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.
The Defendant, the insult comic who talks more shit than Richard Pryor on the dumb dust, only without all the funny bits, says he’s facing a grand total of 561 years in the hoosegow.
Which is not nearly enough. But I’m a reasonable fellow. I’d settle for that.
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.
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 It is monumental as a historical document, but, as a legal document, it is carefully crafted, almost delicately etched.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.
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.”
A bear in the air just north of El Rancho Pendejo.
The clattering of helicopters overhead had become irksome, so I stepped out to see what the hell.
Hm. City cops, sheriff, KOAT-TV. … Goddamn it, has someone posted my résumé on NextDoor again?
Nope. Seems there was body count up the street around Larchmont and Montgomery. Just a short while earlier I had bicycled through that very area twice, at the start of a fine bike ride and again at its conclusion.
The media called it an “active shooter situation,” and indeed it was. Two people dead — one of them the suspect — and four wounded, two of them police officers. Happily, it seems neither sustained life-threatening injuries.
There were few details in a short presser I caught on Twitter, and nobody asked the question uppermost in my mind: How fucking stupid batshit insane do you have to be to start shooting citizens and throw down on the cops when there’s a police substation within earshot?
I arose in the dark of the morning to see a dusting of snow on the yard and the blinking lights of an aircraft as it traversed a slice of moon.
“Hell’s goin’ on around here?” I inquired of Herself, as is my practice.
“Fuckin’ Russians,” she grumbled.
“What are they doing?”
“Dominating the news cycle.”
And so they are.
I loathe the smell of fascism in the morning, whether it’s ours or theirs, and especially when it arrives before coffee. The overactive imagination screens a clip of some brass hat in the Pentagon going full George C. Scott (Buck Turgidson or George Patton, take your pick).
But as options go, our menu seems as limited as the bill of fare at a soup kitchen.
Sure, do what you can to choke off Russia’s income — Stoli sales will slump, theatrically, if only because we’ll need the money for gasoline. Africa is going to find itself short of grain. Lots of little people living in various valleys await the shit monsoon from above.
But I don’t expect the oligarchs are sweating much, unless they’re in the sauna.
Oh, they might not be able to strut their stuff on the Riviera for a while, but there’s always the Crimea. Plenty Krugerrands in the lockbox. Shop online from the dacha. Na zdorovye!
Mad Blog Media 