Buckle up!

Road hard.

The Memorial Day Shopping Fiesta and Family Barbecue Getaway (Nothing to See Here, Move Along, Move Along) kicks off today with the murders most foul of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” and CBS News Radio, along with any remaining illusions that Americans live in a functioning democracy.

There is no truth to the rumor that the new national anthem for our next 250 years — or perhaps 250 days? Hours? — will be the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” reimagined by Black Sabbath. Or so we may hope, anyway.

One thing is certain: That cheery little ditty, along with an unauthorized Kid Rock cover of the Eagles’ song “The Last Resort,” will be in heavy rotation down in the Adolf & Eva Memorial Ballroom & Führerbunker. The lyric “Some rich men came and raped the land / nobody caught ’em” will be a huge laugh line for everyone save the slaves serving up the Big Macs and Diet Cokes.

Meanwhile, some good news: M-Day weekend gas prices are at a four-year high! But that won’t keep 39 million of us from cranking up the Family Yacht and burning a few tanks’ worth to spend time eating bad food poorly prepared and swilling tins of thin industrial lager with people we really don’t like all that much.

The Soma Double Cross takes five in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Last I looked go-juice was between $4.50 and $5 here in The Duck! City, which didn’t make AAA’s list of the top-10 Memorial Day getaways (the podium: Orlando, FL, Seattle, WA, and New York).

No worries here, bruh. I got my holiday shopping done early yesterday, before the ravening hordes could descend upon the grocery and strip the shelves bare like a cloud of fat betatted locusts. And today I ain’t driving nowhere, nohow, though I do expect to get out on a bike at some point. Yesterday was stellar in the Elena Gallegos Open Space; I saw only a few other trail users as I rumbled along on the old Soma Double Cross, and most seemed to be enjoying the wide-open space as much as I was.

Meanwhile, Republicans will be traveling home after shitting the bed in Congress. Here’s hoping their constituents have a few words with them about the horrible smell.

Sink or swim

I wouldn’t expect a warm reception back on dry land, Ratty old chum.

Who knew? There are some shit sandwiches that not even a Republican will eat.

Not on a holiday weekend, anyway.

The ballroom bunker and slush fund for scumbags apparently were not the delightful amuse-bouche Admiral Palsy thought they would be, and the usual congressional dine-and-dash going into a weeklong recess was downsized to a dash, period.

Well! No dessert for you lot. Yo, Rubio! Send this shit soufflé to Vance with my compliments. That shameless hoor will eat anything and smile while he does it.

Beam me up, Scotty

Got ourselves trapped again, eh, Thucydides old chap?

I see King Piggy the Sticky-fingered has covered himself with glory again. Doesn’t smell glorious, but then his snout is probably ruined from decades of horning fat rails of Adderall. His handlers should’ve maybe slipped a little more Thorazine into his Panda Express before letting him anywhere near a hot mic. Or his phone.

While Xi Jinping was making sly references to an Athenian historian’s musings on the Peloponnesian War, Piggy was squealing about how Sleepy Joe is to blame for — well, for everything, including the sinking of Atlantis, the crucifixion of Christ, and the 2008 real-estate bubble — and how “hot” the United States is now after he drove it into the ditch. “Hot” as in “on fire” and with nary a firefighter in sight.

The feeble old fool probably thinks “The Thucydides Trap” is a “Star Trek” episode, the one where Captain Kirk boinks the green gal.

Or maybe he thinks Thucydides is the antibiotic that saved him from one of the venereal diseases that constituted his Vietnam.

Shit, I’ll bet he can’t pronounce Thucydides, much less tell us anything about him. Probably never read any Barbara W. Tuchman, either. No Helen of Troy foldout.

Another day, another shooter

“Welcome to the hotel, California. … hey, wait, he’s got a gun!”

I was visiting The Associated Press website, checking out the security-cam video of our latest alleged would-be pestilential assassin dashing through the Washington Hilton towards the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Wank-Fest & Spooge-a-Thon, when the video snippet served me up an ad:

Well. Fuck me running. Ain’t that just the way it is? Some things will never change.

Dude was definitely breezing through, with what was reported to be quite the toolkit — “The suspect was carrying knives, a shotgun and a handgun, officials said,” according to The New York Times — and quien sabe? Maybe tax season was on his mind. He may have simply wanted to consult with The Pestilence and his lesser maladies about how best to dodge his fair share of the ever-heavier burden the dozy orange sonofabitch is imposing upon us day in and day out.

In any event, as this flag-pinned plague shambles ever on and on, lying through its false teeth like any other dementia victim denying at the top of what remains of his lungs that he has yet again shit the bed, I am less and less inclined to take at face value anything I read with the qualifier “officials said” attached. I have stayed in many a Hilton over the years, occasionally with a loaded firearm, and more than once I have been sorely tempted to haul it out, if only to focus someone’s attention.

“When I booked this overpriced shithole I said I wanted a room as far away from the elevator and the ice machine as was humanly possible. Also, was the previous occupant grooming a chimpanzee in the shower? I’ve seen barber shops with less hair on the floor. And what’s with the goddamn Keurig instead of a proper coffeemaker? If you force me into going to a Starbucks at stupid-thirty for my morning fix, I swear to Dog. …”

Etc.

In any event, I awakened this morning — not in a Hilton, praise Dog — possessed of the certainty that this is not the last time we will read the words “shots fired” in connection with His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered. “Every nation has the government it deserves,” as the political philosopher Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811.

A decade later, he wrote, “The sword of justice has no scabbard.”