The nation is still reeling from the largest single-day reduction in international stature in American history, at what historians are already calling The Summit That Could’ve Been a Thirsty Instagram Comment.

Of course all decent Americans get mad and appalled and embarrassed (mempallassed? mapparrassed?) watching their president parroting the demands of a war criminal as incompetent as he is genocidal, but your problem is you see the people of Ukraine as human beings, deserving peace and freedom and autonomy, but to the President, they’re the reason he had to call off the big, fancy lunch he had planned for his Dictator Bro 4 Lyfe.

He worked SO hard on that lunch, you guys. He never gets to hang out with Vlad because of dumb ol’ Ukraine and he even took Susie’s advice about grown-up food instead of hamberders and now he has to wait till the World Cup it’s NOT FAIR!

Did you ever think you’d see your POTUS fuck something up so badly that multiple heads of state would drop whatever they were doing to fly halfway around the damn world for an intervention? (I actually did. I had that one on my bingo card. All I need now is “deployed state power against Rosie O’Donnell“ and I win.)

Yeah, a diplomatic intervention. Not for substance abuse, but for dumbness. For being the easiest mark to e’er waddle out onto the world stage. Putin plays our president so virtuosically that the poor dope can’t stop himself from showing off the pretty strings sewn to his sleeves.

POOTY SAYS I WOULDA WON IN 2020 IF IT WASN’T FOR MAIL-IN VOTING!

Of course he does. Because anyone willing to feed your narcissistic delusions can make you jump through hoops. It’s one of the most widely understood truths on the planet. I’d suggest measuring the guy’s actual respect for you in sweatshirts, or perhaps attacks on American-owned factories.

I will grudgingly give credit where it’s due: he sure got Zelensky to wear a suit. Operation Warp Speed, couple of cognitive tests, got Zelensky to wear a suit. After that, it’s a pretty sharp drop to bankrupting casinos, crashing the economy, and Eric.

Hard to find a more perfect snapshot of MAGA culture than JD Vance puffing up his soft-ass self to drop that weak little one-liner on Zelensky. Were I JD, I’d want to minimize opportunities for people to make that side-by-side comparison. One of you has spent years successfully holding off the aggression of a onetime superpower; the other made up a story about pet-devouring migrants.

“I want to try to get into heaven if possible— I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole.”

You gotta figure that’s one of the last stopped clock moments we’ll get. In fact, this momentary, uncharacteristic acknowledgement of his own fundamental shittiness is the first sign of cognitive fitness we’ve seen in weeks.

But sure, let’s add fear of damnation (born of the cankles, no doubt) to the sauce. Why not?

I have a new theory about the frantic Peace Prize push, actually: he thinks he can present it to whatever cosmic arbiter awaits in the afterlife as some sort of spiritual Get Out Jail Free card. WOULD THEY GIVE A RAPIST A PEACE PRIZE kind of thing.

He keeps inflating the number of wars he so dealmakingly peacified, with the number rising to ten if you count “pre-wars,” or even eleven if you count not releasing the Epstein files as ending a war. Still, what works on Deutsche Bank may prove less successful at the Pearly Gates.

Of course, nowhere on Earth are things any peacier than Washington, D.C., where history’s most over-promoted game show host continues his grubby fumble towards autocracy, dispatching an unconstitutional mishmash of federal agents to deliver the city’s restaurant district from the scourge of customers.

Tate Reeves, still in power despite leading Mississippi to one of the highest Covid death rates in the entire world, sent National Guard troops to D.C. to join in the fashy shenanigans while the much higher crime rate in Jackson goes unaddressed, and if that seems like a sensible distribution of resources to you, you’re a Republican, all right.

Still, probably doesn’t suck to get out of the Deep South for a week or two in August. See some of the museums before the decadent works get purged. Beat up some brown guys on mopeds.

See, they’re attacking the sandwich problem at its root. Once the restaurants are all closed and the delivery drivers have all been deported to Salvadoran torture camps, there will be no sandwiches to lob.

Of course, the real horror for D.C. may not be the authoritarian crackdown but the multi-billion-dollar makeover that’s coming, presumably at gunpoint. Ever since the Roberts Court granted him limitless redecorating powers, he’s been insatiable, so I figure we’re a couple weeks away from masked men in SWAT gear spray-painting all the fire hydrants gold.

Outside of a handful of “elderly white hippies,” D.C. residents have embraced their occupiers, according to Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Self-Appointed Spokesman for the City’s Predominantly Black Population. Well, who’re you gonna believe, polls or a man who adjusts his hairline with aerosol products?

Anyway, lucky me, it seems my home city of Chicago has a “national emergency” of its own sneaking up on the Becankled One’s schedule.

Wonder who’s next? Perhaps Colorado can host a small siege around the facility where lunatic election crook Tina Peters is serving her richly deserved nine-year sentence. From Denver to Brazil, nothing bothers Off-Brand Orbán more than an enemy of democracy facing consequences for their crimes.

…except being criticized in any way. Or told no. Investigating any of his assorted rapes, frauds, or human rights abuses is obviously not his favorite. Actually, with a growing legion of Ed Martins, Alina Habbas (Alinas Habba?), and Jeanine Pirros willing to break norms and laws, seems there’s plenty of political persecution to go ‘round.

Like, I’ve always believed John Bolton to be the host being for an extraterrestrial life form that means the human race significant harm (the mustache, obviously), but that doesn’t mean Kash Patel’s cartoonishly corrupt FBI gets to raid his house. First they came for the symbiotic face parasites that resemble mustaches, and I did not speak out, because I was not a symbiotic face parasite that resembled a mustache.

But we all know how that one ends.

Kash also announced the FBI will join ICE in lowering hiring standards to a level that’s friendlier to Proud Boys by mere coincidence, I’m sure. Actually, this move makes sense to me, given the agency’s sharp turn away from its traditional “law enforcement” mission towards one more focused on crushing dissent. Do you really need a college degree to smash windows and fire tear gas?

Speaking of the FBI, turns out the deputy directorship was indeed, as predicted, far too difficult for a yammering mediocrity like Dan Bongino, so they’ve brought in a new guy to handle the “job” part of the job so Dan can focus on waiting by the phone for the illegal orders we all know are coming.

The border wall is to be painted black “to make it hotter and harder to climb,” which is the sort of policy you get only under the very stablest of geniuses. We can’t build solar panels because the sun sets like HALF the time, but the wall will stay hot “and harder to climb” at night because of the…the black paint.

Never been a big horror guy, but probably the most consistently terrifying prose genre I’ve encountered is News Stories About How Much Power Laura Loomer Has. The jump scares are unmatched, cuz they’re usually push notifications about guardrails falling.

Yeah, the entire Executive Branch serves at the pleasure of this one racist halfwit. Temporary visas for wounded Palestinian children constitute an “Islamic invasion” to Loomer; therefore, by the authority vested in her as That Crazy Lady Who Handcuffed Herself to Twitter HQ, they shall be revoked. Take that, wounded kids! Ya got LOOMERED!

As the founders intended.

The supposed wokening of the Cracker Barrel hit the least impressive people alive like a second 9/11, because we are living through the Dumbest of All Possible Times. Yeah, the Guinness people officially called it when they saw Chris Rufo’s dorky little call to “break the Barrel” before dying from exposure to unfiltered cringe in its purest form.

You guys Byron Donalds got to second base for the very first time in a Cracker Barrel parking lot and it was with JESUS. Can you even imagine anybody any Christliker than Byron Donalds? All my favorite Bible stories are about Jesus helping a rapist commit crimes and dressing like the rapist for good measure.

Is all this distracting you from those stubbornly unreleased Epstein Files? No? Howzabout Hegseth and RFK Jr. hold themselves a little Toxic Dipshit Decathlon? Events include pull-ups, whale corpse decapitation, and navigating an obstacle course in a suit that’s much too tight.

They sure do love spending our money on their little videos n’ parades n’ such, don’t they? Between Kristi Noem’s freeloading and Hegseth’s multi-million-dollar security detail, no wonder there’s no money left for cancer research.

Slavery was bad…OR WAS IT? The newly MAGAfied Smithsonian is Just Asking Questions™️!

So Texas passed their little mid-decade gerrymander (because Republican policies are so well-liked, you see), and Missouri and Indiana may be next. And of course Putin has rekindled the old fop’s passion for ending mail-in voting, so we’ve got all kinds of fun assaults on our democracy to look forward to.

…unless Gavin Newsom’s social media team finally makes the battered remnants of their tiny brains explode. They can’t figure out whether to shit or go blind, and the whole trick is just…a mirror. Yeah, this is what you look like. What you’ve always looked like. Dorks.

Don’t know that there’s a gerrymander crooked enough to protect y’all from the backlash to the trade war tax we get to pay in fun new ways all the dang time. That $50 hike to the PlayStation console is sure to be a big hit this Xmas season (for those families willing to risk the penalties of exceeding their two-doll allotment, that is.)

Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters thwarted the busloads of Antifas looking to lead thrilling lives indoctrinating th’youths of Oklahoma with a political loyalty test for teachers from just California and New York. DagNABbit! I had a whole plan to outsource fractions to a communist drag queen, but you’re just too wily for me, Ryan!

Ghislaine Maxwell definitely never witnessed any illegal behavior from the man with the power to pardon her, so we can close the book on that one, unless the book contains something unimaginably creepy, like say a birthday greeting to a child sex trafficker that culminates in a pubic hair signature.

Oh, and the President seized the means of production today, announcing the government had taken a 10% stake in Intel, so that’s –

“BINGO!”

What? You HAD that? That’s…reasonable, actually. Dammit, I was so close. Ah well, we’ll fill up another card next week.

I can hardly believe it, but the NEW COMIC BOOK keeps getting closer every day! LOOK HOW WONDERFUL JASON MUHR’S ART ON THIS BOOK IS:

Kickstarter coming…soon! In the meantime, if you enjoyed this lil’ diatribe, feel free to toss a buck or two into the ol’ tip jar (accepting, as you surely know by now, PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App!), or follow @john_luzar and sign up on the email list at showercapblog.com. And do stay safe out there, my friend…shit’s gettin’ real…