From the moment he announced an extensive military attack against Iran by posting an edited social media video at 2:30 a.m. Saturday, President Trump made clear that he would be taking a different tone and approach than his wartime predecessors.
Mr. Trump did not scramble back to the White House from Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, to oversee the U.S. and Israeli strikes. He did not deliver a televised address informing the public of the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was the nation’s supreme leader for nearly four decades.
Instead, the president capped an extraordinary day of U.S. aggression abroad by attending a glitzy fund-raising dinner at his club.
With this REMF at the top of the org’ chart the old joke applies more than ever: What’s the difference between the U.S. armed forces and Scouting America? The Scouts have adult leadership.
Maybe the headline should be “Forrrrrrr’d, Mar … a-Lago!”
“Periwinkle blue, boys,” the color Mickey the Pikey wanted for his ma’s caravan in “Snatch.”
The Duck! City was smokin’ the day after the State of the Union crashed and burned, reaching a high of 72 degrees — 18 degrees above average.
It’s nice to be above average in something. But still, damn.
The roses are budding and so is everything else. The primates who call this desert home may view with alarm the federal knuckles being dragged into the Colorado River Compact, which remains an insoluable dilemma to its signatories and will join the long list of issues about which His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-Fingered knows nothing and cares even less.
And Your Humble Narrator, who ordinarily yearns to piss off to someplace toasty about this time of year, finds himself in the awkward position of grumbling about beautiful weather in February.
All of which means — yes, yes, yes — it’s time for a Coconut Telegraph edition of Radio Free Dogpatch. Apologies to the late Jimmy Buffett, from whom I liberated the headline.
• Technical notes: RFD uses the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack; Apple’s GarageBand, and Auphonic for a quick wash and brushup. The dog drinking from his dish and the car failing to start come from Freesound. The background music, “Easy Stroll,” is from YouTube’s audio library. Other sound effects are the work of the thirsty, sunburnt, untraveled Irish-American behind the bar at this non-alcoholic pub.
Gen. Carl’s Jr. von Clownswitz: “War is neither a scientific game nor an international sport; it is an act of violence, characterized by destruction. Now where’s my cheeseburger?”
Should’ve given the feckin’ eejit his prize.
That lightweight bitch-slap to his tiny puckered hole of a mouth, coupled with The Supremes 86ing (well, 6-3ing) his insane tariffs scheme, and finally the shit ratings for his impromptu “Dope-rah” skit — a.k.a. the State of the Union — pretty much guaranteed he was going to pull the trigger on another half-baked, open-ended Charlie Fox in Iran so he can feel better about his poorly hung, pants-shitting, Adderall-addled, senile old self.
“Operation Fucking Shit Up: This Time We Mean It!” will annihilate Iran’s nuclear program, which was annihilated in the last go-round, except, oops, not. Bonus: It makes Congress look even more like Blanche DuBois and has every journo in the world working on a weekend.
Some people voted for this shit. Not me.
If I were running Cuba I might think about applying to become our 51st state — well, 52nd, behind Venezuela. Maybe 53rd if Mexico’s as quick on the draw as they were with “El Mencho.”
But that’s no guarantee of safety. Hair Füror has already shown he’s OK with invading U.S. territory and killing U.S. citizens if no one else is handy.
Rather than endure The Pestilence breaking wind from the face, I dined informally, at my desk — a bowl of chili, a wedge of buttered cornbread, and a pint of Guinness 0 — while reading about the late and very much unheralded poet Everette Hawthorne Maddox.
Herself was in Fanta Se with a visiting gal pal. Miss Mia Sopaipilla was sprawled nearby in her crinkle tube. The TV was darkly silent in the living room.
I could’ve watched the whole dismal spectacle on the MacBook Pro, but decided that since nobody was paying me to do that, and that I was actually paying for it to take place, I was already down dozens of dollars and not likely to turn a profit on the project anytime soon. A visit to any third-string primate house would have been more informative, with less shit-flinging. Better to read about Maddox for free over at The Poetry Foundation, courtesy of James McWilliams.
Maddox, whom Andrei Codrescu called the “Christ of New Orleans,” published three books of poetry between 1975 and 1988. He died in 1989, just 44 years old, of complications from esophageal cancer. Hundreds crammed into a New Orleans bar to give a proper sendoff to the jobless, homeless, divorced alcoholic who slept in the bed behind the driver’s seat of an 18-wheeler parked outside a used-furniture store. I’d never heard of him before, but McWilliams brought him to life for me:
“Everyone should have an epitaph ready, just in case,” [Maddox] said in a rare radio interview in 1983. He called his version, written around 1974, ‘Hypothetical Self-Epitaph,’ and it comes as close to anything else he wrote to capturing his inner character:
What if I just caved in gave out, pulled over to the side of the road of life, & expired like an old Driver’s license? You might say He didn’t get far in 31 years. But I’d say That’s all right, it was the world’s longest trip on an empty tank.
His few books are hard to find. A plaque in the courtyard of the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street calls him “a mess.” McWilliams, who argues that he nevertheless deserves our attention, writes:
The man was dark and troubled, more so than most. But he aimed to offer his audience — his friends, as we’ll see — the brightest reflection of that darkness that he could project.
Contrast that with what The Pestilence offered in last night’s State of the Union address, which the legacy media swarmed like rats to an overflowing Dumpster and declared a record in terms of duration, if not in unfiltered bullshit. Talk about your long trips on an empty tank.
Yeah, I think I made the right call. I toasted Maddox’s memory with my fake beer, scratched Miss Mia behind the ears, and went to bed early.
• Editor’s note: “I Hope it’s Not Over and Good-By,” selected poems by Everette Hawthorne Maddox, is available from the University of New Orleans Press.
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.
Mad Blog Media 