The headline is an inside joke among family and friends, a line of dialogue lifted from the 1978 novel “Panama,” by Thomas McGuane.

And now it’s the title of a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, an unsubtle bit of misdirection concerning an oversized orange turd that has proven impossible for a confused and bilious nation to flush.

There was no such turd when Chet Pomeroy spoke the line in McGuane’s book. But there is in the podcast. My apologies to Mr. McGuane. I hope he thinks of me, if he thinks of me at all, as having conducted myself with some forethought “as a screaming misfit, a little on the laid-back side.”

Meanwhile, always flush at least twice. It’s a long way to Mar-a-Lago.

• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a sonic colonic. Sly and The Family Stone come to you from their YouTube channel. From Freesound we get a dog whining, a power failure, an Internet outage, a garbage truck, and an elephant trumpeting. Judge Dredd issues his opinions via YouTube. All the other evil racket is courtesy of Your Humble Narrator.