A king-size turd

O, for the days when kings didn’t have shit all over them.

What a perfect lead-in for next weekend’s No Kings rallies.

The Marquis of Mar-a-Lago is definitely not a king, by the standards of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Shit all over him. Plenty of it his own.

James Fallows has a few thoughts about how the Marquis chose to note the passing of former FBI director Robert Mueller, who died Friday at 81. Quoth His Excremency:

Ouf! Dude sure knows how to set the tone, que no?

Well, I’m glad we got that out of the way, not least because I have a penchant for short and not-so-sweet obits myself, some of them with a callback to the old National Lampoon headline — “Franco Dies, Goes to Hell” — and I’m very much looking forward to writing his.

Fallows gives a shout-out to the upcoming No Kings rallies and suggests that we call/write the Orange House, plus our senators and representatives, to deliver “messages of outrage.” Great idea, and I’m all for it.

But that old Yippie-wannabe streak of mine, as always, yearns to take the response just a wee bit further. …

What about sending His Excremency a roll of industrial-grade toilet paper, the kind of 220-grit sandpaper you find in roadside rest areas, hot-sheet motels, and jails, with a note suggesting that he use it to wipe his all-too-public asshole, the one just below his nose?

Or perhaps a single long pubic hair taped to a postcard, with instructions to use it as dental floss after shitting through his face like this? Which he wouldn’t, of course. You know His Excremency never flosses; just tosses his dentures to a minion, who dunks them in the thundermug and then shoehorns them back in through that wrinkled, puckered orifice.

No, not that one. We’re talking the attic here, not the basement.

In the meantime, we can attend our local No Kings events and wait for that glorious, long-overdue day when we can all breathe a sigh of relief and say:

Call me an optimist, but I like to think that this non-king will rest under a blanket of shit for eternity. His should be the only tombstone in the boneyard with a toilet-paper dispenser.

Forward sprung

It’s always time to ride.

Daylight Saving Time is stupid.

Still, this year’s “spring forward” meant we spent one less hour today stacking sandbags against the tide of bullshit flowing downstream from the Orange House.

So, winning? Maybe. We must take these little victories wherever we find them.

This morning I burned a little of my saved daylight by reading an essay in The New York Times, in which the daughter of two former American revolutionaries found the Oscar-nominated “One Battle After Another” to be “nothing more than entertainment” rather than “a battle cry for a generation.”

Huh. Hollywood veterano Paul Thomas Anderson cranks out a rapid-fire rom-com inspired by a rambling mythical history by Thomas Pynchon, and Hope Reeves — who herself is working on a comic memoir of being raised by retired Weatherpersons James H. Reeves and Susan Hagedorn — finds it regrettably unserious.

Well. Shit. Can’t have that. Can we?

Why not?

• • •

I myself have been regrettably unserious since — well, since forever — and, like the thought of suicide, it has gotten me successfully through many a bad night. And a few fairly grim days, too, whether shortened or lengthened by government fiat.

My upbringing was unremarkably middle-class — Catholic Republican father, Presbyterian Democrat mother — and yet somehow I came to cast myself in the role of atheist radical son.

A diet rich in Warner Brothers cartoons, Marx Brothers movies and Mad magazine will give a kid a taste for anarchy. Who do you root for? Not The Man, that’s for sure. It was one battle after another and Elmer Fudd lost every one of them.

So while I would eventually become interested in Weatherman, and personally sample various flavors of Marxism — Socialist Workers Party, October League, Communist Party (M-L) — these last two, like Weatherman, offspring of the Students for a Democratic Society — my first real political infatuation was with the Yippies.

• • •

Elmer wanted to cut off my lovely hair and send me to Vietnam. I wanted to Bugs Bunny his ass. And so did the Yippies, whose regrettably serious alias was the Youth International Party.

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were probably the most famous of these Groucho Marxists, whose theater was the street. Levitating the Pentagon. Throwing money at traders at the New York Stock Exchange. Running an actual pig — Pigasus the Immortal — for president. 

The Yippies invaded Disneyland, taking over Tom Sawyer’s Island, threw pies, and applied for a permit to blow up the General Motors building. When it was denied, the Yippies shrugged and said it only proved that it was impossible to work within the system to change the system.

Alas, that old system sure proved durable, resisting change from within and without.

Some Yippies became yuppies. Rubin traded his Viet Cong flag shirt for the suit and tie of a businessman. He died in 1994 after being hit by a car while crossing Wilshire Boulevard, in front of his penthouse apartment. He was 56, well past the 30th birthday after which nobody was to be trusted.

Hoffman jumped bail after a dope bust and went underground. He eventually resurfaced, did some light time, and returned to activism.

But it was the Eighties — remember those fabulous Eighties, kids? — and the old act didn’t seem to be going over so well with a new audience. Hoffman died, reportedly by his own hand, in 1989. He was 52.

• • •

By then, mockery had already begun infiltrating (or was being co-opted by) The Establishment. “Saturday Night Live,” which debuted in 1975 with guest host George Carlin, somehow remains relevant in an aw-shucks-just-kiddin’ sort of way. David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had their innings, and Jimmy Kimmel is still in there pitching despite some booing from the luxury box at Fudd Stadium.

But there’s something about old-school, street-level mockery that really gets The Man’s dander up. The reigning Man, Elmer Befuddled, who hires out his shotgunning of critters at home and abroad because bone spurs, watches a shit-ton of TV. And if he sees yuuuuge crowds from coast to coast rocking the next No Kings rallies on March 28, giving him the old Warner Bros.’ sendoff — “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”— he might just do a John Belushi, spin right out of his chair, and hit the deck in a slobbering, shitting sayonara.

It comforts me to think back to one of Gilbert Shelton’s “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” cartoons, in which political candidate Rodney Richpigge commits suicide by proxy, ordering his chauffeur to drive off a bridge because he thinks people are laughing at him (a half pint of amyl nitrite getting an unexpected wash in Fat Freddy’s jeans was the actual giggle-trigger).

Hope, as they say, springs eternal. No matter what time it is.

Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!

Acting rashly

“Rash? Fake news!” says press secretary Karoline Leavitt as her head takes a hot lap around her shoulders. “There are no rashes in this White House. Hail Satan!”

I hear His Excremency has a rash.

No, not diaper rash. Though he probably has that too. This rash would be a little higher, something like the fabled “ring around the collar,” if by “ring” you mean something that looks like a wicked case of contact dermatitis, late-stage syphilis, shingles, or as one Internet comedian (not me) surmised, “The Evil trying to get out before he dies.”

If it is a Hickey from Hell, do you suppose this means that he and the Devil are going steady? I would’ve thought Old Scratch could do better than this burned-out old hoor, but there’s no accounting for taste. Maybe he’s getting bad advice from Jeffrey Epstein, who must still be irked about getting whacked in jail.

I think of stuff like this in the dead of night instead of sleeping so you can get a good night’s rest. You’re welcome.

March has already been awash in dire portents and we’re not even three full days in yet.

Kerrygold’s Blarney …

I bought a block of my favorite Kerrygold cheese, their Blarney variety (because Irish, blarney, etc.) and its expiration date was 03/27 — my birthday!

We’ve had two consecutive days of high-temperature records — 79° on Sunday and 80° yesterday, with special guest appearances by particulates and pollen (juniper, elm, oak, cottonwood, and ash) — followed by a full lunar eclipse of the Worm Moon, which makes it a Blood Moon.

… and its expiration date.

And of course we have the war on Iran. I don’t know why The Pestilence felt it necessary to go all the way to Iran to kill Americans when he’s been so successful at that right here at home. Whatever happened to America First?

The body count’s not high enough yet to distract his base from the sudden jump — soo-prise, soo-prise, soo-prise — in gas prices. But they’re bound to take notice after the next few fill-ups.

Nothing to see here, move along, move along. I’m sure His Excremency will be sending Kuwait a bill for the $300 million in F-15E Strike Eagles they shot down the other day, and equally certain that he’ll be sharing that windfall with the rest of us.

That’s the news — and now, here’s Asmodeus with the weather!

“Folks, we may be in the End Times, but don’t expect any end to this heat! The Dark Lord has the Lake of Fire at a rolling boil, and we expect Hell to remain unfrozen for the better part of … well, forever! Back to you, Patrick!”

Pontificating from the rectumry

Barking mad and talking out his arsehole as per usual.

His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-Fingered will be farting higher than his ass this evening during what the legacy media insists upon calling “the State of the Union address” but will almost certainly be more along the lines of the late George Carlin’s “Complaints and Grievances,” only not funny.

I will not be watching for mental-health reasons. Not his mental health; that leaky vessel has sailed, caught fire, exploded, and sunk. My mental health. What with the tariffs and inflation and whatnot, new TVs are way too pricey for me to be shooting ours in a fit of rage.

What say we all give it a miss this time around? If the senile old toad doesn’t stroke out tonight in what he promises will be a long airing of Crimes Against Him, he might just get ferried across the Styx tomorrow by the sort of ratings you might expect from a live goat fuck on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Pestilence Day

One of these things is not like the other.

“Not dead yet, I suppose?” I remarked to Herself as I set about my morning chores.

“Nope,” she replied.

Humph. And they call this a national holiday?

I haven’t checked the news yet, being only a cup and a half of joe into my day. Has His Excremency ordered up a platoon of virgins to take turns massaging his tiny wand? Good luck finding any in the immediate vicinity. Nothing but worn-out old pros with scabby knees and callused lips in that shabby, shameless army. (And yes, I’m looking at you, Lindsey Graham.) The USS Nimitz has fewer years on the job and has seen less action, too.

Speaking of elderly vessels, has Hair Füror ordered a strike group to menace the emperor penguins at Antarctica? Probably in league with the terrorist sheep of the Falkland Islands. Show ’em what a real emperor looks like! Bonus: Antarctica has coal! Clean, beautiful coal!

Mustn’t forget the terrorists right here at home, of course. The proles actually expect to be able to vote during the midterms! Ho ho. That’s easily managed. While Congress is out of town this week, just change all the locks at the Capitol, issue the appropriate executive orders — “Thank you for your service, kapow, kapow, etc.” — and achtung! 535 fewer speedbumps on the autobahn to 1933. If anyone turns up at the polls, well … ICE already has all the funding it needs. Danke, suckers.

Nevertheless I remain hopeful. Herself and I have birthdays coming up and if our good buddy Jeebus loves us we may yet be treated to the sight of a regiment of flag-pinned toadies doing it hand to hand over who will be The One to “don” (har de har har) the departed cult leader’s Depends of Domination as he rides that golden escalator down to his cardboard condo at the Lake of Fire.

A word to the unwise: Just because those drawers are yellow doesn’t mean they’re golden. Pulling them on with rubber gloves and burning eyes will be a Feat of Strength that will make Arthur pulling the sword from the stone look like Stephen Miller pulling his pud in a rental van parked across from an elementary-school playground at recess, unaware of the bomb attached to his gas tank.

Because no matter how this shit shakes out, nobody wants that dude around to sing his songs. He knows where all the bodies are buried. More than a few of them are probably in his basement freezer.