Category: Assholes

Sun of a bitch

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Doctor, my eyes. …

El Rancho Pendejo in The Duck! City was the perfect spot to catch the 2023 annular solar eclipse.

Herself scored some paper safety goggles and we inspected the celestial event at our leisure, from the back patio.

Things grew dark and chilly, the birds went all radio silence, and the sun looked like a big Power button just waiting for Someone to click it off. Happily, no one did.

And you bet your ass I howled at the sucker like a werewolf. Got to keep the neighbors on their toes.

The light throughout was truly weird, with acid-flashback shadows on the brick pavers and concrete walkway. Put me in mind of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” it did.

You see, it was the eclipse. It came into my mind in the nick of time, how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages, and I saw my chance. I could play it myself, now, and it wouldn’t be any plagiarism, either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand years ahead of those parties.

But unlike Hank Morgan, I couldn’t derive any profit from the eclipse; our modern lords and ladies mostly keep their heads where the sun don’t ever shine, preferring to work their mischiefs in the dark. So I just enjoyed it.

All along the walkway, princes kept the view.

Smug shot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
Asshole by Vonnegut
This is not Ginger Hitler’s mug shot. It is Kurt Vonnegut’s drawing of an asshole, from “Breakfast of Champions.”

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Ginger Hitler immediately set about monetizing his Fulton County mug shot, because, hey, lawyers don’t work for free, unless you stiff ’em, which he does, which is why he has to (a) keep hiring new ones and (2) find some way to monetize things the rest of us might prefer to forget, like mug shots.

But that’s not the funny part.

The funny part is, according to Intelligencer, that one of the underfed cells in his brain trust, Chris LaCivita, fired off an aggro and illiterate warning on social media to anyone else hoping to turn a buck off The Face That Launched a Thousand Shits without having received “prior permission,” to wit, the copious wetting of a voracious orange beak.

“If you are a campaign, PAC, scammer and you try raising money off the mugshot … WE ARE COMING AFTER YOU. …”

This is strictly the hee, and also the haw. As law prof Betsy Rosenblatt told Spectrum News Cleveland, it’s likely that the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department — not the famously litigious Moue That Roared — holds the copyright as the creator of the image.

Also, according to Reuters, the Fulton County court distributed the mug shot to media outlets, which are always — especially in these dark days — eager to accept a handout, even one as fugly as this.

Adds Intelligencer:

Team Trump loves threatening to sue people, but its follow-through rate is pretty low. Plus right now Trump has far bigger fish to fry than the person selling Trump-mug-shot toilet paper on Etsy.

Hey, you never know. So many lawyers, so little money. …

Ash, holes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments
Fire on the mountain? Nope. Smoke from Canada.

The haze around here lately is courtesy of our neighbors to the north, who continue to be on fire.

Down south, Georgia finds itself contending with an unnatural disaster, as a conga line of douchebags waltzes in and out of the Fulton County sneezer after cutting bond-and-release deals of various weights.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla supervises the landscapers.

Here at El Rancho Pendejo we have our ongoing landscaping project, which involves neither conflagration nor sedition.

As it enters an extended ditch-digging/pipe-laying phase I thank the gods that I stumbled into journalism, much of which can be done sitting down, in the shade.

Still, I’d gladly stand for hours in the Georgia sun if I got to see the Tangerine Turd get printed and mugged, especially if he came off looking half as frazzled as Rudy the Mooch. Dude looks like a drunk goat trying to shit a rusty tomato can.

Trenchant commentary

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
A final trench coat.

If trial, conviction, and a long-overdue fatal stroke proceed apace we have a fine disposal site in the back yard for Cheeto Benito.

He would spend eternity in crucifixion pose, too, which should suit his persecution complex. Some might call it Death Yoga for Traitors.

I know, I know — it looks awfully narrow for his bulk. But it may actually be a size or three too large once Jack Smith is finished with him.

The biggest downside I can see, other than the strong likelihood that none of this will ever come to pass, is that all the poison he sucked through his pursed little piehole during a lifetime of culinary sins would probably kill all our new plants, shrubs, and trees.

Good reads

• Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. You have to love a guy who writes so clearly and forcefully, while throwing in a bonus reference to “The Verdict,” one of my favorite Paul Newman flicks.

• Michael Tomasky at The New Republic. Don’t mourn, party, sez he.

• Charles P. Pierce at Esquire. My man Chazbo, never at a loss for words, writes thusly:

In fact, it is in its precision where lies this indictment’s real power. In no place, does Smith get out over his skis. It is monumental as a historical document, but, as a legal document, it is carefully crafted, almost delicately etched. For example, there is no talk of citing the former president* for treason or for insurrection. Smith clearly has crafted an indictment precisely drawn to conform to the whopping silo of evidence he has compiled and nothing else. And it is precisely drawn to sit the former president* down under a swinging lightbulb in a dark interrogation room.

• Peter Baker at The New York Times. He’s covered five presidents, so you know he’d have some thoughts on this guy. Here’s one.

George Washington established the precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two of those terms, a restraint later incorporated into the Constitution through the 22nd Amendment. John Adams established the precedent of peacefully surrendering power after losing an election. Ever since, every defeated president accepted the verdict of the voters and stepped down. As Ronald Reagan once put it, what “we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”

Until Mr. Trump came along.