He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.
Author: Patrick O'Grady
After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
The pestilence of the Benighted States, Wally O’Steele, a.k.a. Artie Deal, wants a Big, Beautiful Wall® at the nation’s southern boundary to keep brown people* from crossing the border to work anywhere other than at his hotels or golf courses.
Unable to procure funding for same, he has instead walled off the feddle gummint from its own tax-paying citizens, idling more than a few of them in the process and forcing others to work without pay while selling their Christmas presents on eBay to keep from freezing to death in the dark.
It’s a hard reign, and the water — if that’s what it is — just keeps rising.
Man the lifeboats and rig for heavy seas, matey — it’s the latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch.
* Russian oligarchs and Saudi princelings get a pass, of course, along with a coupon for a complimentary fluff and fold at Artie Deal’s Motor Inn & Money Laundry.
With neither Mexico nor the United States interested in underwriting his dreams of a Wall, President Wally O’Steele has proposed privatizing the project by handing it over to the Girl Scouts of Southwest Texas.
“They’re gonna have to sell something a helluva lot tastier than Thin Mints to make the nut, but that’s how the cookie crumbles, amirite?” slobbered O’Steele, flanked by his alleged wife Melons, wearing a Girl Scout uniform three sizes too small and lobbing condoms and poppers into a mostly empty Luby’s parking lot in McAllen, Texas.
“No Brownies!” he added, digging with a stubby finger at a crust of Adderall clogging one nostril. “Not on this side of my Wall, anyway.”
I just rang up our freshman representative in DeeCee, Deb Haaland, and asked that she and her colleagues start working up articles of impeachment.
Haaland was quick out of the chute with a response to last night’s State of the Wall Address, saying:
“The real national emergency right now is thousands of New Mexicans not being able to put food on the table or pay rent, because of the government shutdown. New Mexicans need quality public education, good paying jobs, and a renewable-energy economy — the wall does nothing to address those issues. On day one, the House passed a bill to get federal workers back to work and paid, and now it’s time for the Senate and the President to do their part.”
I imagine that the congresswoman has a pretty full schedule, being new to the job, but as I told the woman who answered the phone, “This administration is a cartoon that never was funny, and it’s long past time the show was canceled.”