that had been mostly inoperative since the 1950s — Come From Away. The musical turned into a 5-year smash hit on Broadway, showing from 2017-22, and got nominated for 7 awards at the 71st Tonys.

Do Republicans remember any of this? Are their self-performed lobotomies under Trump so effective that not a shred of the honor, dignity, shared sacrifice and awareness of two sister countries born from the same mother remains? Have they all forgotten that the line between Canada and America used to be the longest, unguarded border in human history? Do they not care that we just attacked our longest, most trustworthy, most important ally in the world at a moment when allies and friends are not only very much needed, but hard to come by? Apparently so.

Despite Appearances, Canadian Beaver Isn’t Apparently Up for Grabs

Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Official Senate Portrait, 2021.

*Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity — a scientific principle of logic which asserts that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation for any given phenomenon tends to be the right one. Known in everyday parlance simply as “Occam’s Razor” the principle is drilled into the heads of every first-year college science student, and known as the principle of parsimony. If (a) explains a problem sufficiently, (b) isn’t needed as a supplement. From that flow related postulates of necessary but insufficient. Everything revolves around what suffices, with the rest treated as detritus distracting us from explanations that generally prove themselves over time.

The “razor” part is simply an allegory — things ‘shaved off’ of everything but parsimony. It wasn’t really about the face and neck of Friar William of Occam, a philosopher who lived in England at the beginning of the 1300s. Whether Friar William was actually blessed with an unusually bushy beard requiring constant trimming is doubtful. It simply means you can dispense with the beard with a shave that doesn’t harm the monk’s good face — the fur is superfluous to the friar.

Centuries later comes that fine logician, chaste monk and humble servant of God, Donald Jessica Trump. On August 16, Senator Jon Ossoff, running for re-election in Georgia, held a rally in Atlanta, denouncing Trump as a liar, “absolute crook” and lazy phony. Those supporting Trump are the elites they pretend to hate, he pointed out, those who have made persistence in deceit a personal virtue. The crowd roared its approval. The president “sleeps through his meetings, golfs and trades stocks” rather than does his job as president, which he has no interest in. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar…” The crowd exploded with laughter, applause, guffaws.

Because it was all true. When the Secret Service carried out Operation Orange Chicken in Turkey, stuffing Trump’s fat carcass into a food container on the other side of Air Force One for a hasty get-away back to London in a decoy plane, he took only essential personnel with him. The Secretary of State and Defense (legally next in line for the Presidency were the Vice-President and Speaker of the House incapacitated) got chucked out like yesterday’s leftover, cold mashed potatoes — along with the entire White House Press Corps. In a flash, all of them became excess baggage taking up space, while unknowingly serving as targets of an unspecified Iranian missile threat.

But who, you may ask, was considered more essential than the Secretaries of State and Defense? His Binky, that’s who. Little Blondie, Kew-Pie Natalie Harpie-Barbie, Trump’s devoted travel blanket, who once hopped in the trunk when told there was no room for her in an official car, who apparently worked in the Oval Office for an entire year without a security clearance. She leaves Daddy wee little handwritten “you-are-all-that-matters-to-me” love notes in private places (one shudders to imagine where) as part of her daily devotional. She pores through the farthest right-wing outlets she can find to quote tidbits of twitdom that lavish praise on her boss, while engaging in goofy conspiracizing, re-posting the compost on his social media accounts into the wee hours. Part portable-Dear Abby, portable-printer, portable-young-sweet-thing oohing and aahing over a repulsive pile of rancid orange protoplasm, the blonde blanket-bimbette bears a stunning resemblance to Ivanka, his own daughter, whom he once tried to grope on stage in front of thousands. The Freudian and Oedipal overtones overpower and outdo themselves. (During all these tender moments, Melania, as usual, is nowhere to be found, not even glaring at her understudy from underneath the brim of her Jupiter II space hairpiece.)

Scowling Melania Macbeth, Inaguration Day, 2025.

The next day, a CNN reporter questioned Trump about Ossoff’s speech poking fun at the ballroom. The blob of protoplasm answered with a characteristic 3-year-old taunt, describing a young, fit, handsome Ossoff as “PeeWee Herman Lookalike” (throwing everyone under 25 into a fit of who dat? google-searching), before launching a rambling diatribe about…his bulletproof ballroom. Two minutes later, in a continuing string of fart syllables about his budding bromance with Kim Jong-Un, Kristen Holmes tried to ask if he’d actually spoken to Kim directly. Part 2 of the 3-year-old taunt continued, with Trump refusing to answer, calling her a “loud, boisterous, disrespectful person” and condemning CNN as “fake news” and telling her to “be quiet” over and over again. Somebody posting on the White House’s Rapid Response messages account then continued the savaging, calling Holmes “a disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”

Since clearly the only embarrassed party was the binky holder outed by a Democrat, the entire faux conservative MAGA meathead movement took the opportunity to writhe and scream with faux anger, engaging in performative displays of hara-kiri, impaling themselves with make-believe swords of self-righteousness, as they rescued the virtues of a clear, innocent damsel in distress, slaying every non-existent dragon they could get their hands on.

Except of course, Jon Ossoff didn’t claim Binky was his mistress. He didn’t claim anything. He merely pointed out the obvious. But for the braying, whining Newt Gingrich, Faux News crowd, the obvious was too much. No, they insisted, clearly that’s what Ossofff was implying, that’s what he meant. O the humanity. O the outrage. O the Gloria Swansons all asking Mr. DeMille for their close-up moment. With a ferocity only the truly pathetic display, they smeared facial hair and scruff all over Jon Ossoff — a man without much of a five-o-clock shadow even at midnight — in effect claiming the beard was the man, and the man was the beard. How else to explain the “attack” against a poor, defenseless “professional” woman. Parsimony be damned and crucified. You couldn’t separate one from the other. The beard was the thing. The thing was the beard. Squirrel squirrel squirrel….

Perhaps they saw the family resemblance (?) between Ossoff and Occam. Perhaps both words began with an “O.” Perhaps they were just desperate for diversions and distractions from the daily dosage of crash-landings by the fuckup pilots and opportunistic assholes working for a papaya-colored pus bag. Perhaps like Hamlet’s adulterous mother, they all doth protest too much, over-emoting, over-sharing, over the obvious, over the moon. Who knew Shakespeare could still be this relevant, 500 years later?

Portrait of Friar William of Ockam, Peter Paul Rubens, 1617.

Just another fuckup day at the White House, but with a better soundtrack.

Small Bear Penises Are Wilting Even More Due to Man-Made Pollution (GMA News Authority)

7 Telltale Signs Your Conan the Barbarian Glands Have Lost Their Pizzazz

1. Shrinking Brain Mass. You’re a 46-year-old, know-nothing teenage fuckwad still trying to co-splay GI Joe, and you’ve never figured out Johnny Quest was actually a gay cartoon from the 1960s.

2. Florsheim Swings. You stand in front of lecterns bouncing up and down on the balls of your feet trying to make yourself look taller, hoping people won’t notice you’re really a vacuous TV weenie with the judgment of a fruit fly.

3. Encrapted Signal Chats — Oops. You bring a journalist whom you’ve never met onto a secure line to discuss Top Secret - Eyes Only battle plans, then go “what, me worry?'“ when confronted about it afterwards.

4. Drinking Too Much Alcohol. Enuf said.

5. Confusing Horseshit for Strategy. There was no ‘grand plan’ to go to war in Iran or Venezuela, nor will there be one for Greenland or Cuba. Your boss is just a dumb, greedy, demented Russian stooge consumed with hatred for a black guy.

6. “We Had Transgender for Everybody.” What the fuck does that even mean? Is your penis really that small? Are you really that focused on other people’s genitalia?

7. Cultivating Imaginary Butthurts. Your boss lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes. Get over it, girlfriend.

Other Hypogonadic Low T Clowns From Yesteryear….

National Park Service Workers Bobbing for Gollum (Molly Taft, Science, June 16, 2026)

Within one week of “very effectively” repainting the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool a brilliant Ti-D-Bowl blue, we can now report that the water is “crystal clear…Our National Park Service team is vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some (bold added) parts of the…Pool — just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.” (Department of the Interior Post on X, June 16, 2026.)

Ooooh. Someone at Interior came up with a METAPHOR! 👏😜👏 Paeans of praise began pouring in from all directions! (“Thank you, President Trump!” tweeted President Trump.) Sparkly, squeaky, hydrogen-peroxidy clean water that would make Jenny want to hoist up her skirts and splish-splash through it to get to Forrest Gump all over again!

What’s that? NO! It can’t be! Apparently quicker than you can say “full algal bloom” five times in a row, the advanced ninny-bubbler, loud-mouthing system Dear Leader bought and paid for with your money seems not have cooperated [gasp!] Giant blips and blobs of peeling Toilet Bowl Blue flotsam and jetsam started floating to the still-green surface not two days later. Sabotage! Who dunnit? Who dunnit! “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats who have spent their lives trying to ruin this Country….multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll…Years in jail!” (our Very Helpful as well as Very Literate President suggested). Dastardly Dumocats!

But what lurketh beneath the lagoon of blurketh? Rumors of strange creatures, once thought fantastical, have bubbled to the surface. (Without vouchsafing for rumor’s accuracy, it can be reported that White House Senior Advisor Steven Miller has not been seen at his usual Fort McNair hide-out for several days now.)

“But soft! What beast through yonder muck breaks? It is Reptilicus…!” June 19, 2026

On Friday, June 19, former Olympic canoe racer David Hearn, 67, on a 52-mile bike ride, stopped by the Pool to dip his hand in the water to feel what the spine of a strange Dimetrodon-like creature piercing its surface felt like. The National Park Police promptly arrested him for destruction of government property. “By the time I realized what was going on, I was put in handcuffs,” he told reporters at the Washington Post. Hands off that Dimetrodon, sir! We wants it! We needs it! My precioussss…! Immediately, the National Guard (stationed against the will of Washingtonians since last August) was put to good work, walking around the perimeter — or simply standing around in their usual circle-jerk formations, looking at their cell phones, ready to round up the usual suspects.

Alert Guardsmen and Women Doing Nothing Useful Whatever, Newsweek, June 20, 2026

The saga continues. The no-bid, single-sourced contract to do the repair work for six times the quoted price, which went to J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust — a neighbor at Mar-a-Lardo who once pleaded guilty to bribing former disgraced Congressman James Trafficant, Jr. — and its subsidiary, Greenwater Services, will have to be tapped again, apparently. Blub-Blub-Blub…

“You can’t make this shit up,” tweeted Hunter Biden.

Mrs. Mallard and Brood Recovering from Hydrogen Peroxide Fumes, Photo, Courtesy Evy Mages, Washingtonian Magazine, June 19, 2026.

Photo, Courtesy NPR, June 12, 2026

Under a flailing autocracy, driven by rage and the need for pure comic relief, small acts of resistance can quickly take on a moral legitimacy all their own, spreading like wildfire over a parched landscape. At the drop of a hat it seems, small deeds of non-compliance with greed and evil become public groundswells, creating their own legitimacy, accelerating with their own momentum. When people see real examples of the regime’s failure and imminent demise, a special power gets born that simply wasn’t there the day before.

Under all those flabby layers of peach-formaldehyde make-up, the Manchurian Cantaloupe knows this. All dictators lie awake at night contemplating it, tossing and turning over the grim possibility that despite everything they try, history will one day just sweep them into oblivion along with the flotsam and jetsam they create.

Both the courts who ruled against Velveeta Voldemort’s preening silliness know it, too. So do the dictator’s lackeys. So do we. The 24/7 cameras set up by MS NOW and C-SPAN will capture — if not each agonizing, joyful second of it for posterity — the screen under which the demise is being played out. We all know what’s going on under that tarp. A New York Times photographer has already peered through a flap to see the “A” in AND getting pried off by hand. Because there never was an “AND” to begin with. Honor bestowed on one isn’t meant to be usurped by another. Cadet Bone Spurs never served aboard PT-109.

And that’s the right metaphor for us —in reverse. For unlike the shabby posts holding those stolen letters onto the wall of the JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS, he’ll never be able to pry the Republic from our cold, dead hands.

Aux Barricades! Eddie Redmayne and all of Paris, from Les Misérables, music by Claude-Michel Schōnberg, Universal Pictures, 2012.

Mount Denali (NO, not McKinley), 20,310 ft., Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska

Sometimes, you just need to rest your ears, eyes, heart and soul from what James Bruno calls the “psychosis, dementia and physical decline [that] have turned the nation into the world’s largest insane asylum.” For me and my partner, it was a true ‘North by Northwest’ escape on a boat sailing from Vancouver up through the Salish Sea and Queen Charlotte Strait, past Prince of Wales island to Juneau and Skagway, then into Canada along the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush Trail via the narrow gauge railroad at White Pass to Whitehorse and Dawson City, exploring the desolate wilderness of the Yukon Territory along the way, with its just-budding fireweed, tufts of willow and emerging, lemon-yellow spruce tips, before venturing back to Alaska’s interior.

Leaving You Know Who and his rotten brain behind, we abandoned Washington for laughter, nature, black spruce, caribou, bears, ptarmigans and…Mount Denali, the highest peak in North America. 51 years ago, the Alaska state legislature formally requested the federal government to change the name of this great mountain back to its original Koyukon-Athabaskan name of Denali, the High One. (In 1896, white nationalists, ignoring the fact that the mountain already had a name, renamed it McKinley for a Republican President who had annexed the Kingdom of Hawaii after deposing Queen Liliuokalani in 1893, and — through a “splendid little war” — took possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from the Spanish in 1898.) Not even the Russians had tried to name it for a man nobody had ever heard of, using simply the Athabaskan title in translation (Большая Гора — Big Mountain). When Ohioan William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, the Ohio Congressional delegation took it as a sign from God that this mountain must be named for him in perpetuity. Significantly, in 1975, when the Alaska State Legislature formally requested Denali’s heritage be returned, only the Ohio Congressional delegation objected.

Finally, Obama’s Interior Secretary Sally Jewel complied with Alaska’s request in 2015, changing the name back to Denali on all official documents —- until January 2025, that is, when Velveeta Voldemort decided to celebrate the Social Darwinism of the late 1800s and its accompanying beggar-thy-neighbor tariffs, which McKinley had championed. Nobody had asked for the name change, nobody demanded it, nobody had even thought about it — and the entire Alaska Congressional delegation vociferously objected. But Pissy Pants thought changing it back to McKinley would cement his own ‘victimized’ presidency, which demands that snit fits based on delusion always be accepted as reality. Still, Denali it officially remains in Alaska — and within anybody with a shred of sense and respect.

It is said Denali shrouds himself from view. Those who get to see it without clouds are informally branded 7 percenters, for the chance of that actually happening. We got to see it clear as a bell — three days in a row. I do not know what the chances of that are in any season, but seeing this magnificent massif looming above the mountains below it moved us greatly. Climbers die on Denali — it is as treacherous as Everest, and 4 people have already lost their lives in the effort this post-Memorial Day season, which made the viewing of the mountain, his wife and child (the two adjoining peaks) even more poignant.

To say Alaska is a state filled with superlatives is an understatement. Turn around and there’s yet another breathtaking mountain range. Blink your eyes, and another spectacular river, waterfall, rainforest, or field of black spruce, nesting sandhill cranes, bald eagles, grizzlies, and a vastness difficult to put in words rushes by. You just have to see it for yourself. Or go see some place — anyplace — that makes you feel in the presence of true greatness, beauty, the cycles of nature, with the proper sense of humility that must accompany it.

View from the Alaska Railroad, Fairbanks south to Anchorage, somewhere past Talkeetna.

And Canada. Fun, bright, cheeky, unfailingly polite Canada. We plotted how two gay guys might be accepted as escaping political refugees, flinging ourselves on the mercy of the Mounties — though in honesty, we would prefer living in Vancouver and visiting the interior wildness, rather than homesteading in Nova Scotia (for those younger and up to the challenge). So we leave you with a joyful Canadian spirit to remind ourselves — and you — that other lands exist which somehow co-exist far better with other countries, with nature, with ‘First Nations’ antecedents and ancestors, with themselves. A little ditty, courtesy of the Canadian folk trio Arrogant Worms, celebrating what the True North Strong and Free brings to the rest of the world (other than peace, order and good government). 🇨🇦 Enjoy…..

Logan Circle Park, April 23, 2026

Within two hours after the Virginia Supreme Court struck down Virginia voter-approved Democratic redistricting efforts on May 8, local street artists graced that bit of presidential self-fluffery with a flourish and tribute only a plurality-black city deprived of all voting representation in Congress could come up with.

Logan Circle Park, May 8, 2026

A reminder to Repulsican Monarchists that decades ago, Sons of Liberty protestors dressed as Native-Americans once dumped about 340 chests of tea in Boston Harbor to protest things done to us by an occupying power without our request or consent, using the same motto as the one adorning most Washington DC auto license plates today — NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

In contrast to the pranks of 1773, the coming uprising will be using so many f-bombs, it will make Lindsey Graham want to reach for his fainting couch.

Senator Beauregard Pittypat (R-SC)

“When you feel the need to call on us…” said the King, after presenting the President with a small golden bell salvaged from the submarine HMS Trump…

…’just give it a little tinkle.’ 🔥

Asserted to the nation in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, April 2026.

Asserted to the nation in a press conference in November 1973.

Which version did you prefer? Though maudlin and self-pitying, the 1973 one was at least delivered without that feigned, Miss Piggy-style moi? performative outrage designed specifically to con a female reporter. And Nixon’s was delivered from behind a lectern, not poised at the edge of a chair by a clown decked in orange-formaldehyde face paint, making little vagina-thingy shapes with his hands, like a shabby, vicious spitting cobra ready to strike.

And the guilt in question then revolved around basic garden-variety High Crimes and Misdemeanors (like using the CIA to stop an FBI investigation into a criminal matter). It wasn’t about whether a man caught on tape years ago detailing how “I moved on her like a bitch…when you’re a star they let you do it…Grab ‘em by the pussy…” had actually been wink-wink, nudge-nudge BFFs with America’s most well-known pedophile some years back.

Of course you’re a pedophile, Donald. Remember that big birthday card you drew pre-pubescent breasts on, scratching your “Donald Trump” signature in lieu of pubic hair at the bottom? The one delivered with love and kisses to somebody named “Jeffrey Epstein”? The one that got made public by the Wall Street Journal, much to your fury and feigned indignation? The very same Wall Street Journal set to receive the Katharine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability for reporting that very same bawdy letter to the American public not so long ago? That very same award that was supposed to be presented to the Wall Street Journal at that very same White House Press Correspondents’ award dinner that got interrupted by an assailant’s bullets the other night at the Hinkley Hilton? That one?

I’m afraid Richard Nixon is not the posthumous recipient of this year’s Award for Stupidest Chutzpah Ever Delivered by a Prevaricating Schmuck to an Incredulous Nation.

“The Play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.”

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2 (Charles Rolls and Daniel Maclise, engraving, Yale Center for British Art).

With Profound Thanks to Ann Telnaes and Her Drawings. Live Long and Prosper! 🖖

[Photo, Courtesy ARTnews.com, Sculpture by The Secret Handshake, March 29, 2026]

Two days after 8 million people in more than 3,300 events across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and 20 countries overseas assembled for the third No KingsDay since He Who Must Not Be Named was inaugurated the second time, a mysterious sculpture appeared on the National Mall at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial by the National Reflecting Pool. Not to be confused with a Golden Ticket secretive chocolatier Willy Wonka once hid inside 5 bars of Whipplescrumptious Fudgemallow Delight in Roald Dahl’s famous children’s book, a sudden Golden Toilet has apparently beamed down from above à la The Day the Earth Stood Still. Today’s aliens identify themselves as an art collective known as The Secret Handshake. Weeks earlier, that same collective fashioned a gold Trump-Behind-Epstein, King of the World statue on another part of the Mall. Clearly, the aliens aren’t done with us yet.

Klaatu’s Spaceship on the National Mall, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” 1951

Why are we being visited by artistic aliens dedicated to seeding America with random acts of satire and senseless snippets of snark? A plaque below the sculpture may contain the seeds of an answer — “In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict, and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what truly mattered: remodeling the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House” — a reference to the Lincoln Bedroom’s newly installed gold-and-marble vanities Donald Trump believes represent class and taste. Tourists are invited to tear off pieces of toilet paper next to the Golden Throne marked with their logo — “The Secret Handshake.”

On the subject of little shits, Senator PittyPat Lindsey (R-SC) was spotted over the weekend at Disneyworld clutching a magic bubble wand and dining on breakfast pancakes (because there’s little else for a vapid, groveling wretch to do after refusing to pay TSA employees and telling South Carolina’s mothers and fathers to send their children to volunteer to fight Iran). An appropriate exemplar for Day 45 (and counting) of the longest artificially-induced, government-created Shitshow Shutdown in American history.

(March 29, 2026, Courtesy, TMZ Magazine. Astute observers will note Minnie Mouse attending other dining patrons nearby — a perfect metaphor for a small, scurrying rodent still forced to live with himself the rest of his life).

Fantasies of TinkerBell notwithstanding, we also approach Day 40 of the unplanned, artificially-induced, Trump-created shitshow in the Middle East. After firing 840 Tomahawk missiles (at a cost of about $3.5 million each) to destroy Iran’s launching pads and systems, after thousands of combined US-Israeli air-and-sea strikes using at least 20 different missile systems (including Tomahawks) against 13,000 sites, and Iran retaliating with over 1,215 ballistic missile (and many thousands of Shahed-2 drone attacks) against Israel, US military forces and our Gulf allies in the region (assisted by Russian satellite imagery and pinpoint bombing coordinates given to Iran for free), at least one million new refugees in Lebanon alone, Iran has now shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Its 90 million people have not sacrificed their lives for Trump’s vanity, its regime still stands, and extracts new payments from oil vessels bound mostly for China, while Baby Huey in the White House makes bizarre claims about winning and claims Iranian extortion is really “a sign of respect” for him.

Tomorrow — a different message, another casual throw-away quip about bombing “our little hearts out” and threatening war crimes against Iran’s people by destroying their electrification and desalination plants— all while raking in hundreds of millions through insider trading, market signaling, massive kickbacks and under-the-table deals with profits going directly to the Trump family, Pete Kegsbreath and Howard Lutnick. The incoherent double-speak and inebriated verbiage is supposed to serve as a tiny fig leaf to cover the grand corruption taking place on a daily basis. The Farce is indeed strong with these ones.

And tonight, news breaks that Baby Huey just signed an “Executive Order” directing the US Postal Service and the Social Security Administration to send mail-in ballots only to those voters deemed “appropriate” rather than to those who simply request them — as has been the case for decades. No legal authority exists anywhere in the Constitution, federal or state case law to do this, however, and voting rights groups will immediately file multiple suits against it. (Those suits have never before failed in court, despite You Know Who’s trying to do this multiple times in multiple jurisdictions before).

The ghastliest, most macabre, fucked-up April Fools anyone can remember in years.

“Laughing Jester” (c 1500), Flemish or Nederlandisch, US Library of Congress

[Angwy Twumpie, photo courtesy, Doug Mills, New York Times, 2019]

During a March 18, 2026 Q and A session at the Oval Office, with Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi present, a Japanese reporter queried President Clueless:

Reporter: “Why didn’t you warn your allies before attacking Iran?”

Trump: “We wanted to surprise them — who understands surprises better than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

(Ed: President Dementia was actually born one year after World War II ended.)

WAY TO GO, DONNIE!

Remains of a Geran-2, Shahed-style, Russian-made attack drone, currently being used in both Ukraine and the Middle East. (The UAE claims at least 1,514 drones have been launched at it since the start of the Iran war (photo, courtesy Ukrainian National Police).

At night, Baby Huey pads around the White House, lost in his ‘terrible twos’ stage of arrested emotional development. The war has exposed what for some has been obvious for years: this sniveling brat has no ideology, no belief system, no core principles. Whatever he thinks might be expedient today — is what he stands for. Tomorrow, he’ll be for something else. “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them…well, I have others” — but without Groucho’s trademark cigar, the funny glasses, rapacious wit or self-effacing charm. Yesterday, it was I demand you help me unfuck myself. Today, it’s I never needed your help to begin with, scumbags. I hate you because you didn’t grovel after I spent the past year attacking you. Tomorrow?

The most recent intelligence reports now leaking out of this Swiss Cheese Administration simply repeat what they said one week before the war began — a joint Israeli-American war will not lead to regime change. It may end up doing the precise opposite, strengthening the hardest of the hard-liners in Iran with even less to lose by attacking American sites (courtesy of Russian drone assistance) and making their own miserable people suffer even more.

Today, the continued down-is-really-up twisted logic proved too much for Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterintelligence Center. A dyed-in-the-wool MAGA bro, veins still coursing with the purple kool-aid of 2020 election denialism, acolyte of the brain-dead Tulsi Gabbard, somehow found his own sticking point, and said enough is enough. He flung down his drinking cup, hitched up his toga and beat a hasty retreat out of Pompeii as Vesuvius continued to spew ash, the pyroclastic flow approaching.

This guy is no hero. He was another abductee from the true-believer crowd who fell for the delusion that Trump stood for something or somebody other than Trump. He swore his loyalty on a stack of fundamentalist, fright-wing Bibles, right up until the moment he didn’t. Nobody’s heart should bleed for this disappointed man-child. Nobody ordered him to self-lobotomize years before. He voluntarily wielded skull-saw and scalpel all by his little self. But his departure illustrates something much larger than he is, something important to note, right this very minute.

Visualizing the Hay-Wired Scenario for an anticipated 7.0 earthquake along the Hayward Fault, California (courtesy, US Geological Survey (April 2017).

MAGA is cracking. In bits and bobs, blips and blobs, the coalition of loonies and lemmings is flailing. Roads once thought of as conduits to victory may soon become impassable cul-de-sacs. In maritime metaphor, the hull of their ship is breaching in multiple places. The compartments are filling up with seawater. The moment of truth is coming soon, not just to a theater near you, but in real time.

It’s been said before, and bears repeating: as much as we fantasize about dislodging the Mango Miasma and the slithering scalawags and vicious wormtongues around him all by ourselves, we probably can’t. We need allies — breakaways from his circle of lifeboats who are beginning to choose — finally — to desert the Sinking Rat.

So pay attention, focus your energies, donate your time and money wisely, welcome fleeing refugees from Vesuvius but don’t let your guard down, hold your nose, and prepare for a giant sucking sound coming from below. It will still try to pull you down right alongside that sinking maelstrom. Swim harder. Wait for it…..“There’s a boat, Jack.”

At 2° centigrade, high-sulfur, low-manganese galvanized steel actually undergoes a transformation, changing from a ductile (bendable) material to a brittle (shatterable) one — especially when the forces operating against it are powerful enough. [From James Cameron, Titanic, 1997].

“Now does he feel his secret murders sticking on his hands;

Now, minutely, revolts upbraid his faith-breach;

Those he commands move only on command,

Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title

Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe

Upon a dwarfish thief.”

—William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 2

(”Photo” by James l. Bruno, Dispatches from Exile, https://substack.com/@jameslbruno)

Appearing Suddenly on the National Mall Yesterday Morning.

They got the order mixed up. Should be Epstein behind Rose Trump. Because we know which one’s the peg and which one’s the hole….

Send Somebody Else’s Kids to Rescue Fiona, Shrek, 2001

On the third day of our second war on Iran in less than one year, the State Department told U.S. citizens to leave the Gulf states immediately because of “serious safety risks,” “using available commercial transportation.” This, after most airports in the region had already shut down and closed their air spaces, prompting Ted Lieu (D-CA) to post the following on social media:

“Dear [Secretary of State Marco Rubio]: You told Americans to depart now via commercial means when you know many airports/airspace are closed. YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY SCHEDULE U.S. GOVERNMENT EVACUATION FLIGHTS FOR THE STRANDED AMERICANS IN DANGER. Maybe you should have thought of a frickin’ plan first.”

Operation Epic Miasma, Part Deux

A frickin’ plan, indeed….The great fog of war descends — deliberate, purposeful, the kind of pea-souper you’re not supposed to see through. War as ready-made-for-TV- entertainment. Shock-and-awe assassinations and regime destruction courtesy of a criminal who’s spent the past year BOTH soliciting and accepting hundreds of millions worth of bribes from the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia — Iran’s sworn enemies. And they’ve complied — knowing the influence this would bring them.

At this point, we’re practically client states of THEM, not the other way around. The tails wag the dog with deadly effectiveness. This is what they wanted, not what America needed. On top of that, the obvious — Netanyahu. And Putin gets an even more distracted America moving still farther away from Ukraine and Europe.

Follow the money. It’s Trump’s only real love and lifelong obsession. (That and the appearance of power, the willingness to kill to get a Nobel Peace Prize, and wanting to blow up the four faces on Mt. Rushmore just to carve his own likeness on their ruins).

During the last Gulf war — which ultimately killed hundreds of thousands — a few voices here and there managed to pierce through the chaos, the dissemblances, the false narratives: “Tell me how this ends,” pleaded General Petraeus to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

No such voices coming from inside the house today. The regime uses Congressional pipsqueaks to launch argle-bargle word salad tirades. Tehran wuz 45 minutes away from blowing up New York, they wail, as Trump bloviates that “the bombings will continue” (until morale improves, no doubt). But mostly the airwaves echo with silence about why this, why now, who benefits, and especially, what comes next?

No one thought this one through. Baby Huey didn’t spend 10 minutes pondering what comes next, anymore than the Non-Macho, Macho, Macho Man, Pete Kegsbreath. Marco Rubio will happily babble whatever gobbledegook he’s ordered to on the spot to paper it all over. If we hadn’t done it, the Israelis would have. Ummmm… None of them considered how this might end. Anybody from the Republican Lollipop Guild who claims otherwise also wants to sell you an oceanfront lanai in Utah. (And they don’t come cheap.) When The New York Times actually writes “President Trump…said that it was unclear who would take over the country because likely candidates were dead” — you know you’ve officially left Parody Land for LaLa Land. Oops.

On a serious note (practically the only one out there), Tom Friedman of the New York Times writes:

“To think clearly about Middle East wars, you need to hold multiple thoughts in your head at the same time. It’s a complicated, kaleidoscopic region where religion, oil, tribal politics and great power politics interweave in every major story. If you are looking for a black-and-white narrative, you might want to take up checkers...”

Senator Pittypat (R-South Carolina) contemplates American Adventurism in the Middle East

Lindsey Graham has never bothered to master “Middle East for Dummies.” Had he done so, he might have learned that the opposite of autocracy there is most often disorder, not democracy. Reality trumps slam dunks while we’ll be greeted as liberators congeals into a sticky miasma to prevent us from seeing the very things we refuse to believe might ever happen once America plays its cards.

When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the President a war against Iran could have significant American casualties, Trump twisted it around on “Truth Social” (nothing to do with truth, of course) to claim that a US victory would be easy. At a press conference, His Ugliness started talking about his beautiful golden drapes rather than about what comes next. Reports are surfacing that he felt empowered — “on a roll” after Venezuela — just like every dumb asshole in every casino in the world certain he’ll outsmart the house with the next roll of the dice.

When someone won’t answer basic questions and keeps changing their story about why they did what they did, they’re either incompetent, or they’re lying (or both). When dishonest fuckups announce that ‘some of you are going to die and that’s ok by me’ to parody Lord Farquaad from “Shrek” — you know they have no more understanding of the consequences of war than a 4-year-old.

Watch what happens rather than what the TrumpToads insist you’re seeing. The GOP will now try to co-opt patriotism itself, spinning bullshit like it was fine silk. Look past the not-ready-for-prime-time rhetoric and pay attention to who gains from all this. Expect oil and gas prices to rise precipitously — and stay there a long time. Expect many more US soldiers to die for a cause nobody’s bothered to explain to them. Expect instability across multiple countries.

And prepare for the “unknown unknowns” to remember former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Sometime in the future, Iran might well indeed get run by kinder, gentler mullahs unwilling (or unable) to murder their own people, repress women, export terror, destabilize their neighbors, manufacture Shaheed missiles to kill Ukrainians, or threaten Israel. But a country with an ancient, proud culture could just as easily now spin out of control, unraveling into violent, fractured chaos. We’ve seen that movie, too. We don’t know what will happen. Neither do they.

So fasten your seat belts, ladies and germs. Our pilot is a duplicitous moron making shit up to look powerful and compensate for his small….organ. Having dumped the navigator and smashed the plane’s radar system, he’s flying blind, while a true pea-souper fog hangs over the night skies….It’s going to be a very long and bumpy flight.

Will It Even Make it to Lisbon? (from Casablanca, 1942, courtesy of Yesterland.com)

[‘They Had the Keys to the Food Locker and the Strawberries!…’ White House Briefing Room, February 20, 2026, photo courtesy, Al-Jazeera]

“Sir, sir, I really want to kiss you”….said nobody at any time in any place ever to the Deformed Dumbass of Mar-a-Lardo — decompensating, decomposing, de-legitimizing and dementia-dribbling before everyone’s eyes with the accelerating speed of an approaching end-of-the-Cretaceous-period comet.

In his delirious broadside today against the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision overturning his unconstitutional aggrandizement of Congress’s explicit Article I power to levy taxes, he labeled the six Justices who sided with the Constitution “radical-liberal Democrats” who “hate” America — adding for good measure “I won in 2020 and won BIG, and everybody knows it.” Surprisingly, that did not form a part of Respondents’ claims to Plaintiffs in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (Tariffs) Trump v. V.O.S Selections (2025). More offensive to Hair Furor even than the decision was that six Justices dared to point out that the 1977 Emergency Economic Powers Act — which the White House based its defense on — never once mentions tariffs (how wude! the noive!).

Before the diatribe began, the White House Briefing Room lights were dimmed, perhaps to blend the purple blotches on his hand in with decor from “Dark Shadows” or maybe to conceal Tulsi Gabbard’s baseball-capped head peeking out at the press from behind a pair of heavy dark glasses and a chintz curtain. Or perhaps to hide His Fruitcake’s double-wattled wrinkles and jowls, distracting listeners from the babble-bibble word salad of smack, bluster, cries and whimpers the injured Beast made from behind the lectern, dispensing self-pitying chickenshit right and left with piss and vinegar as he went along.

The Hump Never Moves — Ascending Right, Sloping Left, from the last presidential debate against Joe Biden, Nashville, December 22, 2020 [photo courtesy, Tennessee Lookout, November 17, 2022]

Lying Liar Lies Bigly [photo courtesy, Joe Navarro, “An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People and The Dictionary of Body Language,” Politico, August 29, 2020]

Who can say? One thing for sure. When he clambers onto that lectern, grabbing it like it was you-know-what, the shoulders go HUMP. Were the lectern not there, the small, puffy hands would be going WHUMP, then PUMP, as that invisible concertina moves back and forth, forth and back, for all it’s worth. The physical message remains the same. It never changes. Don’t believe a word of this snowjob. I have no idea what I’m saying, I’m guilty as sin, dumb as a brick, and I always make Pinocchio look like an honest little boy. My lies are whoppers; my penis isn’t. Look away, go away, and fuck you. Choose the day, the context, the distraction. It never varies. NEVER.

Key moments from today’s Bluthering Heights (not the Lawrence Olivier version):

“I’m ashamed of certain members of the Court….there’s no way that any way anyone can argue against [the dissenting justices]…no way….The Democrats on the Court… are against anything that makes America strong, healthy and great again, they also are, frankly, a disgrace to our nation…others think they’re being politically correct, which has happened before…it’s happened SO often with this Court…having to do with voting in particular.,..they’re just being fools and lapdogs for the RHINOs and the radical-left Democrats…they’re unloyal to the Constitution…..we won in a landslide…there was s LOT of cheating, but we won anyway. But these people are obnoxious, ignorant and loud and certain justice are afraid….because we’re doing so well as a country…I wanted to be very well-behaved because I understand the Court, I want to be a good boy….broking 7,000 on the SNP….nobody thought it was possible to do it….they said you’ll never be able…read the geniuses…all the Nobel Prize winners…we broke every record in the book….I settled 8 wars whether you like it or not…could have been nuclear….the Peace Board…he said Trump could have saved 35 million lives…but they’ve given us great national security these tariffs…”

Enough. BASTA. Shrieking, disconnected gibberish does not a retort make. It doesn’t even make a lemon torte, much less a logical one. The moment approaches when this sad sack of dementia pudding without the mental capacity of an ADHD caterpillar will have to be carried off in a strait jacket. (Do you suppose that might have had something to do with conservative Justices on the Supreme Court voting against him today?)

Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, abducted along with his father by ICE in Minneapolis on January 20, 2026 to a border facility near El Paso, Texas, ordered released by Judge Fred Biery of the Federal Court of the Western District of Texas on January 31 condemning the Department of Homeland Security’s “perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty”

[Photo, courtesy Ali Daniels, Columbia Heights Public Schools]

“It isn’t nice to block the doorway. It isn’t nice to go to jail. There are nicer ways to do it, but the nice ways always fail. It isn’t nice. It isn’t nice. You told us once. You told us twice. (Well thank you buddy, for your advice!) But if that’s freedom’s price, we don’t mind, we don’t mind…”

“It Isn’t Nice” by Barbara Dane and Malvina Reynolds, 1965 (Judy Collins, Elektra Records)

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

Thomas Paine, “The American Crisis, Series 1.” Pamphlet and Broadside, November 1776

Democracy on Wheels, in 5° F, Minneapolis January 31, 2026 [Courtesy “Walking Minnesota’]

President “Malice Toward All, Charity for None” Pissy Pants, 2026

It’s impossible to overstate the insanity of the current moment. The galaxy’s smallest, tiniest, pettiest, wee-est little whinybitch made his sleepy denouement in Switzerland this week. Diaper Donnie mewled and whinged, whined and sundowned, raved and ranted, cried and clucked, whimpered, sniveled and sniggled, all while imagining himself to be the cleverest act in the aging bump-and-grind show he always pictures himself the star of.

In reality, he’s always been the only entrant. The lines and the tunes are always older than Egypt: “MEE want pussy! MEE want GOLD! MEE want trophy wives! MEE want to be Pwesident! MEE now want a Norwegian necklace, how come Denmark didn’t give MEEE a beautiful necklace? Gimmee that Nobel, Maria! MEEE need it, MEEE never get NUTHIN’, MEE never enjoy RESPECT from nobody! (waaaaaa!) 😭😩😭 MEEE HATE all of you fuckers, MEEE now going to slap BIGLY tariffs on you…THEN you’ll be sorreeee!”

It never varies. Day in, day out, all through the night, the itty-bittty, bratty bratwurstface fills his diapers — and the planet — with his wee invective. An angry chimpanzee rolls his demented eyes like a chameleon with ADHD, while fiddling with the pin on a hand grenade. Our allies are reduced to begging, pleading, cajoling, cooing… ”nice banana for you, big fella, just put the grenade down nice and slow.”

Unhappy with just being a jerk and a loser, Mango Malfeasance went out of his way at Davos to lie about the sacrifices others have made not just for their own countries, but for us — a concept he will never understand. Insulting NATO, he claimed: “we’ve never needed them…they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that…they stayed back, a little off the front lines.” Prince Harry in Exile, once deployed to Afghanistan himself, did everything possible not to tell the orange-faced scunner and cockwomble to go sod off in a corner somewhere.

Not content with being just a big-time crook and dissembler, Donnie’s new “Board of Peace” — in reality a Board of Grift, Graft and Gimme, complete with a $1 billion entry fee (who throws away money like that?) and a self-appointed Chairman for life position — mocks the truth with every outrageous claim and Kushner-created model city in Gaza. The scam matches the ego — Brobdingnagian and Vulgarian.

Tomorrow will bring more threats, more itsy-bitsy acts of petty vengeance, more sundowning filled with babble-bibble, piss and vinegar, bluster and brou-ha-ha, TACOing and folding, rage-tweeting against the Federal Reserve, Barack Obama, Bette Midler, Joe Biden, windmills, Taylor Swift, female reporters. Predictable and predicted, resolute and regular as an atomic clock. Meanwhile, Republicans will continue to devolve into one-dimensional flatworms, capable of nothing but groveling periodically with “as Your Grace pleases” grunting noises. The Court of Henry VIII showed more testicular fortitude back when.

Oh, the Humanity!

You don’t have to be David Brooks of the New York Times, delving into the long-forgotten journals of Tacitus, Sallus, the histories of Edward Gibbon, the wisdom of James Madison, or even the obvious truth of the Marx Brothers to discern what’s going to come down the pike next. For anyone who’s ever watched a beloved parent or grandparent disappear into the emptiness of Alzheimer’s or the never-never-land of fronto-temporal dementia, there’s no mystery about it. One day soon — very soon perhaps — an angry, sleepy, exhausted old man will suddenly wander into the White House Briefing Room clad only in his briefs (no, not the Top Secret kind), with or without a layer of Depends on top, nothing else. Perhaps he’ll wrap himself around the flagpole to pretend it's all been scripted beforehand. We’ll all be waiting with bated breath to see how Karoline Spokesbarbie will explain that one. Or when those diapers drop a BIG ole’ boom-boom while the cameras roll. The coming crack-up will be televised, horrifyingly live and obvious. The six-o’clock news tapes will roll forever. America’s day of shame, lodged in the internet for posterity.

“She’s Gonna Blow, Captain!”

And every Republican slimebag, scalawag and wormtongue will try to pretend that we didn’t see that one coming / had somebody said something to me / it’s all a Democrat hoax, mix and match, rinse and repeat. Senator Lindsey Pittypat will retire to his fainting couch, clutching pearls in one hand, smelling salts in the other. “I didn’t see the film clip” Speaker Bobblehead will claim. Jockstrap Jordan will profess outrage (at something or other, we don’t yet know what).

It’s going to happen. One way or the other. And with it, the whole Rube Goldberg MAGA Clueless Contraption of Cacophony will start wheezing like an elephant with emphysema as it keels over, its mental circuits blown to kingdom come.

“This, Too, Shall Pass….” [courtesy, Cambridge Design Technology]

Whenever and however it happens, it won’t be a pretty sight. It will be the ugliest, most humiliating moment of your life as an American. You’ll recall studying Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy in your history classes….and then the image of someone’s dirty drawers will intervene to fill the space. Nature abhors a vacuum, after all.

●∘◦❀◦∘●∘◦❀◦∘●∘◦❀◦∘●∘◦❀◦∘

The future belongs to those who can discipline themselves enough both to visualize that foul day as well as what must come after. Thousands of pieces will need to get picked up, one at a time. Elections will still be held, even as they try to arrest more 5-year-olds, drag a grandfather out of his house in boxer shorts in 10 degree weather, raid our neighbors, threaten Greenland, Iceland, Lapland, LegoLand, Never-Never-Land. A disciplined Democratic opposition to such ghastliness cannot simply express outrage, it must formulate the solutions, anticipate the resistance, organize, assemble, donate, keep ranks, stay on point, and in focus. This will be our saving grace — they do not see it coming, but we do. Fortune does not just favor the brave, but the prepared mind.

Be strong, caretakers of our republic. Be brave, like Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment at Gettysburg. Be resolute, like the Battered Bastards of Bastogne at the Battle of the Bulge. Be courageous, like those civil rights marchers in Alabama as committed to non-cooperation with evil as they were to non-violence. Be like the participants in the world’s first Gay Pride Day in 1970, practically jogging to Central Park to avoid being attacked along the way. Be like those unfurling banners in the gallery of the Illinois State Legislature in the early 1980s to support timid men considering voting for the Equal Rights Amendment — “Men of Quality Are not Threatened by Women with Equality.”

There’s work to be done, even without a map or a compass. Pack a lunch and get to it.

“Are you saying Donald Trump’s fat ass doesn’t smell like peaches and cream?

Paul Ryan, Former Speaker of the House (R-WI), Resting Idiot Face.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Invertebrate&oldid=762135165)

Back in January 2017, before the current Nightmare Before (and During and After) Christmas fully metastasized into its shapeshifting, pestilent, putrescent, rancid mango shape, some delightful hero-biologist edited Wikipedia’s page on “Invertebrates” to briefly include former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan. The distinguished former Trump Toad didn’t quite make it to the “Horseshoe Crab” tier, let alone the higher-ranking ones that include Arachnids (spiders), Velvet Worms and Molluscs (snails).

Naturally, the moment didn’t last long, as somebody ELSE at Wikipedia went ahem-ahem, we-can’t-have-that-kind-of-tomfoolery-on-our-very-serious-scientific website. The anonymous antic will still be remembered for future history books, despite the tongue-in-cheek practical joke being taken down and Wikipedia restored to its briefly bruised, self-reverential image.

What a field day that biologist would have today. For the list of Republican Flatworms has only grown by leaps and bounds since then. People who once would have once been ashamed to catch themselves flattering and buttering the Manchurian Cantaloupe even once now gladly smear his poo all over themselves as the cameras roll. (Talk about dirty pictures.) Like anybody wants to see that….

But wait….there’s more!

As the cameras roll, the outrages mount, the self-reverential tongue-worship kicks into superdrive, the fronto-temporal dementia accelerates, His Flatulent Majesty, King Louis (“Jed Clampett”) XVI now demands Maria Corina Machado, winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, kiss his butt in public by presenting him with her Prize. ‘I won it. I killed 100 people and kidnapped Maduro. I WON it. I DESERVE it. It’s MINE. IT’s all about MEEEE! Now she must give it to MEEE!’

And so we approach….the real reason for the bombing of Venezuela. (Hint: not about drugs, God knows not about democracy. No, not even about oil — despite Trump’s wrinkled, oleaginous face — but about V*A*N*I*T*Y.) World’s shabbiest, smallest, weest, pettiest, pissiest, most thin-skinned, tiniest, tiniest of little men….

But let’s not forget his current accomplices and poo-brains. New nominees for the Hall of Vicious Invertebrates now beckon us back. Won’t some mischievous biologist please take another look at the list of deserving new jellies and nematodes?

Not a Macho, Macho, Macho Man, courtesy of Ian Baker, March 2025.

The Sole Surviving Cast Member from “Gone With the Wind” 1937.

Speaker Bobblehead (Praying, Farting, Wishing he were dead?)

1937 v. 2017 (Enough Said)