Category: Derision

Wishboned

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Oh, eat me.

What’s on the Thanksgiving menu this year? Why, it’s a heaping helping of the fabled Epstein Files, which everyone expects — hopes? — to feature the sticky deets of something on the order of Caligula, the Joker, and Prince Prospero hosting a masked ball at the House of Usher on the Island of Dr. Moreau.

Bon appétit!

Anyone else get a whiff of teenage miscreants frantically policing up the red Solo cups, roaches, and rubbers from an unauthorized bacchanal as their parents pound on the door?

“Hold on, be right there, uh, just got out of the shower, getting dressed, door seems to be stuck for some reason, no, don’t know what that smell is (sotto voce: open some fucking windows for chrissakes, throw a pillow over that stain on the couch, and … shit, is that Suzi curled around the toilet?). …”

It is the hee, and also the haw. This den of thieves has all the transparency of the Shield Wall on Dune, and I don’t see Paul Muad’dib rolling up on a sandworm with the family atomics to let a bit of daylight into the fucker anytime soon.

What we’re likely to see once the fear-sweat evaporates is the massively redacted, heavily abridged, Democrats-only, Reader’s Digest version of a Nextdoor tirade about The Worst Airbnb Ever, featuring a hidden lo-res camera in the crapper and a creepy host who kept popping over in his bathrobe “to see if you needed anything.”

I mean, c’mon:

Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, said that once the Epstein resolution becomes law, the Justice Department could not refuse to release the files, or release them with the names of perpetrators redacted. The resolution prohibits the redaction of names “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity.” 

“They will be breaking the law if they do not release these files,” he added. While true, the only way to enforce the Epstein resolution would be for Congress to hold President Trump’s Justice Department in contempt, and for the department to then prosecute itself for failing to release the files, an unlikely sequence of events.

Breaking the law? Seriously? For this lot, that’s what it’s there for.

Dick Cheney dies, goes to Hell

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
“Welcome, Dick. Been a long time since we struck our bargain back when that other Dick was running the White House.”

If you can’t say anything nice … well, let’s get started!

Dick Cheney was smart, mean, and a brass-balled traitor to the spirit of America who thought the Constitution a motley collection of outdated recommendations and never missed a chance to pants Lady Justice whenever she had her back turned.

He made his bones in Richard Nixon’s White House, hitching a ride there on Donald Rumsfeld’s coattails, and then hung around DeeCee in various capacities, improving the nation’s governance in the same way an untended and freshly dead raccoon under a porch improves a home’s resale value.

A five-deferment draft dodger turned back-office warmonger, Cheney helped leave a trail of bodies, ours and theirs, in Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He shot one of his own friends in the face during a quail hunt and the friend apologized for all the fuss. But Cheney never copped to fucking up, in that instance or any of the other bloody debacles in which he played a role.

Cheney was a big fan of the sort of fascist cosplay we’ve come to see from the present occupant of the Oval Office — the USA Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, indefinite detentions sans hearings or charges, brutal interrogations, etc. — but only when he had the president’s ear. Thus he was not a fan of his fellow draft dodger, the serial bankrupt and convicted felon presently turning the White House into a Gilded Palace of Sin (h/t Gram Parsons and Charles P. Pierce).

So, when he finally got the “strong, robust executive authority” of his dreams, Cheney decided he didn’t care for it. It wouldn’t take his calls.

Now he’s off to join his old mentor Rumsfeld in the afterlife, where — according to some religious traditions, anyway — another strong, robust executive authority awaits him.

I don’t know whether that head of state will require his advice, either. He seems to be doing just fine without it. Shucks, Hell isn’t half full.