Piece in our time

January 8, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

“Ve vant only piece … a piece of Venezuela, a piece of Greenland. …”

Maybe I should count my blessings.

Herself has a good job, plus a small pension from PERA set to start in a couple months. I have my Social Security. We have health insurance. The house and cars are paid for, we live frugally, and our financial adviser says we’re in fine shape.

But I just can’t stop thinking about Nazis.

Goddamnit, I fucking hate fucking Nazis. Especially the homegrown variety. We should be making them jump off bridges. And not into Venezuela or Greenland, either.

Michael O’Hanlon recently wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs that noted, accurately, and with the usual disclaimers, that when it comes to national security policy the current federal management really isn’t that much different from a number of its predecessors.

Ohhhh-kay. Thanks for the history lesson, Mickey. What say we try learning from our mistakes? Remembering the past to avoid being condemned to repeat it? The name George Santayana ring any bells in your cerebral carillon?

It’d be comical if it weren’t so serious. Which of the various Marvel timelines are we experiencing now, in which an unelected strutting fuck-bubble like Obergruppenführer Stephen Miller is running the country, giving Kent State scholarships to educate anyone who won’t do as they’re told, while his alleged supervisor whiles away the hours nailing Hobby Lobby kitsch to the White House walls, cheating at golf, and watching on TV as “Happy Hour” Hegseth punishes another two-bit dictator for stealing the boss’s dance moves?

If they were mine, I’d leave them out on the street with a handlettered sign reading, “Free.” Or maybe just park them in the shitter at Mar-a-Lago next to all those classified documents that should’ve served as his ticket to Leavenworth until Thanos snapped his fingers. Or was it Eileen Cannon? Whatever.

“Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys here?” asks Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., in an interview with Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic.

Not according to the gin pig at the top of the DoD org chart, who’d like to hang Kelly’s pelt on his office wall, no doubt in part because (a) Kegsbreath would like to see what a pair of actual testicles looks like, and (2) Kelly is making presidential noises just in case we ever have another one of those elections.

But first we have to make damn sure we have some midterms, this year. Take the House and the Senate; impeach, convict, and remove Comandante Piggy — take a seat and another fistful of Bayer’s finest, Porky, watch those cankles swell like poisoned puppies in the summer sun— and then, in 2028, reclaim the White House.

And none of this “let’s not look back” bullshit. Not this time. What’s the phrase? Oh, yeah: Never again.

Call me selfish, but I wanna get back to scribbling my little tee-hees, and I find this relentless “America über alles!” screeching a huge distraction.

Yo, Nazis. Here are your MAGA hats, there’s your bridge, what’s your hurry?

‘Our long national nightmare. …’

January 6, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

… is not over.

It wasn’t over on Aug. 9, 1974, when Gerald R. Ford trotted out that boogeyman-be-gone bullshit upon assuming the presidency vacated by Richard M. Nixon, a rat fleeing the ship of state he did his best to sink.

And Ford went on to be even more stunningly full of shit when he added:

Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.

A month later, Ford finally achieved escape-velocity, bullshit-wise, when he granted “a full, free and absolute pardon” to his predecessor, a man whom Hunter S. Thompson called “so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”

Some of us thought that was as bad as it was ever going to get.

Ho, ho, as the Good Doktor would say. We were wrong.

We have elevated some remarkably stupid, ineffectual, and/or venal hombres to the presidency since then. Not Ford, though. Nobody voted him into the gig, but he certainly got voted out in ’76 when the nation decided, well, fuck it, they’d rather have a Georgia peanut farmer in the Oval Office than the knucklehead who waved Tricky Dicky off to San Clemency with nothing but his pension and related benefits to keep him warm in retirement.

And even now, when we appear to have reached our political nadir, the creaky national machinery in the tiny palsied handsies of a senile, shambling, burger-gobbling narcoleptic, a convicted felon with a mean streak a mile wide and an unquenchable thirst for wealth, power, and vengeance, who apparently has a joy buzzer installed in his diapers so an aide can shock him awake, however briefly, to unleash a torrent of non sequiturs to be dutifully chronicled, analyzed, and excreted by the press corpse, well … I’m not about to tell you that this is as bad as it’s ever going to get.

Pogo — himself a candidate for the presidency in 1952 and ’56 — hit the nail on the head back in 1971, when Tricky Dicky was still kneewalking drunk around the White House, arguing with the paintings and looking for an exit that didn’t involve a perp walk in cuffs. Had we insisted upon it, we might have been spared some of what was to come.

But we didn’t. And so it goes.

“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Pogo. Truer words, etc.

Julius Seizure’s bananas republic

January 3, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. … This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. — Plato, The Republic

The Congress shall have Power to … declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water. … — the U.S. Constitution

‘Tedious and burdensome’

September 19, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Page 1 of 85. I’m surprised the judge didn’t order these ambulance-chasers summarily hanged.

Well, “tedious and burdensome” is one way to describe The Pestilence’s latest lawsuit against The New York Times.

“Wall-to-wall bullshit” is another. Or “the ramblings of an ADHD preschool dropout ‘parented’ by an outlaw-biker uncle who makes him work without safety gear in his poorly ventilated meth lab.”

But Judge Steven D. Merryday of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida clearly is not one for hyperbole, and so he confined his observations to phrases like “tedious and burdensome,” and “florid and enervating,” noting that in alleging only two simple counts of defamation, “the complaint consumes eighty-five pages.”

“A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner,” Hizzoner wrote.

He added — without giggling, which must have been difficult, because this shit is funnier than Jimmy Kimmel on a good day — that the complaint, as written, “stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart” legal requirements that complaints must be “a short and plain statement of the claim.”

And then Merryday wrapped things up the way editors of my early attempts at journalism were known to do, by crumpling that big ol’ 85-page pile of bushwa into a wad and throwing it at the authors, with further instructions appended.

“This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner,” Merryday wrote. “The complaint is STRUCK with leave to amend within twenty-eight days. The amended complaint must not exceed forty pages, excluding only the caption, the signature, and any attachment.”

Then he dropped the mic and walked off stage.

ICE, ICE, maybe?

July 16, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Paranoia strikes deep, as the fella says.

Coming home from a grocery run yesterday I turned into the cul-de-sac to see a nondescript white Chevy SUV parked in front of the new neighbors’ house.

Didn’t think anything of it at first — new neighbors mean strange vehicles full of inspectors, handymen, and new neighbors.

And then, as I rolled past, three largish individuals in light-blue shirts, dark-blue trousers, and thick black vests stepped out of the vehicle and stalked across the street to the Bulgarians’ place.

I call them Bulgarians because I think that’s their nationality. Can’t quite remember. It’s a multigenerational, multilingual household, and the owners have adult children in the area who are always popping round in a variety of top-shelf vehicles bearing dogs and grandchildren and whatnot.

They’re probably the neighbors we have the least amount of contact with, mostly because they seem a self-contained unit. Describing them to a reporter after a capital-E Event of some sort you’d say something like: “They were quiet. Kept to themselves. We never had any problems with them.”

Still, with one eye on the rear view as I punched the button to raise the garage door, I was thinking what I was going to say to the three largish individuals in light-blue shirts, dark-blue trousers, and thick black vests if they suddenly stopped talking to the Bulgarians, slapped the cuffs on their wrists and the hoods over their heads, and dragged them shrieking into the white SUV.

Time to earn that democratic-socialist street cred, bruh!

So I snapped some quick pix of the SUV, ran the groceries inside, grabbed the binoculars, went back outside, jotted down the deets from the license plate — which was not easy, it being a typically sun-bleached New Mexico plate and barely readable — and just generally made myself real obvious standing there in my driveway three houses down, waiting to see whether I needed to go over there and get my ass kicked for some people I barely know.

And then the discussion ended without violence and the authorities ambled down the cul-de-sac to the next house over. It was then that I saw, stenciled on the back of one dude’s stout black vest, not “ICE,” but “PSA.”

“PSA?” I mumbled to myself. “Public Service Announcement? Prostate-Specific Antigen? Pi Sigma Alpha?”

And then it hit me. Police Service Aide. The unarmed crew that helps the Albuquerque Police Department with traffic control, writing reports on property crime, and other low-risk chores while sworn officers focus on scraping the stiffs off the streets.

And as that neighbor stepped out to speak with the PSA posse I recalled that he does have a problem with the Bulgarians, who have kept a broken-down rust-bucket with a right front flat and weeds growing through the engine compartment parked at the curb for the better part of quite some time, and whose functioning vehicles have been known to take up a fair amount of the limited parking in our little cul-de-sac, occasionally blocking his mailbox and/or making it tough to find a spot for the bins on trash-pickup day.

Well … at least he didn’t call the ICEholes on them. He is a Trumper, after all. And I’m not at Alligator Alcatraz, picking worms out of the chow I can’t eat with my jaw wired shut.