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:

“Breeze through tax season … with Acrobat AI Assistant.”

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.”