Trying times, friends. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m right on the brink of discovering precisely how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of my fragile sanity. Ah yes, I believe I feel the beak of the owl crushing down on my skull even now…let’s get the news in before I shatter.

In open defiance of a recent Supreme Court ruling, the Checks Are For Cucks and So Are Balances Administration has been rejecting new DACA applicants, because we’re just not going to have the rule of law between now and the election. Personally, I wouldn’t be doing donuts on John Roberts’ lawn if I knew I’d be begging him to throw out an election and keep me in power in just a few short months, but expecting long-term thinking from these clowns seems unfair at this point.

Because he is such a good little servant, Donnie Two-Scoops pulled out his crayon-scrawled register of PEEPUL TO GET BACK AT WHILE ME AM STILL PREZIDUNT, and compared it to Uncle Vlad’s Xmas list, in order to set priorities for his dwindling term. “Sticking it to that haughty Angela Merkel woman” was a point of mutual agreement, and so the U.S. is withdrawing 12,000 troops from Germany, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. Putin has reportedly gone into hiding, because he believes being photographed while tap-dancing with glee would undermine his carefully-crafted strongman image.

In his doomed quest to win back college-educated white women, Tangerine Idi Amin has commandeered an ice cream truck, and embarked, drenched in sweat that reeks of tanning lotions and cheeseburger grease, on a whirlwind tour of suburbia, shrieking about Joe Biden’s evil plot to abolish apple pie and friendly father/son games of catch, panicking more and more as he learns these people aren’t nearly as frightened and hateful as he desperately needs them to be. Yeah, Brad Parscale was the problem alright.

Everybody’s giving Government Cheese Goebbels grief because he’s too chickenshit to tell Putin, “Hey, it would be really cool if you could maybe stop putting bounties on American soldiers’ heads,” but to be fair, it’s extra tough to stand up to your boss in this job market. Also, as a practical matter, there probably just isn’t time after all the sniveling and groveling. ”C’mon Vlad, you promised, I took the troops outta Germany like you wanted, please gimmie some dirt on Joe Biden, I can’t make anything stick, Vlad, PLEASE, we both know I can’t handle prison!” And then Meadows bursts in with a stack of shit to sign. You know how it is.

Going local for a minute, some shitty white kid called Will Dismukes resigned his post as pastor of a Baptist church, though not his seat in the Alabama state legislature, when he got caught attending a birthday party for dead Confederate/KKK loser Nathan Bedford Forrest. Y’know, back when I was a theatre major in college, there’d occasionally be some pretentious douche who wanted to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, or Marlon Brando’s, or John Cazale’s if he was particularly tedious; this is the white supremacist version of that. These are dork klansmen, throwing the lamest theme parties on God’s green earth.

My least favorite trope in this nightmare reality show is probably the inevitable shitgeyser that erupts every time Littlefinger delegates anything important to his idiot son-in-law. Kid Nepotism’s latest game of Fantasy Chief of Staff has of course come at the expense of the nation’s coronavirus response, and if anyone has any as-yet-unpopped forehead veins they’re looking to preserve, I suggest you look away now, because it turns out one big reason the United States failed so spectacularly and disastrously in the early days of the pandemic was Jar-Jar’s sociopathically misguided belief that the only really dangerous outbreak zones were in blue states, so it would be good for his team politically to just LET THE VIRUS KILL PEOPLE, and then blame Democratic governors in the aftermath.

Now, that’s not only evil, but epically fucking stupid, VIRUSES CAN’T READ MAPS, JARED. Fuck, even the Paul Reiser character in Aliens would call Kushner a cretinous little nitwit, everyone can see it, everyone…except the President of the United States.

So that one pizza guy, the one who doesn’t understand economics and sexually harassed a bunch of women…Herman Cain. He’s dead now, because he caught Covid at that one place everybody told him he was gonna catch Covid, and it killed him, because that’s what Covid does. I’m sure you have a few pearl-clutchers in your feed insisting that we must treat Herman’s self-inflicted demise with great somberness and respect. Fuck that.

What Herman Cain chose to do with the end of his life was vile. He engaged in a deliberate effort to trick people into extremely unsafe, indeed possibly lethal behaviors. He told his followers that what he was doing, namely gathering indoors in the middle of a city experiencing a heavy coronavirus outbreak, without masks or social distancing, was safe. No doubt many of those followers trusted Herman, and some of them are sick or even dead right now. For those people, I feel sympathy and sorrow. For Herman Cain, well, he was trying very, very hard to hurt people, and now he can’t hurt anyone anymore. My mourning card has been booked up for months, sorry.

And now the Dumbest Man in Congress, Louie Gohmert, has tested positive as well, in spite of his extremely impressive public stance against mask-wearing. I confess I’m confused here; surely the virus finds such manly defiance intimidating; we all know there is no basic law of science that isn’t subject to immediate suspension when faced with a sufficiently masculine doubter, proclaiming “nuh-UH” with a puffed-out chest. That’s just how the universe works…in the Freedumb Caucus, anyway.

Of course, Louie is SO dumb that his existence isn’t defined by the mere absence of intelligence, but the often-violent projection of anti-intelligence, and thus, he can’t just admit, “I was wrong, folks, this virus is REAL, and it is DANGEROUS,” no, he has to bellow, “IT WUZ THE MASK WUT DONE IT” as he’s dragged off to quarantine. If there are no supply chain issues, I’d like to order a round of cognitive tests for Texas’ entire first district, please.

Panicked as his electoral prospects wither like his own dusty scrotum, Sharty McFly is pretty much just flipping through famous dictators’ biographies looking for ideas at this point, and so this week he finally floated the notion of delaying the election, as we always knew he would. The optimism boggles the mind, as though a few more months spent percolating in the lake of raw sewage he dropped on our heads would win converts as we grow accustomed to the smell.

I suppose he still believes the problem will mystically resolve on its own, that his ghostly father will one day appear before the coronavirus’ accountant, and with his astral checkbook offer a sum so large the disease will simply retire to the French Riviera. Guess he’s just afraid Daddy’s gonna wait until mid-November, one last I Never You Loved You before dragging him away to the Great Military School in the Sky.

Like most of his endeavors, Weehands McNodick’s pathetic attempt to redirect the media’s attention just as Barack Obama began his eulogy at John Lewis’ funeral failed spectacularly, and the world watched the former President’s speech, overflowing with grace and righteousness, with the sort of nostalgic longing seldom found outside Kenny Chesney lyrics. You realize, old man, Obama has barely begun to tear you apart on the virtual campaign trail, right?

Well, looka here, the Department of Homeland Security has been compiling little intelligence reports on American journalists covering the shenanigans in Portland. Considering DHS’ I Can Haz Secret Police? actions there, I can certainly understand their fervor to keep the homeland safe…from journalism; obviously it’s much easier to disseminate propaganda when there are no inconvenient videos of your own stormtrooper bullshit, but to bastardize a phrase, who secures the homeland from Homeland Security?*

Going one giant, dark step further, the Department of Justice is asking the courts to lift an order protecting journalists on the ground in Portland, alleging that there are just oodles and oodles of antifa super-soldiers out there pretending to be journalists, blah blah blah the point here is that the Van Disappearance Squad is asking for legal permission to start bashing reporters’ heads, and y’know, I don’t think we should give it to them.

Oh, and now hurricane season is bearing down on our Covid-ravaged shores? Luckily we’re experiencing a historic leadership surplus, so dealing with any storm damage’ll be easy-peezy, we’ll just have Ron DeSantis declare victory a few days before landfall, and move on with our lives; it’s a time-tested 2020 tactic.

And of course, President Crotchrot is still using all his tiny-fisted might to choke the life out of the coronavirus once and for all only not the coronavirus but rather the Post Office. Wow, the authoritarianism plotline and the pandemic plotline keep mingling in ways that would be really fun and interesting anyplace other than real life, don’tcha think?

Fuck. It’s no fuckin’ fun out there, is it, Resisters? But we’re in the home stretch now, we can tough this shit out, right? I think it was Aristotle who said, “The last 96 days of a game show host autocrat’s reign are always the toughest, but the beer will never taste better than it does on that 96th day.” So hang in there.

*I’m worried I didn’t say “homeland” enough in this paragraph.