If anybody had this week in the office pool as the one when the world’s many asshats would finally stop fucking more or less everything up, and let the rest of us just LIVE OUR FUCKING LIVES IN PEACE, you lost your fucking money, didn’tcha? Well, feel free to seek shelter from the merciless barrage of Will Smith takes in the following paragraphs:

Welcome to week whatever of Vladimir Putin’s Dunning-Kruger War, everything’s going great, thanks for asking. Maybe nobody fell for your tricksy fake diplomacy, and maybe your military is retreating, with nothing to show for its efforts but t-shirts reading I Briefly Occupied Chernobyl and All I Got Was This Lousy Dose of God Knows How Much Radiation, but otherwise it’s been a veritable clinic on conquest; you could give seminars at CPAC, or whatever that Nick Fuentes thing is.

Yes, with the dare I say yugely successful completion of Phase One, (which is the phase where you accidentally shoot down your own planes, tactics 101, everybody knows that) Operation: Please Please Please Fuck Up Less You Guys may now commence in earnest!

But can Vlad the Miscalculator’s clown army successfully retrench to achieve even these vastly reduced new war goals? I mean, with the casualties they’re taking, Russia seems to be demilitarizing the wrong country. Personally, I think if you can’t get through one measly month of your war of aggression without begging your Syrian buddies to replenish your supply of bullet sponges, you probably never had much of a shot at restoring the full glory of the Soviet Empire, bucko.

Meanwhile, Doubleplus Good Planner of Wars Putin has placed his own, personal Beanie Baby collection up for auction on eBay to anybody willing to pay in rubles, and Russia’s getting kicked out of the G20 the hard way, but maybe, just maybe, Bret Stephens is right, and this monthlong fuckup parade actually masked the master plan of a KGB super genius playing eleventy-fifth-dimensional chess, and the West is playing directly into his hands by providing the arms that’re destroying his military machine in front of the watching world, and taint-punting his cut-rate economy into the fucking sun.

“Yeah, but WHAT IF THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED ALL ALONG?”

Or, what if Bret’s pompous fanfic is the most perfect example to date of the neuron-rotting condition doctors are calling Contrarian Pundit Brain? I’m starting to suspect NYT finds their conservative columnists by wandering into wingnut think thanks and offering the gig to whoever can fit the most nickels up their nose.

I see Kid Kompromat simply cannot stop himself from begging the Butcher of Mariupol for help with his petty, personal, political fixations. Y’know what? Dig up your own goddamn dirt for once, you lazy fuck. You should try doing work, just one time, if only for the novelty.

New studies confirm that, in defiance of the fanatical certainty of the Science Ain’t the Boss of Me crowd, medicine designed to de-worm livestock is precisely as effective against the coronavirus as anyone whose brain hadn’t been devoured by maggots would imagine it to be, which is to say, not fucking at all. Obviously. OBVIOUSLY.

We had a whole-ass national debate about that shit. About ivermectin. People died. Thousands and fucking thousands of ‘em. Because the terrorists win if we (checks notes) listen to doctors during a global health emergency, you see. That’s “populism.” Anti-elitism taken to its mad, suicidal extreme.

YOU CAN HAVE MY COMPLETELY USELESS HORSE MEDICINE WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS!!!!!

Ok. Those terms are acceptable.

Science is actually amazing, by the way, y’all don’t know what you’re missing. Why, just this past week, we witnessed a phenomenon so rare, most assumed it was entirely beyond the realm of possibility: Kevin McCarthy actually pushed back on one of the proto-fascists in his feral caucus! It was the political equivalent of giant squid footage, trust me.

No, not for inciting violence or attending white nationalist clambakes, don’t be silly, I’m talking about young Maddy Cawthorn, who baselessly, nefariously accused his GOP colleagues of being fun enough to throw coke orgies.

Young man, the Republican Party may’ve devolved into a tangle of plague rats, snapping at one another in a liposuction clinic dumpster, but by Saint Ronnie’s Pickled Testes, the Eleventh Commandment yet reigns!

Assclown Autogolpe apparatchik John Eastman has been ordered to turn more than 100 emails over to the January 6th commission, because it turns out there’s no attorney-client privilege in criminal conspiracies to overthrow the federal government, or so says some deep state “judge,” anyhow.

Oh, and said commission is thinking about calling in Ginni Thomas, to…I dunno, to ask her what the bees in her head have been whispering lately, perhaps? Somebody on that committee needs to cut to the dang chase and say, “Level with us: what’s the nuttiest thing your SITTING SUPREME COURT JUSTICE husband believes? Is it just QAnon, or are we talkin’ lizard people and Jewish space lasers here? Like, do you two have plans to set JFK Jr. up with somebody’s daughter when he comes back?” The public has a right to know this stuff.

Also, I guess there’s a seven-hour gap in the Tangelo-Tinted Taint Tumor’s phone records, from the day of the insurrection, like, during the actual Capitol Riot. I’m sure he was just, y’know…praying. Or trying to figure out how the DVR works, so he could preserve the images of his precious, loser white boy mob, to wank to down in Marm-a-Lago.

I tell you what, folks, it is a goddamn regressive feeding frenzy in the red states right now, and with so much blood in the water already, with the attacks on voting rights and reproductive rights, and the bullshit CRT panic, I suppose it was inevitable they’d turn their teeth towards the LGBTQ community sooner or later, but even within the confines of this unwieldy, way-too-long shark metaphor, I’m astonished at the viciousness.

“Grooming.” That’s the old, slanderous trash these shameless fucks are once again tossing around, with unrestrained glee at another successful heist of the ol’ Overton window by the forces of extremism; Jesus, it’s like they’re browsing SPLC links looking for talking points.

Now Ron DeSantis is about a week away from ordering airstrikes on Epcot, and while Marjorie Taylor Greene remains incapable of assembling coherent thoughts, there’s no mistaking the raw bigotry at the heart of her venomous (if nonsensical) attack on Pete Buttigieg.

It’s the stuff that hate crimes are made of. And they know this.

But they keep on feeding this goddamn Q monster, because, well, given recent history, I’ll allow it’s easier than defending their record. Still, whatever its effectiveness as a get-out-the-vote technique of last resort, this policy of mass radicalization keeps causing violence, DUH, and I guess my personal belief is that the American ideal inherently implies an inalienable right to freedom from the homicidal outbursts of emotionally stunted, easily dupable white men. Call me old-fashioned.

But gee whiz, these weirdos are really scrambling to install their kooky new death cult ideology as the official state religion wherever possible.

And I just think y’all should have to formally codify your shit first, because you’re still in that shifting, Weimar Republic sort of place, and the impulse towards lawless hedonism keeps clashing with your deep-seated prudishness in…fairly creepy ways, if we’re honest. Apropos of nothing, here’re some thoughts on parenthood from Rudy Giuliani’s impossibly fucked-up kid.

Holy balls. Give Todd Solondz the Giuliani biopic, right fucking now.

Seriously though, who gets to contribute to the MAGA Bible? Where’re y’all drawing the line? Does Alex Jones get a chapter? Obviously the Big Lie is Commandment #1, so Chris Wallace is out, but will you be locking in Lara Logan’s “evolution is a Rothschild-funded hoax” drivel, or are you holding out for something even batshitter?

Didja see that story about how Off-Brand Orbán casually ripped off the poor White House photographer who’d shown the courtesy to refrain from publishing any candid snaps of the U.S. President leering at his own daughter from behind the Resolute desk? And you know there were tons of those. Anyway, turns out Donald Trump is something of a jerk, who knew?

Quick sidebar: the only aspect of the whole Cult45 thing that legitimately confuses me anymore is that anybody anywhere still trusts this cheapest of crooks, or expects loyalty from him. Ask Rudy Giuliani how that worked out. Ask Michael Cohen. Mo Brooks. Hey, ask Mike Pence.

Ask Ted Cruz, because I guess they don’t teach the snake story at Harvard Law. Hey, not to offer unsolicited advice or anything, but live your life so the Washington Post can never publish a deep dive into your simpering, reputation-shredding servitude to a dwindling fascist thug who publicly insulted both your father and your wife.

Actually, Don’t Be Ted Cruz is a fairly solid mantra, sure to serve you well in many, if not most aspects of the human condition, ranging from vacation planning to beard grooming to citizenship generally.

Now, just because we all saw the Brobdingnagian collapse of Little Donnie Dotard’s pitiful Twitter knockoff coming a mile away doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still point and laugh at his latest humiliating failure. Or at Devin Nunes, who gave up a seat in Congress for this short, sharp ride on the Titanic. Golly, and it seemed like such a sure thing.

Oh hey, ODD YARNS finally arrived from the printer, so if you backed the latest comic Kickstarter, I’ll have your books in the mail NEXT WEEK. It’s in Louis DeJoy’s hands at that point, so…good luck.

Ok, that’s more than enough of this shit, I think. Thanks for reading, stay safe out there, and while you’re always invited to buy me a beer if you enjoyed the post, this week, circumstances force me to ask you to pay in rubles, if at all possible.