From where I stand, Sean Spicer appears qualified for nothing. He’s best known, of course, for serving as the first of four White House press secretaries under Donald Trump, for whom he brazenly lied in one of his first official acts on the job. If he’s known for anything else, it would be having Melissa McCarthy channel his demented Chucky Doll soul in an Emmy-winning guest turn on Saturday Night Live.
The latest tell-all from a former Trump associate promises to be a real barnburner and/or barf-bagger, depending on your current tolerance for the perpetually eye-popping evidence of Donald Trump’s treachery and bottomless bad taste.
At this point in the game, it’s difficult to envision what sort of scandal, if any, could possibly change anyone’s mind about Trump.
Afghanistan! Delta variant! Hurricanes! Wildfires! Chaos, chaos, chaos! Hie thee to thine lifeboats, fellow Americans! The good ship Biden is sinking!
The evidence? President Joe Biden’s approval ratings have now sunk to a roughly 45% average based on FiveThirtyEight’s latest aggregate of polls. As usual, the media is doing its news cycle tango, questioning Biden’s ability to push through his agenda in the face of these numbers.
Ever wonder what happens to the money you donate to nonprofits and political causes? Some organizations and websites exist solely to help you choose which charities to support, typically basing their ratings on the percentage of donations that go directly to programs rather than salaries and other overhead costs.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reminds me of someone. Someone from popular culture. Is it Hannibal Lecter? Nah. Lecter was far more discriminate when it came to choosing his victims. President Camacho from Idiocracy? No way. Camacho at least showed glimmers of empathy. Gus the Field-Goal Kicking Mule? Closer, but no. Gus was actually good at something. Jim Carrey’s talking asshole from Ace Ventura? Much closer—especially this version. But not quite.
I’ve seen chipmunks with their heads stuck in Mountain Dew cans that were better adapted to their environment than today’s lumpish throng of anti-vaxxers. Their reasons for eschewing the COVID-19 vaccines are as varied as they are stupid: Jesus will protect them, God gave them an immune system, the vaccine will kill half the population by October, the vaccine is the mark of the Beast.
Assuming we don’t all die of the Omega! Omega! Omega! COVID-19 strain sometime before the year 2050, it’s easy enough to imagine future archeologists rooting through our scattered, bleached bones seeking explanations for why TruckNutz suddenly disappeared from the fossil record in 2040 or so.
Okay, to be fair, I watched more of Mike Lindell’s goofy cyber symposium than I care to admit. And I may have hidden the full extent of my pathological obsession from my wife. And my therapist. And my dogs, for that matter. But, you know, I wasn’t literally banned from watching it.
Capitol rioter Douglas Jensen was banned, however. In fact, as a condition of his release from jail following his part in Donald Trump’s Jan.
Don’t get me wrong. Joe Biden isn’t perfect. His administration’s assumption that the Afghan government’s security forces would put up more than nominal resistance to the Taliban appears to have been disastrously wrong—though, luckily, many of the people who need and deserve safe passage from the country are now being taken care of.
I used to challenge my friends—usually when we were well into our cups—to come up with the most crass and inappropriate product placement they could for a movie. Product placements are done all the time, of course. If you see a Roman centurion eating Funyuns at the foot of the cross on Golgotha, that’s almost certainly a product placement paid for by Frito-Lay. If Jesus himself tucks into a family-sized bag of Tostitos, you can take it to the bank.
Roughly 20 years ago, I wrote some (very unpopular, mind you) op-eds about our adventures in Afghanistan. As a lefty liberal in a conservative Northeast Wisconsin redoubt, I took a far less knee-jerk approach to 9/11 than some of my neighbors. I experienced the pain, horror, and fear of that day like anyone else. Still, my instinct was always to reject half-baked, jingoistic calls for “nation-building” (to resurrect a term George W.
Sometimes when I wake up in the morning feeling a bit down, and life seems like little more than a small service to the strange, twisted course of the universe, I think, “Well, it could be worse. I could be Matt Gaetz.” And then I think, “Nah. Impossible. If I were Matt Gaetz, I’d be wearing Donald Trump Underoos.” Then I go back to sleep, wondering when our country will return to any semblance of sanity.
For a network that’s been huffing Donald Trump’s underpants nonstop for the past five years, this is pretty rich.
For some reason, Fox News decided it was newsworthy—and perhaps somewhat untoward—for a group of gold medal Olympians to throw back a few bevvies in the wake of their victories. They were “drunk,” according to Fox’s eyeball-grabbing headline.
It’s a soulless, mindless quasi-life form that drains the vitality of the living, leaving nothing but tribulation and death in its wake, and it really wants to be president. Of course, Ron DeSantis’ frothy-mouthed political ambitions may help explain why Florida is essentially a leper colony with a Pirates of the Caribbean ride right now.
To know Pillow Man is to laugh at Pillow Man—or it is if you’re a member in good standing of the sane community, anyway. If not, you may be willing to follow Mike Lindell down every rabbit hole he’s managed to slither through with the help of a spelunker’s headlamp and a Costco-sized tub of Crisco.
Lindell is about what you’d get if Harry Carey had switched from Budweiser to bath salts late in life.
I get that writing for a living can be hard sometimes. It can be difficult to find a voice. Or a platform. Or any reason at all to remain an ink-stained wretch instead of, say, trying one’s hand at perpetual lighthouse-sitting.
Unless you’re Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, the pay is frequently low, the laurels few and far between, and the indignities often serial.
I’ve been in a minor funk the past few days after getting in an online tiff with an anti-vaxxer family member. I was called a “bully” and “judgmental” for refusing to join hands with this relative and leap into the fatuous fairyland where career civil servant Dr.
Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills, and he isn’t loyal to anyone. This is like saying the sky is blue and the sun sets in the west. It’s as plain as the pug nose on Trump’s jowly ape scrotum of a face, and if you end up getting burned by this universal MAGA maxim, you need to load up on aloe and simply take your lumps and/or blisters.
I mean, even Satan lives up to his obligations when, say, he loses fiddle contests.
You know, if we’re just going to go with our hunches about political races and assume they mean something, then I must insist that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election by a final score of 154 million to, I don’t know, 8. Total votes, that is. Because I simply can’t fathom why anyone not named Trump would ever vote for anyone who is named Trump. It would be like putting up a big, star-spangled yard sign to let your neighbors know you have chlamydia.
In a cynical attempt at counterprogramming the Jan. 6 House Select Committee hearings, the 4G Goober Gang—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, and Paul Gosar—sought to draw attention to the wretched state of the “political prisoners” who were arrested in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, many of whom remain in stir.
It didn’t go quite as planned.
Donald Trump is a colossal, outsized, Brobdingnagian loser. You might even say he’s a “yuge” loser. And while he’s always been a loser (see also: multiple bankruptcies), his loser bona fides are shining particularly brightly these days.
He lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost the presidency in 2020, conspicuously becoming the first loser incumbent in nearly 30 years. Under his “leadership,” Republicans lost the House.
While I’ve somehow managed to live as a white person for more than five decades without once feeling persecuted over the color of my skin, the 24/7 White Grievance Media sees an America (or, rather, a dwindling majority of very concerned white folks) under existential threat. In other words, it’s easy to sell grievance to conspiracy-primed racists who greedily swallow performative nonsense like a flock of deranged pelicans scarfing down perilously over-microwaved Hot Pockets.
Masturbation is still a big no-no, according to the Catholic Church. The catechism calls it “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” But it’s only a mortal sin if you’re doing it right. For those of you who weren’t raised Catholic, you should know you should know that dying in a state of mortal sin is a pretty big deal.
According to the great doctors of the Catholic Church, including St. Augustine of Hippo and St.
I’m old enough to have once thought Eric Clapton was cool. I was never a superfan, but I enjoy some of his stuff. At the very least, he was cool by association because he hung out—and occasionally worked—with The Beatles.
Regardless, he’s a music legend and three-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee.
Asking “do you know who I am?” is never a great tactic when you’re pulled over by the cops—especially when hardly anyone knows who you are. It’s one thing if you’re Mel Gibson and antisemitism basically oozes from your pores. Cops know who you are, and they expect bad behavior from your sodden arse.
Tuesday morning, we were all treated to headlines about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ “historic” space flight. I’m not exactly sure what’s meant by “historic.” It wouldn’t be the first time a billionaire burned through gobs of money and resources to accomplish something a monkey did 72 years ago.
The “just wait, he’s gonna turn presidential any moment now” crowd is still at it, months after Donald John Trump skulked away from the White House with his schwanz between his atrophied, KFC-bucket-balancin’ gams.
For more than five years after his rambling, racist campaign launch speech, Trump has had every opportunity to prove there was more to him than meets the eye. There isn’t. I’ve looked.
In a recent episode of The New Abnormal podcast, Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece and the author of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, said Princess Ivanka, the rotten apple of Donald Trump’s sallow, bloodshot, rheumy eye, is far more likely to flip on The Donald than Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg, who is up to his cheesy mustache in legal troubles, thanks to a few fringe benefits gobs of extra pay he received tax-fre
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem sure has her priorities straight. When it comes to bright, shiny, jingoistic nonsense, she’s got the instincts of Leni Riefenstahl. When it comes to anything that actually matters—like, say, protecting the lives of her constituents—she’s more like Lennie from Of Mice and Men.
Oh, my, my, my. Grampa Shouty-Pants is not gonna like this.
You’d think the guy who made America great again—just look around you—would be ranked higher than 41st out of 44 former U.S. presidents in the latest survey of presidential historians. And he would be, of course, if the voting panel consisted exclusively of multibillionaire bloodsuckers and the hapless corona-fodder who remain enthralled by Ocher Shrek’s every splenetic utterance.