Aldous J Pennyfarthing

Reporters really need to ask Republican lawmakers about Donald Trump’s political future every time they interview these weasels. This should be in addition to asking them who won the election. Not only is it important to the long-term viability of our representative democracy, it’s also effing hilarious.

These are simple questions: Do you think Joe Biden was elected legitimately? Some Republican legislators—including South Dakota Sen.

To say Donald Trump is a cartoon villain ascribes far too much humanity and gravitas to this oleaginous heap of gently used circus peanuts. Most people can fully size him up after hearing him purple-nurple the Queen’s English with his gauche, ungrammatical boasts for a just a few minutes, but many Americans remain in thrall to his, shall we say, “unique” charms.

Okay, why would anyone try to exterminate large swaths of the population with vaccines millions of people still refuse to take when they can use effing space lasers instead! It makes absolutely no sense.

Ever since the COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, disingenuous pundits have been using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to “prove” that the vaccines are deadly. But in reality, VAERS is just a collection of raw reports from people who’ve been vaccinated.

A death reported on VAERS could be caused by just about anything, and is proof of exactly nothing.

With the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempted coup fast approaching, NBC’s and ABC’s Sunday morning news shows both devoted significant time to the Big Lie, Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to subvert Western democracy, and the Republican Party’s shameful support of his dangerous, anti-democratic delusions.

In fact, NBC’s Meet the Press devoted its entire broadcast to Trump’s continuing threat to our republic.

When Fox News demonstrates more journalistic scruples than the BBC, you know we’re in trouble. 

Famed constitutional scholar Alan Dershowitz, who thinks the Constitution gives Donald Trump the power to do anything he wants so long as he’s earnestly attempting to steal elections, appeared on BBC News Wednesday after Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on five counts of sex trafficking.

What could be possibly more American than a group of cranky a-holes fighting for their God-given right to spread deadly diseases at fast-food restaurants? That’s peak 2021, folks; MAGA mites always save the best for last.

As much as I’d like to dump most Burger King food into Boston Harbor (still a far better choice, I’d argue, than eating it), I don’t think this protest will have the historic impact these anti-vaxxers hope it will.

Yeah, Donald Trump also said we’d never see him again if he lost to Joe Biden. We all know how that turned out. After all, Trump is never really gone—as long we remember him. We see his eternal light and essence in every irregular, half-priced Grocery Outlet yam. Every time a bully farts on a weaker kid’s head, he is there—in spirit—gently guiding the bully’s sphincter.

For the past two years—and especially since we all got access to the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines—I’ve felt like Luke Wilson’s character in Idiocracy trying to explain to relatives and acquaintances why they should irrigate their plants with water instead of sports drinks. It’s hard to get through to them, though—without an actual cranial saw, that is.

I can only imagine how Dr. Anthony Fauci feels.

Oh, hey, Ted Cruz still wants to be president! Of course he does. The “breaking” part of this news is that he still seems to think it’s possible. Though, to be fair, Ted did snag a lot of primary votes in 2016—and that was before the beard. Imagine the mojo he’s got workin’ now!

Of course, Ted is universally loathed among warm-blooded vertebrates, so he’s forced to run as a Republican.

I’m having a real hard time understanding how a civil war between liberals and conservatives would actually play out in this country. Would we have to wear uniforms to mark ourselves as part of the vast progressive horde, or would the conspicuous lack of misspelled MAGA neck tattoos be sufficient?

Our nation is terribly divided these days, but I don’t really fear a second civil war for the mere fact that it would be far too confusing.

I have a deep, visceral mistrust for anyone who says God is on their side. When has Providence ever sorted winners and losers like this? Didn’t we learn better from the bloody Crusades? Or centuries of ruinous sectarian violence? Or Tim Tebow’s NFL career?

Of course, these days we’re meant to believe that God is on the side of the vast majority of the people unnecessarily dying of COVID-19—because that’s what they keep claiming.

On Friday night, a series of devastating tornadoes ripped through parts of six states, killing at least 79 Americans.

Contrary to Donald Trump’s usual attempts to pulverize reality into an unrecognizable heap of dust he can power-snort directly into his fib-pickled brain, the Trump-Russia investigation was neither a witch hunt nor a hoax.

Is Tucker Carlson literally on Vladimir Putin’s payroll? He has to be, right? As the free world attempts to stand up to this ex-KGB thug who brazenly attacked our country and poisons political adversaries nearly as often as Tucky-son poisons minds, Fox’s resident trust fund bloviator is giving literal aid and comfort to the enemy.

You might say this foppish fish stick fuckwit is a modern-day Tokyo Rose—only slightly more transparent.

“And so this is Christmas, and where is your gun?” John Lennon’s 1971 hit “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” was a call for peace, not for packing heat, but apparently the lyrics need to be updated to fit the 21st century. Fifty years later, the NRA and Republicans have made sure that far too many Americans can easily answer that (updated) question.

After normal presidents stop presidenting, they’re typically deluged with offers from major publishing houses for the right to release their memoirs. But judging from the blowback The Wall Street Journal received after publishing Donald Trump’s recent lie-festooned letter to the editor, no one who groks that Trump’s bloviating bottom is not actually a flowing fount of wisdom seems eager to let him topple inkwells anywhere near their shops.

Here come the Oompa Loompas to roll another purpling anti-vaxxer carcass down to the boneyard. By now, the Oompa Loompas are tired of singing their cautionary tunes—they obviously aren’t helping. So they’re just sallow-faced, hollow-eyed funeral home gofers now. Sad!

Okay, so this isn’t your run-of-the-mill, daisy-pushing anti-vaxxer. This guy was a real piece of work. (More on that in a bit.

I was warned ages ago that violence is not a solution to any problem, and that if I wanted Carrot Top to stop doing prop comedy I should just bide my time. Did it work? I’m scared to look. Can someone at least let me know if Jeff Dunham is still at large?

But Republicans these days seem to have missed the memo. In their bath salts hallucination of a universe, political violence is tres chic.

Why does it seem like the mainstream media isn’t taking the very real danger of America losing its democracy seriously? When Germany invaded France in 1940, did newspapers fret over what those rich pastries were going to do to Himmler’s triglyceride levels? Because that’s kind of what this moment feels like.

The most egregious story I’ve ever heard about Donald Trump—and, granted, there’s an embarrassment of riches to choose from—is the one about his stripping health coverage away from his gravely ill infant nephew … out of spite.

This story was fairly widely reported before the 2016 election, which seriously makes me wonder what people imagined about Hillary Clinton that could have possibly been worse than that.

Presidents are kind of like NFL quarterbacks: They get too much credit when their team wins and too much blame when they lose. Rightly or wrongly, U.S. presidents tend to be the face of whatever’s happening in the country over a given snapshot of time.

It was a rough summer for Joe Biden, and his problems have persisted well into the fall.

This won’t go over well with … uh … certain people. Donald Trump’s decades-long campaign to pretend he’s a winner who always wins—despite his conspicuous inability to make money running a casino, selling liquor, or sponsoring a fraudulent university—hit a bit of a snag last November when he lost the presidency to Joe Biden.

Lauren Boebert’s natural milieu is a dive bar, so it’s kind of hard to decipher her dreck without at least 12 shots of Jägermeister and a Busch Light or three prepping my brain for her authentic frontier gibberish.

Sadly, these days I drink only occasionally—in non-Wisconsin volumes—and so the Rosetta Stone I need to decode this cacophony of crackpottery eludes me.

Standard disclaimer: Like most Republicans, Liz Cheney is simply awful. But also like most Republicans, she’s not nearly as awful as Ted Cruz, whose (mostly) tongue-in-cheek association with the Zodiac Killer gives me the barest whiff of sympathy for the now-brutally defamed Zodiac Killer.

More importantly, Cheney has stood up to the potentially republic-ending nonsense of Donald Trump, who simply can’t own up to his decisive loss in the 2020 presidential election.

In a way, it might have been fun to be a double-agent Trump adviser, but it would have been practically impossible to undermine him more than his own loyalists did. I mean, the guy retained Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer.

Henry Ford famously said, “History is more or less bunk.” Of course, he was a horrible, virulent racist who Hitler praised as an “inspiration” in Mein Kampf, so his sentiment makes a certain amount of sense. To racists, that is. After all, if you can ignore the long and dark history of antisemitism in Europe, you can whitewash pretty much anything.

In a new excerpt from his upcoming book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl notes that Donald Trump’s Spinal Tap-esque Tulsa rally marked “the worst day of his entire campaign.” Which is weird, because for me it was easily the best. In fact, its only serious competition was the fleeting moment during the first presidential debate when Joe Biden finally told Didgeridoo Donnie to STFU. That was pretty cool, too.

For someone who continually touts his winning bona fides, Donald Trump sure loses a lot. He lost his casinos, $1 billion in cash over a decade, the popular vote (twice), the 2020 election, the House, the Senate (thanks to his nonstop whining), two wives, most of his hair, and, on or about Jan. 6, his effing mind.

It can be tough to separate the art from the artist, particularly when the artist has separated his own brain stem from his cerebral cortex. Such is the case with Irish rock legend Van Morrison, who’s embraced the COVID-19 death cult with the kind of vigor Donald Trump might embrace a big slab of rotisserie gyro meat in the bathroom stall of a Coney Island Greek restaurant at 3 AM on a random Tuesday.