I see The Media have a couple new chew toys this morning — a brain-dead SecDef and a completely dead pope.

That should fill The Void for a nanosecond or two.

Now we await the various conclaves. If we see black smoke from the Pentagon, that means that SecDef Yog-Sothoth has burned his Signal passwords and has gone back to using NextDoor for all secure communications involving war plans, pub crawls, and no-strings hookups.

White smoke means that Baby Daddy Musk has sent him on ahead to set up shop on Mars.

Red smoke from the Office of the Vice President means that Hillbilly Boy has failed to convince his god that he had nothing to do with his pope’s death, even though he was one of the last people to see him alive.

Fwooosh! Straight From servicing Beelzebozo to serving Beelzebub in one seriously hot DeeCee minute. Not exactly upward mobility, is it? Sure as shit ain’t the golden escalator Beelzebozo rode down back in 2015, either. More like that elevator ride that Mickey Rourke took at the end of “Angel Heart.”

And the pope? Well … Dad was a ring-kisser, Mom was a Presbyterian, and I turned out to be neither. So I haven’t paid much attention to Holy Mother Church since 1978, when I was still a newspaperman in Bibleburg and we burned through a couple of popes in a month.

If I recall correctly, which is unlikely considering the circumstances, we had finished newspapering for the evening and had retired to Jinx’s Place for cocktails.

A late arrival burst in, as they will do, and told us the pope had just died.

“Catch up,” we replied. “That was last month.”

“That was the old guy,” our informant revealed. “This was the new guy.”

And soon we had a new new guy, to be dubbed “J2P2,” because back then newspaper people knew how to treat anyone who claimed to speak with God’s voice, whether they were in Vatican City or DeeCee.