Year: 2018

So Trump managed to get himself some positive points this week by theoretically standing up to the NRA. But we must emphasize the “theoretical” part because it wasn’t all that long ago that Trump was endeavoring to make nice to the Democrats and making positive noises about immigration…until he threw all of that under the bus, screwed over DACA, and started talking about šhìŧhølë countries. His talk is fine, but all the NRA has to do is apply pressure and Trump will back down. Meanwhile he’s been busy in other ways.

1) Steel Crazy After All These Years.. Trump announced that he was going to implement a tariff of 25 percent on imported steel and ten percent on aluminum. Naturally this caused the stock market to plummet once again as investors feared retaliation from China which is almost certainly guaranteed. Republicans, including Paul Ryan, are asking Trump to reconsider because of the likely consequences of his actions, but at this point it seems unlikely that he will. Which means we can wind up in a trade war (his words) with other countries, but without the resources to win it. Everyone from farmers to our own manufacturers could be crippled as a result of subsequent fall out, but Trump is perfectly happy to allow a massive tariff war because he thinks it’s good for business.

2). Shouldn’t they be on the same side? . Trump once again launched an attack on his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, declaring that Sessions had no business asking the Inspector General to investigate potential FISA violations over surveillance. It of course makes sense that Trump would try to change the subject: Robert Mueller’s investigation is drawing closer, his beloved Hope Hicks has joined the endless number of people who have resigned, and son in law Jared Kushner had his level of security clearance dropped to the same level as people who work in the kitchen and below that of the White House calligrapher. So it’s natural that Trump wants to draw attention from a monumentally chaotic week by bìŧçhìņg about Sessions, to whom he referred as Mr. Magoo. This was of course an idiotic comparison. Most people below the age of forty haven’t the slightest idea who Mr. Magoo was. And anyone over the age of forty knows that Magoo, with his tendency to blindly (literally) walk into the middle of dangerous situations, make things far worse with his participation, and then pat himself on the back and declare, “Oh Magoo, you’ve done it again!” far more closely resembles Trump than Sessions. If Jim Backus, the brilliant actor who provided Magoo’s voice (not to mention Thurston Howell on “Gilligan’s Island”) were still alive, I’m sure he’d be fast tracked into providing some manner of animated response.

3). Dead from D.C., it’s Saturday Night!. Trump once again was stupid enough to try waging a Twitter war with Alec Baldwin, the man who is so convincing as Trump that newspapers have inadvertently run pictures of Baldwin’s impersonation of Trump rather than Trump himself. It was actually pretty hilarious because he cited Baldwin’s stating that the impersonation was painful, to which Baldwin responded that he was willing to endure the pain so that he could keep doing it during Trump’s inevitable impeachment and departure from the office. If SNL were smart, they would have Baldwin on SNL complaining about Alec Baldwin’s impersonation of him. And he could be voicing his frustration to an assortment of actual former Trump staffers who were fired or quit. Cap it with Hillary Clinton walking in and sharing her sympathy. It just couldn’t get more meta than that.

4). Shooting off his mouth again. . Trump shocked the GOP with a meeting on Wednesday, broadcast live, in which he basically transformed into what the GOP and Trump just a year ago claimed was Hillary Clinton’s attitude. Trump advocated passing stricter gun laws, upping the age at which you could buy them, and even taking them away from people who are suspected of being nuts and then subsequently going after them in court. Dianne Feinstein, who was seated next to him and has been advocating just those things for quite some time, was grinning like a loon. But forty eight hours later: NRA representatives came out of a meeting with him assuring their patrons that they shouldn’t worry about it; Trump has suddenly been silent about gun control; and Mitch McConnell declared that there would be NO debate about guns in the Senate because they were too busy gutting banking laws so that consumers will be roundly screwed over.

Did he do anything right?. He tried, with guns. The problem is this: Trump hates conflict. He hates having people yelling at him or being angry with him. This is why he will always reflect the opinion of whoever he just met with. Indeed, it’s why he seemed much happier running for president than actually BEING president. He’s already planning his 2020 run even though it’s only 2018. I’ve never heard of anyone planning that far ahead. But he’s doing it because that’s the only time he is really pleased. He’s surrounded by thousands of people cheering him and accepting blindly everything he says.

PAD

So on Twitter, Chris Pratt (a.k.a. Starlord) tweeted in part “I’m praying for you because I believe in the healing power of prayer” to Kevin Smith, who had recently announced that he’d had a heart attack.

And now people are bashing Pratt for saying he was sending prayer. Why? Because they’re apparently conflating it with people who send empty prayers to the victims of gun violence.

No. It’s not the same. At all.

When I had my stroke five years ago, do you guys have ANY idea how many people said they were praying for me. Hundreds. Probably thousands. Including an entire Buddhist temple. And we totally got where everyone was coming from. When faced with a situation where someone was ill, many people were resorting to asking God to give me a break. No one said, “Hey dûmbášš, if you weren’t morbidly obese you could probably have avoided this.” There is nothing wrong with evoking sympathy from a higher being when confronted with bad news.

The reason there is now backlash against offering prayers during gun shootings is because the politicians who are claiming they are praying are capable of doing so much more. The same people who claim that their thoughts and prayers are with the victims are taking thousands of dollars in donations from the NRA and doing nothing to try and address the problem directly. We don’t need God to step in and prevent shootings; we need the changes in gun laws that people have been demanding but are seeing squashed by the orange dûmbášš and his coterie of gun suckers. It’s a completely different circumstance from wishing for divine intervention to help a fellow human who is having medical problems.

I too wish Kevin Smith the best and a full recovery from his heart attack. And leave Chris Pratt the hëll alone.

PAD

Much to my surprise, Trump actually did something right this week. The downside is that he did his usual amount of things wrong, and as for the thing he did right, there’s every chance/likelihood that he will think better of it and maybe even claim that the “fake news” fabricated it.

1). Empathy in chief. Sympathizing with those in need or in dire emotional straits is one of the first things we learn as human beings. If a mother is sitting on her living room couch and sobbing, her pre-verbal toddler will come over to her and hug her to try and provide support. It’s simply ingrained into our psyches.

But not in Trump’s case. An alert newsman snapped a picture of his notes that he was using in order to try and display empathy for the parents whose children had been torn away from them. “What do you most want me to know about your experience?” was one note. “I hear you” another note assured the apparently blind listeners who didn’t notice the notes.

Trump literally could not be counted on to remember even fundamental questions. He had to be reminded to say that he was listening. The most powerful executive in the United States is so self-absorbed, so narcissistic, that he has no idea how to speak to grieving parents. How in the hëll can someone live for seven decades and not learn simple, personal interactions? Has he never had to console anyone? Obviously not. At the most, he’s probably hired people to step in and speak on his behalf to anyone who was ever aggrieved.

How can he be prompted to say he hears you?!? . It’s three stinking words!!! He can’t remember three stinking words? If he didn’t have the note, would his mind drift off and then when snapped to attention he would say, “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.” To assure someone that he’s paying attention has got to be the most minimal duty a president would have to undertake and he can’t even do that!!. This man isn’t simply lost as a president. He’s lost as a human being.

2). Teachers shooting off their mouths. . The worst possible answer to people slaying students is to arm the teachers. So naturally that is what Trump endorsed. Not all the teachers, mind you. Just the ones who could be trusted with guns. Because after not having the money to provide even basic school supplies so that teachers have to pay for paper and pencils out of their own pockets, Trump and company want to start arming teachers. Because the next time police come charging into a situation where an armed man is gunning down students, what they really need to deal with are a couple dozen educators waving guns around, because that will make it oh-so-easy to determine who exactly they should be shooting at.

Yet Trump insisted that if teachers are armed, they would have shot the hëll out of the recent shooter in Florida. Maybe. Or they would very likely have wound up hitting other students or teachers and added to the death toll. If they had a hand gun and they’re facing a guy with a machine gun, they’d likely have one chance to shoot down their enemy before he opened fire and turned them into Swiss cheese. You want to bet your life on the aim of a terrified teacher? Good luck with that.

Of course, Trump then later turned around and said he’d hadn’t advocated arming teachers, right before his address at CPAC reiterated the notion. In fact, let’s chat about CPAC for the moment.

3). CPACing them in.. Trump gave an overview of his greatest lies at the conservative gathering, kicking off with the assertion that his administration had “the most successful” first year in the history of presidential administrations. This is, of course, a bald faced lie. His administration has done almost nothing, and the achievements they can point to are going to be screwing people over for years to come. He slammed the Democrats, of course, accusing them of providing blockage to his endeavors when in fact the GOP has been refusing to work with their left wing counterparts. He asserted that he was still going to build his wall that the Mexicans will never pay for, and claims that the Democrats refuse to do anything about DACA even though it was Trump who threw DACA under the bus in the first place. Yet his supporters continue to embrace his lies and tell themselves everything is okay when it very much isn’t.

4). I can’t wait to see the protests. Trump has settled on the day for his idiotic military parade: Veterans Day. His plan is to have a military processional begin at the White House and thread down to the Capitol. I am positive that this will not go unremarked upon: I fully expect hundreds of thousands of protestors to be lining the streets shouting down Trump and his waste of taxpayer money to provide a display of strength that is unprecedented, that nobody asked for and that nobody wants.

5) Sanctions. So Trump decided that this was the perfect time to implement sanctions against North Korea. Because when North Korea is beginning to develop a dialogue with their neighbors and is participating in the Olympics, that’s exactly when to punish them. As opposed to Russia which the Senate and House decreed should have sanctions placed against them and Trump is disinclined to implement them. After all, why punish them just because they helped rig the election to put him in office? What point would there be to that?

Did he do anything right?. For the first time in quite some time, yes, he did. He actually seemed willing to do something about eighteen year olds buying guns and opening fire with them. He advocated raising the age for gun ownership to 21, because it was pointed out that it’s insane to say that kids can’t buy liquor but the can purchase rifles. He also wanted to eliminate bump stocks that transforms semi-automatic weapons into basically machine guns. Of course, this announcement prompted two things: First, sales on bump stocks have skyrocketed, and second, the áššhølëš in charge of the NRA are putting their feet down and are acting in opposition to both notions. Instead they are advocating putting guards at schools, “hardening” them, a new verb that Trump immediately picked up and reiterated. Because Ronald Reagan was surrounded by seven secret service agents when he was shot, so obviously having armed personnel on site is guaranteed to prevent gun assault. Despite Trump’s assurances that the NRA would fall in line, they have in fact stated that they oppose raising the age limit of gun ownership. Nor do they support the banning of bump stocks. So the question is, will Trump really act in opposition to NRA wishes or will he fold? My guess: the latter, because that would be consistent. Which is a shame. He could actually do something positive with his presidency if he’s willing to stand up to the NRA, but it’s unlikely that will happen.

PAD

It would seem that there’s really only one thing to talk about this week, but surprisingly, no, there’s a couple of things. So let’s see what we’ve got.

1) This sort of behavior totally ruins my Lysistrata plan. Turns out Trump is being accused of a second affair, this time two years into his marriage with Melania. Traditionally when the first couple heads to Air Force One, they take a helicopter dubbed Marine One to it. Not this time; Melania headed over to it via car so she could travel separately from her husband. That does not bode well for the two of them, and I am convinced that at this point she is waiting for him to die because she’d rather be a widow than just another cast off wife.

2) And so it begins. Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russians in interfering with the election. While Trump claimed that the efforts did not affect the election (it did) and of course there was “no collusion,” which is going to be a huge meme once he’s convicted of collusion, Hillary Clinton’s assistant, Nick Merrill, was much more specific in his comments: “Today’s revelations confirm what we’ve long known. Time will tell us more, but Russia went to great lengths to undermine our democracy, & the President won’t protect us. No matter your politics, it’s un-American. We have an adversary that is laughing at us, who will act again.” Yes, they absolutely will, as soon as the 2018 elections. Let’s hope to God that vote tabulators will have learned from the 2016 election and will be prepared to prevent it. If they’re smart, they will return to paper ballots which can not be interfered with by hackers.

3) The Rob Porter fiasco. Rob Porter, a former White House secretary, indisputably beat two wives. There’s photos of them,.Yet Trump’s administration incredibly tried to side with him. The White House administration claimed that the FBI was still conducting their investigation, except no, the FBI states that they finished their investigation back in January. But hey, I suppose that wife beaters who hit their wives so hard there are bruises on her face…I’m sure that a lot of them are really great guys.

4) Florida. You need to understand something: I have a fifteen year old. Every single day when I send her off to school, I have no idea whether I’m going to see her at the end of the day. Her school has no metal detectors, which I used to not be in favor of but now am. I am seriously considering getting her a Kevlar vest if I can come up with the $500 required to get a good one. I mean, I always had a sense that when she goes out into the world, anything can happen. She could be robbed, beaten. Then again, she took kung fu lessons so that anyone who tries to attack her will ideally have a really lousy time of it. And my third daughter teaches at a school and also took Kung fu. But if a lunatic comes in shooting, what can they reasonably do? And what did Trump do? He blamed the victims. He blamed the victims. He tweeted, “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior..Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!” You believable fûçkìņg moron. He was reported repeatedly. The police had been brought in by his mother. He was expelled from high school because he was considered too dangerous. He was a White Supremacist. Every single check system that Trump and his NRA šhìŧhëádš will allow was in place and he still had no trouble buying an AR-15, a gun that has no place in a private citizen’s hands. You don’t need it for hunting; it will shred whatever it is you’re trying to catch. You don’t need it for protection unless you’re anticipating a zombie Apocalypse. It has one reason and one reason only to exist: To kill lots of people very quickly. It is the weapon of choice for demented šhìŧbágš who intend to blow a ton of people away. And what does Trump do? He revokes an Obama-era rule that made it harder for people with psychological problems to obtain guns. Gun advocates, of course, hated it, because they claimed it infringed on the Second amendment. No, it didn’t, you morons. The Founding Fathers passed the Second amendment to make it easier for colonists to form militias, not to allow demented psychopaths to acquire whatever weapons they wanted so they could slaughter dozens of people. Don’t you get that the weapons the founders were familiar with shot one bullet a minute, not forty-six. This has got to end.

Did he do anything right? No.

PAD

I’ve been sure that ever since the slaughter at Sandy Hook went unanswered that it is simply impossible to come up with genuine means of limiting gun slaughter. In the latest incident in Florida, the lunatic shooter bought his guns through legal means and was not deterred from doing so, even though he had a mental health record, a record of loving guns and talking about slaughtering people in the high school that expelled him because he was obsessed with guns.

What in the world can be done about it? When the vast majority of the population want to make it impossible for known menaces to obtain guns but the NRA won’t permit it and the politicians line up behind them, how can the lame ášš politicians be compelled to take actions that will save lives?

Well, as a matter of fact, I think I’ve got an answer. An answer that was first suggested in 411 B.C.

Aristophanes wrote a play, you see. It was entitled “Lysistrata” and it centered on the title character convincing Greek women to withhold sex from their men until they agreed to end the Peloponnesian war.

I think that is what every wife of every Senator and every representative of the House should do. All the women should band together and say, “No sex until the gun crisis is brought under control. No sex until we have genuine gun control laws. No sex until you all say to the NRA, ‘Fûçk off.'”

Because that is how you hit these áššhølëš where they live. They’re so obsessed with big guns which are, let’s face it, just phallic symbols anyway.

If every wife figuratively cuts off their husbands’ sexual proclivities, I would like to think that that is going to be what turns them around.

PAD

It’s been a relatively quiet week for IQ45. But here’s the problem with that: If you didn’t hear anything major from Obama for a week, it didn’t matter. You just figured he was doing his job. If a week goes by for IQ45 and you don’t hear anything major, you leap to the conclusion that he managed to cover up whatever evil he undertook this week.

1). Maybe we should all start saying prayers.. Trump appeared at the national prayer breakfast this year. You may well remember his appearance a year ago where he gave a freewheeling speech in which he promised to do away with the Johnson Amendment, a law that prohibits religious organizations from endorsing political figures, and trashed Arnold Schwarzenegger for the lousy ratings of “The Apprentice.” A year later, the law is still on the books and “The Apprentice” is off the air, so he had nothing major to discuss, it seems. He did still manage to say something stupid: “Our founders invoked the creator four times in the Declaration of Independence. Our currency declares, ‘In God we trust.’”

Uh, no. I know this for a fact because I’ve been in three productions of “1776” and at one point the Reverend Jonathan Witherspoon points out the complete lack of mention of God. So one reference is put in to make the New Jersey representative happy. I double checked the final document and I found just the single mention. Not four.

As for “In God we trust,” that was added formally to the money in 1956 for a very specific reason: to differentiate the USA from the Godless commies. You remember the godless commies: the ones who managed to rig the election to get their boy Trump into office. If Trump had been around in 1956 he would undoubtedly have endorsed the move to show that we’re different from the Russians, rather than now when they undermine our elections and national actions.

2). Let’s rain on his parade.. Trump wants this country, which apparently is running out of money to help Puerto Rico, to waste millions of dollars on a parade displaying our military might. He claims that he got the idea from watching the Bastille Day parade in France.

Let us put aside for a moment that Bastille Day is a celebration of a massive internal war in which nobility was publicly executed by the guillotine. Let us put aside that, fair or not, the French, going all the way to “Encounter on Farpoint” where the French starship captain surrendered, have a reputation for giving up.

Putting all that aside, I do not believe for one second that this was inspired by Bastille Day. It was unquestionably inspired by Kim Jong un’s display of the North Korean army. Without question. Kim Jong un, between proving North Korea’s strength with his army demonstrations while simultaneously attending the Olympics and talking about achieving peace with their neighbors, is perfectly playing the role of national leader. He displays his strength while coming across as someone who can be reasoned with. He’s got the might but doesn’t want to have to use it. This is as opposed to the idiot-in-chief, because I can tell you seriously, there have been nights where I have lost sleep cogitating on the fact that this lunatic could conceivably start World War III if “Fox and Friends” tell him that he should.

Trump wants to show Kim Jong un that the US has a powerful military. Because to this numb nut, the simple fact that we could annihilate the entire world something like ten times over is insufficient. In terms of nuclear weapons, the only ones who have more are the Russians. So if they can annihilate the world fifteen times over, we’re supposed to compete with that? Isn’t having enough nukes to obliterate the world once over enough? But no, not Trump. Whereas previous presidents have, since the 1970s, supported the concept of reducing the world’s nuclear weapons, Trump wants to “update” it. Because apparently the weapons that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki are out of date.

3). Screw it, just shut it down.. Trump is totally fine with the concept of the government shutting down. Why? Because he undoubtedly plans to blame it entirely on the Democrats. He figures that he can spend his entire days tweeting about how the GOP was willing to play ball but the Democrats want to protect the rights of foreigners to stay in this country. Yet as of Thursday night, who was singlehandedly delaying up the vote? Rand Paul. Wonder how he’ll spin it if one of his own screws things up for him.

Did he do anything right? Do you even have to ask?

PAD

Watch the short film above. Then come back here.

Done? Okay, good. So you know that because we literally don’t have anything better to do, we are putting together an anthology entitled “They Keep Killing Glenn.” Glenn has cheerfully agreed to go along with this, so now it’s just a matter of putting the dámņëd thing together.

Now, you may wonder who’s going to be contributing to this thing. The answer is twofold. First, you can count on all the usual idiots from Crazy 8 Press to kill Glenn in all manner of interesting ways.

Secondly, three names: Stephen King. Neil Gaiman. David Gerrold.

I’ve written to all three of them and none of them replied.

So we’re moving on to the B-list, which is pretty much every other writer out there.

If you are a writer–and by that I mean you’ve had something published that you were paid for–then you are welcome to contribute. Here’s how you do it:

1) Write to my co-editor, Kathleen, on this: t.k.k.glenn@gmail.com.
2) Pitch your method of how you plan to dispatch him. We don’t want to have overlaps.

These are the current means we have of killing Glenn that already are good to go: Drag queen; electricity; comic book boxes; elevator shaft; straight up poison; Sherlock Holmes; defenestration; killed at college; killed at a convention, poker game, comet, stack of books, Groundhog Day, time travel, Garrote, Tesla (person not the car), mythological bed of Procrustes, Flu, Netflix marathon, Wacom Pencil, Tiger, Tesla (car), Motorcycle, Facebook.

Now, you may be wondering how we’re going to pay for this sucker. Where, you wonder, is the inevitable Kickstarter program?

Not gonna do that this time. It was only a year ago that I came to the fans, hat in hand, asking for money to get me out of my snarl with the IRS, and you guys came through.

So not on this occasion. Let’s just say that I will have sufficient money in my pocket to cover the payments and publishing costs.

What are the payments? We are looking for stories from 3000 to 5000 words, for which you will get a princely .04 cents a word.

As of this point, “They Keep Killing Glenn” will make its publishing debut at the Shore Leave convention in July. So if you want to come on board, your story must be delivered by March 31.

Get writing.

PAD

(Get help for me. Please. —GH)