It was only a few short days ago when so many Resisters fell into despair, certain the Barr memo had delivered the Treasonweasel Adminstration such an overwhelming victory, we could ne’er hope to recover. O ye of little faith. If ye trust in nothing else in this world, trust in Donald Trump’s nigh-supernatural ability to spin gold into cat turds.

So, about nine seconds after I posted my last piece, news broke that Baron Golfin von Fatfuk had decided to stop defending the Affordable Care Act in court, in the current about-as-serious-as-Dane-Cook’s-Hamlet lawsuit.

I confess, I initially thought this couldn’t possibly be real. Not on the very eve of the Barr/Mueller memo, and the best headlines of his entire term to date.  Nobody’s that stupid.  Nobody would pivot from such a gift to the very less-popular-than-getting-Ebola-at-a-Nickelback-concert policy that decimated your party in the midterm elections just four short months ago.

My god, he’s got the political instincts of a tumor on yak’s testicle.  It’s like winning the lottery, then immediately spending every penny on a machine that heats cannonballs until they begin to melt and then right at that moment fires them directly at your own genitals.  It’s the dumbest act yet by a very, very, very, dumb man.

And if anybody out there is terrified at this news, worried that a return to the bad old days of no protections for people with pre-existing conditions might bankrupt you and shorten your life, fear not, for Susan Collins has expressed concern, or disappointment, or possibly even consternation. Please rest easy knowing that if the problem can be solved by a furrowed brow and hollow words spoken in passing to a reporter in a Capitol Hill hallway, Senator Collins will save us all.

Alabama Congressdope Mo Brooks woke up, prayed to the Jefferson Davis Funko Pop he keeps on his bedside table, and said to himself, “Y’know who doesn’t get quoted nearly enough on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives?  HITLER, THAT’S WHO!” So, as part of the GOP’s ongoing Operation: Icarus, he went after Democrats with a dramatic reading from Mein Kampf, like your average totally sane person.

What’s extra fun about this episode is remembering that even Mo somehow wasn’t nutty enough for the screeching hatemarmots who vote in Alabama’s Republican primaries, so when he ran for Senate, they chose a literal child molester instead.

Buried in a story about old FBI investigations into the Shart Organization or some other boring shit, we learned that while Weehands McNodick was still married to Marla Maples, she fucked Michael Bolton while he was out of town.

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHHHHHH CUCKED BY MICHAEL BOLTON!!! You can keep your Mueller Report, y’all, this is all I need. If I was Nancy Pelosi, I’d begin every meeting with Lil’ Donnie Two Scoops going forward by muttering “Michael Bolton fucked your wife” under my breath.  I’d make a little Michael Bolton pin and wear it on my lapel at all times. I’d slip song lyrics into conversation whenever possible, like, “After the recent flooding, Nebraska really needs a little time, love, and tenderness, don’tcha think, Mr. President?”

Betsy DeVos is here to tell all you filthy takers who didn’t raise yourselves up by the bootstraps and get your peasant asses born into fabulous wealth some hard truths! America, we simply cannot afford both the Special Olympics AND Hairplug Himmler’s weekly golf vacations, and you certainly wouldn’t suggest we begrudge Dear Leader his favorite grift!

This is yet another testament to the political instincts of the Dotard and all the Very Fine/Best People he surrounds himself with, by the way. These cuts aren’t likely to actually happen (Betsy can appropriate all the DeVos family money she wants for her yacht collection, but when it comes to the U.S. Treasury, Congress is in charge, you plutocrat horror), but you take the massive media hit anyway. It’s weird that somebody who’s never worked in her life is so bad at her job, isn’t it?

I see Squeezably Soft Telefascist Sebastian Gorka and the soggy-with-spittle loons of the QAnan movement find themselves at loggerheads. If there’s some way we can get these two sides to work out their troubles, ideally with hammers and hacksaws and bleach, I’m willing to referee.  Excuse me, I mean “moderate.”

And of course the battle for Mueller Report rages on. Attorney General William Barr stuffed the report down the front of his pants, and has begun gyrating tauntingly outside of Adam Schiff’s office, telling him in a sing-song voice that if he still wants to see it so badly he can just come and get it.

It’s kinda funny that these clowns imagine they can redact this report, led by a partisan hack famous for cover-ups, and expect the American people to trust the result. I’m told Dr. Ronny Jackson has been placed in charge of the redacting process, so at least he’ll knock a couple hundred pages off the real thing.

The National Rifle Association is opposing the Violence Against Women Act because of a provision that would prevent domestic abusers from buying guns. You know, I used to be an actor, and I played a lot of villains. It can be challenging to unwind and inhabit the psychological processes that lead people to do terrible things, but eventually, you figure it out.  Still, I’m sitting here, trying to piece together the thinking of a human being who has concluded “BY GOD THE RIGHTS OF A MAN WITH A HISTORY OF ABUSING WOMEN TO PURCHASE AND CARRY A MURDER MACHINE SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED, YOU COMMIE BASTARDS!!!!!!” and…I’m coming up empty.

As expected, the vote to override President Gas Station Urinal Cake’s veto of the Shove Your Bullshit Fake Emergency Declaration Up Your Poop Chute Act of 2019 fell short in the House. Remember, this wasn’t a policy vote, it was a “is the Constitution still a thing” vote. The majority of the GOP is casually ceding American democracy to a barely-sentient wannabe Duterte, not for any grand cause or epic endeavor, but for a big, stupid, wall, that nobody wants and that won’t solve a single problem.

To bastardize A Man For All Seasons: “It profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for walls?”

You know, just because he’s been completely exonerated by a memo that goes out of its way to mention how very not exonerated he is, don’t think for a moment that the Candycorn Skidmark is free from trials n’ troubles. Why, did you know those whiners down in Puerto Rico are still asking the government for aid JUST because their island was decimated by a massive hurricane and their megabigot President has obstructed their recovery at every turn? The NERVE!

Anyway, in case this is getting glossed over thanks to our subatomic expectations of Boss Turdmaggot’s basic human decency, the story here is the President of the United States of America complaining about being called upon to help American citizens in need. He has tried his damndest, from the very beginning, to leave these people to suffer and die. Because of their ethnicity. Without the slightest pushback from his party. In any civilized society, he’d have been removed from power and imprisoned for what he did, and didn’t do, in Puerto Rico. But us? We’re stuck with Republicans. 

At the risk of being divisive, the next President should like people. You wanna bicker about variations in health care policy, go ahead, but I figure so long as we wind up with somebody with at least a fleeting trace of empathy, it’ll be a significant upgrade.

Meet the newest rising star in the White Supremacist Hate Cult we call the Republican Party, Pennsylvania State Representative Stephanie Borowicz! Steph puked up as appalling a load of hate speech as you’re likely to see this week, in response to the PA House seating its very first female Muslim legislator, and had the motherfucking gall to call it a “prayer.”

She’s the perfect Evangelical, ain’t she? Not even a moment’s passing concern for the teachings of Christ, no no, all she’s interested in is membership in a club that gives her license to spit on anybody different. When people talk about “unity” with the 21st century American right, show them this lady, and demand they identify the precise halfway point where we’re supposed to meet this hate-filled little shit and shake hands.

Utah Senator Mike Lee is one of Ted Cruz’s only actual friends, so I don’t know why y’all expect him to act rationally. When he brings his sub-Carrot-Top prop comedy to the floor of the Senate, is it really news? A man who is an idiot is going to behave like an idiot, that’s just science.

Although speaking of science, Lee’s suggestion that climate change can be solved by gettin’ married and makin’ babies is, um…let’s call it “not yet peer-reviewed.” You watch a guy like Mike mindlessly ramble with the unearned self-regard only the truly incompetent are blessed with, and you think, “wow, I wouldn’t let that dude scramble an egg without heavy supervision,” and then you remember he gets to write laws that all the rest of us have to obey and if anybody needs to cry or scream or beat their head against the wall until they’ve uncovered the wiring and insulation, I totally understand.

I guess Fed nominee Stephen Moore owes $75,000 in back taxes. Hey, remember when that very thing was a big enough scandal to keep Tom Daschle from becoming HHS Secretary?  How fucking QUAINT is that? We’re one Cabinet resignation away from watching Kellyanne Conway condescendingly insist that the American people don’t mind that the Department of Energy is headed by a guy who lobbed a hand grenade into his neighbor’s kitchen over an un-raked yard, and we’re acting like a five-figure tax bill is even news? This is some straight Saturday Evening Post shit.

We’re so thirsty for Mueller news, we all clicked on that push notification that didn’t tell us shit beyond “it’s over 300 pages,” didn’t we? God, we’re pathetic. Ok, Billy, now, is it bigger than a breadbox?

Quick shout out to whoever busted out the Creature From the Black Lagoon mask at David Bernhardt’s confirmation hearing today. We need more of that sort of thing, like perhaps lingering outside Stephen Miller’s office wearing a bald cap covered in spray-on hair, or dressing the entire White House press corps in Michael Bolton masks.

Boy howdy, Republicans sure do wanna fire Adam Schiff, don’t they? I guess they haven’t read their Welcome to the House Minority initiation handbooks yet. Nobody has to do anything you say anymore, campers. You’re purely decorative. You “demand” Schiff’s resignation? Well, to paraphrase my daddy, “Demand in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.”

Yet another WaPo deep dive into the Grand Wizard Grifter’s business history revealed A FUCKTON OF CRIMES. It’s full of good, responsible, journospeak, with stuff about “inflated net worth” and “the role of the accountant” and blah blah blah but what it’s documenting is a long-ass history of extremely illegal fraud. The President is a career criminal, evidence of his crimes is in the hands of law enforcement, and if he and his cabal of enabling thugs imagine William Barr’s little book report delivered him permanently from all legal consequences, well, I look forward to their inevitable moment of surprise.

We learned that Director of National Intelligence/Last Adult Standing Dan Coats nearly resigned, but ultimately Mike Pants threw his arms around him and begged him to stay.  Reports that the Vice President lingered in the embrace for an uncomfortable length of time and complimented the DNI on the smell of his hair are unconfirmed at this point.

Anyway, seems Pissant Pol Pot got mad at Coats because he was unable, or unwilling, to search for proof that President Obama wiretapped him during the 2016 campaign. No big deal, just an attempt to force the intelligence community to fabricate evidence for a 100% made-up “crime.” I wonder if there are any books in Mo Brooks’ library that might prove instructive on this point.

Well folks, this week, for the first time during the entire shitworm regime, the calamity in my personal life rose to match the craziness of the news cycle. (Nothing to be worried about, just a little pet health scare, and she’s fine now.) Just forgive me if you find this post a little below the established standard for comprehensiveness/accuracy/spelling-n-grammar/poop-jokery. I hope to be back at full strength next week!