News from Zontar: Coalition of the willing to fight global warming

Editors' Note: Every so often the Spy's Deep Space Bureau receives transmissions from the alien civilization on the planet Zontar, in the distant Remulac galaxy.  Because of the principles of electromagnetic wave theory (so much more complicated than good old steam!) these transmissions often take years to travel through the vastness of interstellar space.  For example, this dispatch was beamed from Zontar in 2002 but just reached us Earthlings yesterday.

By Zudith Miller
The New Zork Times

President George Z. Bush astounded official Washington, D.Z. yesterday when, in a major policy about face, he announced that he would divert resources away from a planned war on Zaddam Hussein to combating global warming, which he described as the “the number one threat facing the country and the world.”

The decision represents the culmination of a thorough interagency review of all threats facing the nation headed by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.  Sources close to the review praise her for insisting on a rigorous fact-based inquiry over the objections of Defense Secretary Donald Rumzfeld and Vice President Dick Zheney.  The two old whackjobs had been urging what they called a “brief and glorious war” against Zaddam's regime, which they said would lead to quick, bloodless victory that would transform the Middle East.

The President was shocked to see a simulation of
what could happen to Houston in the next 15 years

However, in a lengthy White Man Paper released today by the White House, the President said that “the intelligence showed that the threat from Zaddam was negligible and could be easily contained by the current regime of international inspections and sanctions, while the threat of global catastrophe due to human-caused global warming was obvious to the even the meanest intelligence, like mine.”

The President was shocked to learn that the estimated cost of removing Zaddam from power and restructuring his country as a stable democracy could reach or exceed $2,000,000,000,000, when all costs, including caring for hundreds of thousands of wounded and crippled veterans for the rest of their lives, were factored in.

Asked what the same $2 trillion could do if earmarked to the battle against climate change, the President was told that it would make a decisive difference in achieving a transition to carbon-free energy, focused on solar, wind, other renewables and most crucially improved battery technology that would enable electric cars to travel over 200 miles on a single charge by 2018.

In a gesture of bipartisan unity, sources close to the President admitted that he had had several private meetings with the man he defeated for the Presidency in 2000, former Vice President Zal Gore.  “The President understands that he did not win the popular vote and therefore should take careful note of the views of the man who did,” explained Presidential flack Nicolle Z. Wallace.

Although former campaign manager Steve Szhmidt warned the President that moving away from carbon-based fuels like coal might harm the ZOP in mining states such as Wezt Virginia and Wyomingz, the President was said to have been so alarmed by his sessions with Zal Gore that he brushed aside partisan political considerations.

The White House released shocking science-based estimates
of sea level increases

The President was said to have been especially stricken by Gore's depictions of likely future climate catastrophes if the current rate of global warming continued.  Gore was said to have warned the President that great cities like New Orleans could be devastated by hurricanes whose power was magnified by warming Gulf waters.  He even warned the President that climate change could bring a drought in California so severe that Kim Kardazhian would lose her house in a wildfire.

“Not Kim Kardazhian,” the President was said to have responded, adding “We need a whole new strategery to save our nation!”

The President is expected to lay out his ambitious war on global warming in his upcoming State of the Union Address.  He plans to refer to coal-generated power, gasoline engines, and deforestation as the new “Axis of Evil,” according to Presidential speechwriter and proud Torontonian David Frumz.

The ZOP conservative base has generally been supportive of the new policy.  “Any intellectually honest review of the facts would prove that Zaddam is not nearly the threat that global warming is,” said former Dan Quayle coatholder Billy Kristolz.

But the broader American electorate has not traditionally been engaged by the threat of global warming.  For that reason, aides to the President plan a “shock-and-awe” campaign to educate the public about the imminent threat of human-caused climate change.

They may have their work cut out of them.  Asked for his view about global warming, busto casino owner and reality TV star Donald Z. Trumpf, reached at a golf course in the Zierra Nevada Mountains while his wife was giving birth to their son back in New Zork, said, “You bet it's going to get warm tonight.  I've lined up a beautiful squad of porn stars to f***.   All tens.  Maybe there's an eleven in there, I don't know.  Tell me what's hotter than that?”

Jsut when you thought it was safe to cross Independence Avenue again

By Isaiah Thomas
Chair, Editorial Board

When the weather is right and the wind blows from the northeast, you can hear in the streets of this forlorn occupied city the sounds of distant gunfire.  The immiserated inhabitants of Washington City sense that the hour of their liberation is at hand, whether from the new House of Representatives or a juicy stack of sealed indictments filed by the Special Counsel's office.

Like Paris in August 1944, Washington is stirring, and the various factions of the Opposition are already at each other, eager to take credit for the glorious hour when President Tiny Toadstool's Reign of Terror is no more.

The anti-U Bum Republicans are coming back, and they still want your brains

But some of the most preposterous claims are coming from those that had the least to do with the coming liberation: the anti-U Bum Republican conservatives who are ready to demand for themselves the rewards coming to those who resisted.

Yep, like zombies in an AMC series that's gone on about three years too long, the Republicans are baaaack, and they're just as horrifying and lifeless as they ever were.

So before we admit zombies like Billy Kristol, Max Boot, Toronto's Own Davey Frum, Nicole “Stop the Recount” Wallace, Ana Navarro, Steve Schmidt, and the rest of the gang of Republican gunslingers who brought us forty years of stagnation, not to mention war crimes, back into the corridors of power, let's stop to consider what they have done to earn their Persilschein.

First, can anyone name a single winner on Election Night who owes his or her victory to the tireless efforts of anti-U Bum Republicans?  One?  If the past three years have taught us anything, it's that the Republican Party is as close to to the Tangerine-Faced Grifter as his cheeseburger.

Not a single living Republican office-holder has broken with him, no matter what the outrage.  Not one of the very fine white bigots talking to credulous reporters in diners in East Bumf**k, Pennsylvania has been persuaded by the stirring Tweets of Billy Kristol or the impassioned rumblings of Steve Schmidt.  Not a f***in' one.

And what exactly did they do in the war?  Did they oppose huge tax cuts for rich?  Appointing a sex criminal to the Supreme Court?  Gutting the Affordable Car Act?  Adding more coal to the fires of climate change?  Of course they didn't.

Why should they?  They've worked for decades flacking for Republican schmucks whose policies are indistinguishable from those of the Grifter-in-Chief whom they claim to loathe with all their tiny hearts.

Denying climate change and promoting the wasteful use of fossil fuels?  Anyone besides us remember St. Ronald of Bitburg's condemnation of “killer trees” or George W.'s refusal to enter into meaningful international agreements to address global warming?

Appealing to white racists and mouth-breathing bigots?  That's as Republican as tax cuts for the rich.

Doing nothing while America's schools, concert venues, and houses of worship are turned into killing zones?  Hey whatever happened to that assault weapons ban that ol' W. was supposedly ready to sign?  We're asking you, Nicolle, stop smirking.

Showing callous indifference to their concerns of women, especially those who have suffered sexual abuse and harassment?  Come on down, Justice Long Dong Thomas, appointed by beloved former President David Cop-a-feel Bush.

Supporting affordable health care for all Americans, even those not rich enough to buy a Presidential Medal of Freedom or a Harvard education for their unpromising offspring?  Right.

And speaking of corruption and abuse of power, does it get much worse than firing U.S. Attorneys because they refused to file false voter suppression cases, and then erasing the e-mails that would have inculpated lovable Karl Rove?  I guess the answer is it does a little, but the difference is more a matter of tone.

We could, like Mr. D. Glass and others, go on, but no matter where you look, the animated corpses of past Republicans sinners, no matter how lifelike they seem on the op-ed page of The Washington Post, are intent on only one thing: gobbling our brains and returning us to the Republican glory days of needless war, torture, plutocracy, and corruption.

Former Iraq warmonger Max Boot, who has shown some recognition of past sins, is out seeking redemption by peddling a book with the ridiculous title The Corrosion of Conservatism.  An accurate title would be The Culmination of Conservatism.

So before you let the zombie Republicans back into American political life to promote God knows what  – war in Iran?  the bold leadership of Wilfred M. Romney?  cutting Social Security?  arming the Contras?  – best look into their cold dead eyes and ask yourself if they represent a more plausible future for what's left of our democracy than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressly?

Then drive a stake right through their Twitter feeds.

Maureen discovers that Republicans are hypocrites, but you read it first in the Spy

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator


All of Georgetown was abuzz this morning, wondering if Maureen Dowd had been kidnapped and replaced by a newly-discovered good twin.

The speculation was sparked by her column in the Sunday New York Times.  Not only was there a complete absence of snarky putdowns of Hillary Clinton and crypto-racist ones aimed at real President Barack Obama, but she actually took on an important issue and got it right.

I know, we can't come up with any other explanation either.

Her topic was the enduring fatuity of loyal apologists for the war crimes of Bush and Cheney reinventing themselves as U Bum scolds who suddenly have discovered a hitherto-unknown fealty to truth and the rule of law.  What the hell, we'll let Maureen kick ass and name names:

The architects and enablers of the Iraq war and Abu Ghraib are still being listened to on foreign policy, both inside the administration (John Bolton and Gina Haspel) and out. NeverTrumper Eliot Cohen wrote the Washington Post op-ed after the election telling conservatives not to work for Trump; Max Boot, who urged an invasion of Iraq whether or not Saddam was involved in 9/11, is now a CNN analyst, Post columnist and the author of a new book bashing Trump; John Yoo, who wrote the unconstitutional torture memo, is suddenly concerned that Trump’s appointment of his ghastly acting attorney general is unconstitutional.

She missed a few of the leading suspects like Nicolle “Shut Down the Recount” Wallace and Sarah Palin campaign manager Steve Schmidt, but now that they are earning a living as bloviating gasbags, maybe it was just a matter of professional courtesy.

Of course, she didn't come up with this all by herself; she had to have it explained to her by some alt-Hollywood filmmaker who might be in a position to finally produce her great script about a smart, sexy Irish Catholic girl from Annandale, Virginia who takes Washington by storm in the 80's.  But she finally gets the point:

After a screening of “Vice” Thursday, I asked McKay [the Hollywood guy] which of our two right-wing Dementors was worse, Cheney or Trump.

“Here’s the question,” he said. “Would you rather have a professional assassin after you or a frothing maniac with a meat cleaver? I’d rather have a maniac with a meat cleaver after me, so I think Cheney is way worse. And also, if you look at the body count, more than 600,000 people died in Iraq. It’s not even close, right?”

Leaving aside the moderately hilarious irony of our staunch feminist ceding her column to a mansplainer, we wonder why it took a Hollywood medium-shot to explain the truth to Maureen when she could have read it a long time ago in – you guessed it – the Spy.

While we can't green-light her script we can note that the hypocrisy of Never U Bum Republicans and the continuity between the lies and crimes of W. and Cheney and those of the Tangerine-Faced Grifter has been an increasingly tedious staple of these pages.

We made the point as long ago as last month regarding war criminal apologist and former CIA Director John Brennan:

Has Maureen Dowd been replaced by her good twin?

To those eager to canonize Brennan because of his recent criticism of the Grifter-in-Chief, exhuming the broken bodies of various unlucky detainees may seem like whataboutism: an effort to change the subject to an unrelated topic.

But is it unrelated?  The Republican culture of destroying democratic norms didn't begin in 2017; it goes back at least to the glory days of Bill Buckley's man crush, Joe McCarthy. Sometimes the American system manages to rid itself of these evildoers, like McCarthy or Nixon.

And sometimes it doesn't.  Bush Republicans stole the 2000 election by a vote of 5 to 4 and never paid a price for it.  Indeed the recount rioters now pose as concerned citizens, right, Nicolle?  Then those same Republicans lied us into needless war and engaged in grotesque tortures and war crimes, and again never paid the price, unless you count being relegated to the daytime lineup.

When outrages are buried and unpunished on spurious grounds like national security, the tears in the fabric of the Republic become normalized and accepted, both weakening America and providing a model for those who would rip new holes in it, like President U Bum.  When such subversion is overtly supported by majorities in the House and Senate, the web of norms that supports our democracy become ever more tenuous, until, as is the case today, it appears ready to collapse into threads.

Those who now properly sound the alarm about obstructing justice and accountability when a critic like John Brennan is mugged by a corrupt President might be asked where they were when justice was waterboarded at CIA black sites, and accountability frustrated by the man who now claims it as his birthright.

Or June:

One conclusion leaps out: as long as conservative “intellectuals” flap their gums about their past glories and current indignities, we'll never lack for material.

Former George W. Bush flack and coatholder David Frum, come on down!

Instead of starting as he should have by apologizing for lying this country into a bloody war of choice and the commission of heinous war crimes, he deploys one classic strategy of conservatives unable to defend their past or present views: whataboutism.

There's no difference between the Grifter-in-Chief and Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders because all three have a dangerously “messianic” appeal?  Of course, the same smear was deployed against Barack Obama in 2008, to no avail.

We wonder if David Frum would admit that there is a difference between politicians who seek to inspire their followers and those who seek to inflame the racism, bigotry, and unjustified sense of grievance of their hate-filled mobs while undermining democracy with graft and authoritarianism.

 Or one of our favorites, a where-we-they-then piece (on gun control) from March:

David Frum was a little closer to the action at a Washington think tank, but he seemed to be too busy with his mission with the Hot Air Force promoting the endless disaster of the Iraq War to notice the real danger to Americans on the shelves of Wal-Mart.

We heard Steve Schmidt on the cable raging about the failure to control assault weapons, so naturally we inquired as to his whereabouts in 2004.  It turns out he was a high-level flack and henchman in the Bush re-election campaign, in the course of which he lauded W. as a “steady and principled leader.”  We guess it's a case of those who can, do, and those who can't, flack.  We would have said teach, but the teachers are dead.

Speaking of overexposed on cable, what about long-time gasbag Joe Scarborough?  Incredibly enough, he was already blathering on cable news in 2004.  One month before the assault weapons ban lapsed he was observed “standing and applauding numerous times during the president's speech.”  That's President George W. Bush.


Due to pressures of time and increasing nausea, we can only cover one more stalwart post-massacres opponent of assault weapons.  Come on down, former Florida recount rioter Nicolle Wallace!  By incredible coincidence, she was the Communications Director for the often tongue-tied Texan under her former name, Nicolle Devenish.  In 2004, in that senior policy-level position, she communicated her deep concern for human life by slamming John Kerry for refusing to support a bill making harming a pregnant woman a crime against the fetus.

Of course, that legislation, unlike renewal of the federal assault weapons ban, wouldn't have protected the massacred children of Sandy Hook, because in 2004, they hadn't even been conceived, much less born.

On the plus side, though, she has her own daily cable news show. 

We could go on but you get the point.  And at long last, apparently Maureen (or at least her good twin) does too.

The post-midterm column you'll never read

The lesson of the 2018 midterms:
Republicans must move to the center

By ChuckDavidJoeTom Toddbrooksboraw
Political Editor, [insert name of media outlet]

Despite their luck with a favorable red-state Senate map, there's no doubt that the Republicans have lost the midterm election.  The voters have sent their message and the losing party should take heed: it is time for Republicans to move to the center and seek common ground with their political adversaries for the good of the nation.

In the months ahead, the Republicans will no doubt be tempted to leverage their increased Senate majority and hold on the White House to advance their agenda.  But this would be a mistake.  The past two years have showed us that the public is sick of Republican extremism in all its forms, from cozying up to white supremacists and wannabe Nazis to borrowing from our children to give the richest Americans (including the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) a tax cut they did not need or deserve.

ChuckDavidJoeTom Toddbrooksboraw

They should temper their partisan urges and find common cause with the Democrats.  For example, Republicans should work with Democrats on a real infrastructure bill, not a fake bill that auctions off our public patrimony to the highest bidder.  They should collaborate with Democrats on responsible oversight of Executive Branch officers, fulfilling the historic oversight role of Congress.  They should show respect for the rule of law by supporting an orderly completion of Mueller's Russia probe and by nominating and voting for mainstream judges who exhibit a nonpartisan judicial temperament and consistently treat potential romantic partners with respect or at least not feloniously.

If the Republicans refuse to abandon their hyperpartisan extremist approach, they will only give ammunition to Democrats who claim that Republicans are too extreme to govern or even that Republicans don't share broadly-accepted American values.

Republicans would do well to remember that this nation was founded on, and has pursued, bedrock principles such as respect for the dignity of every human being regardless of their background or parentage, the rule of law, the value of honest, responsible government, and the belief that the rewards of a market economy should be enjoyed broadly rather than pocketed by a wealthy few.

When Republicans pursue their radical agenda of insulting and demonizing members of a particular religion or ethnic group, proposing wildly bigoted constitutional revisions to treasured fundamental laws like the 14th Amendment, or even subverting a core Constitutional provision like the Census, they appeal to their angry hard-core base but at the cost of imperiling our precious nation itself.

A Republican Party willing to work collaboratively with Democrats on vital national priorities such as ensuring affordable health care to all, providing a long-term path to citizenship for those brought to this country as children, and protecting our planet from the coming scourge of unchecked global warming would do much to ease the current climate of polarization and gridlock that has prevented sensible bipartisan action.

It is time for Republicans to put country above party and reach across the aisle.  If Republicans are willing to put their extremist past behind them and work on issues that I myself care about then they will show that they have truly taken on the lessons of the midterm elections and are ready to unify our nation.

ChuckDavidJoeTom Toddbrooksboraw's latest book, “The Greatness of American Greatness” is available in remainder bins everywhere.  His podcast “An Inside Look at the 2020 Elections” begins tomorrow.

The Grand Old Pogrom

Editors' Note:  Due to breaking news, we are unable to bring you today's planned feature: “I Knew It All Along” by legendary Spy Sports Columnist Shill Shamelessly.  We'll try to bring you his peerless insights soon!

By A. Cahan
Jewish Affairs Editor

Shabbat morning in America.  Jews everywhere are heading toward shul, late of course.  Perhaps it's a bar mitzvah, a bris, a yahrzeit, or they simply want to remind Bob Feldman to pay his damn pledge to the Building Fund already.

Instead, on Saturday,  October 27, 2018, in the comfortable suburb of Squirrel Hill, what they got was a pogrom.

And what all surviving American Jews got was a wake-up call.  In the wake of the massacre and the responses of Republican politicians and their apologists, running from the lame to the incredible, it has become clear that any Jew who votes Republican is putting his people at grave risk.

The leading candidate for Republican
Speaker of the House published
then deleted this Tweet

The lone gunman, a white male loser who was able without any serious difficulty to amass a 21-gun military-grade lethal arsenal, decided that he had enough of the international Jewish conspiracy to overrun America with Honduran terrorists disguised as hungry, wretched women and children.

From whence could he have gotten this crackpot idea?  After 0.05 seconds of searching, we found out: from the alternative white supremacist Republican media machine.  A representative sample appears above but we could afflict you with an infinite number of like examples.

Now Jew haters have always been with us.  But only since the Bigot-in-Chief stole the Presidency with his toxic brew of hatred, bias, stupidity, and anger, have they felt emboldened to stroll into synagogues and open fire.   As the Editor of the Forward, Jane Eisner, summed up:

But very worst of all, we are a nation with a president who stokes this anger — against immigrants, against minorities, against anyone who disagrees with him at any moment — and then, when violence and death stain the landscape, blames the victims for not protecting themselves enough, as if that were the reason for the bloodshed.
It’s time for the Jewish community in all its many facets to confront the complicity of the man in the White House, and all who support him — with money, votes, political expertise and moral cover.

Let us savor the full bitterness of the response of the U Bum Administration to this appalling disaster.  By selling their soul (not a particularly valuable commodity at this point to be sure) to gun nuts, the entire Republican Party has endorsed the idea that any hate-addled nut should be able to stroll into any gun lover convention and walk out with an unlimited amount of military-grade weaponry that can kill 30 innocents a minute and overpower any defender armed with only a handgun.

The price for that insanity has been paid by high school students, people of color, concert goers in Las Vegas, and now the Jews.  Who knows who will get the butcher's bill tomorrow?

We know it won't be the Grifter-in-Chief.  With his now-legendary response to any tragedy – half-assed off-the-cuff ignorant hateful bullshit – he blamed the Jews for not posting armed guards at every U.S. synagogue.  Leaving aside the obscenity of blaming victims at a time of crushing loss, there's no doubt, as was the case with innumerable school shootings, that a guard with a handgun is no match for a white maniac with an array of heavy semi-automatic weaponry.

And by the way, who's supposed to pay for all of this round-the-clock security?  We know it won't be President Tiny Toadstool.  Or his hidden genius son-in-law Jared.  Will it be the Jews themselves, taxed to provide their own security as in the medieval ghetto?

Here's an idea: the $25 billion that the Groper-in-Chief wants to spend on a wall to guard against a nonexistent threat at the southern border could buy plenty of security for religious institutions currently being targeted by white male extremists.  

This is how a Jewish journalist is treated

in U Bum's America

But surrender to gun maniacs, while bad for the Jews, isn't necessarily anti-Semitic.  It's the rest of the Republican party prescription that sends our co-religionists to the real estate listings in Montreal and Toronto.

Let's consider the oafish response of brain-dead extremist and ghoul in waiting Mike Pence who said that anyone who shoots up a temple or a church should pay the “ultimate price.”  Leaving aside that the death penalty is already available for terror attacks (ask the Marathon Bomber), isn't something missing from this list?  Are there any other religious institutions in America?  If not, where do America's 3,000,000 Muslims congregate?  So it's OK according to Mama's Boy Pence to leave mosques off the list because it's OK to ban, if not shoot, Muslims?  And who thinks that anti-Islam bigotry is good for the Jews?  (Actually, we'll get to that.)

As Julia Ioffe – who has been smeared with unspeakable anti-Semitic abuse for the crime of truthful reporting – said in today's Washington Post:

In the two and a half years that followed, Trump’s tune has become a deafening roar. The closing ad of his campaign reprised the kind of anti-Semitic tropes that populated “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”: “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” Trump’s voice said, as pictures appeared of then-Federal Reserve Board chair Janet Yellen (a Jew), billionaire progressive donor George Soros (a Jew), and then-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (also a Jew). The ad was called “Donald Trump’s Argument for America.”  In fact, Trump had so much to say about the Jews that his Jewish son-in-law has had to publicly defend him as “not an anti-Semite.” 

Bigotry wasn't some incidental aspect of the the Republican argument for political power.  It was the core, and anti-Semitism was right in there with racism and anti-immigrant animus.

Speaking of people whose concern for American Jews we're having trouble stomaching, according to the The New York Times:

Leaders in the United States and across the world condemned the attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said he was “heartbroken and appalled” and that the “the entire people of Israel grieve with the families of the dead.”

Is he now?  It's nice that Netanyahu evinces such tender concern for Conservative (that is, mainstream) Jews, having denied them the right to pray as they see fit at the Western Wall in Jerusalem to protect his frail extremist coalition.

More fundamentally, Netanyahu and the entire Likud apparatus, from Las Vegas to the meanest illegal settlement in the hills of the West Bank, have done their level best to demean and marginalize liberal Jews, especially those who have the temerity to question the wisdom of paving the West Bank with settlements to deny Palestinians any hope of a real state in the region.

For that reason, the Likud has enthusiastically backed U.S. extremists and the Tangerine-Faced Golem, all the while undermining Democrats who have dared to express support for a two-state solution.  We are told in ways subtle and otherwise that only Republicans, who support the extirpation of legitimate Palestinian aspirations (whether as part of the end of the world and the Rapture or otherwise), are good for the Jews.

Yesterday's massacre demonstrates just how ludicrous that position was.  The blood of our brothers and sisters in Squirrel Hill cries out to us from the floor of their violated sanctuary: No one who cares about their fellow Jews can even think about voting Republican.

24 Minutes in the Life of America

24 Minutes in the 

Life of America

Editors' Note: The Spy is not just your comprehensive source for hard news and trenchant opinion.  It's so much more, like a showcase for the finest in writing and photography featuring the talents of our far-flung network of stringers and freelancers.  That's why we decided, what with all the scary news about bombs being sent to critics of the Grifter-in-Chief (which bombs he places in quotation marks to demonstrate he doesn't think they're real), to step back for a minute and fill a few pages with a reflective moody impressionistic pastiche of America at this moment – not just the rich and powerful but the little people, the common clay of our land, your fellow Americans, you know – [We get the setup. – Ed.]

6:42 a.m. New York City.

Dawn is just breaking over the skyscrapers of Sixth Avenue as Alison Porchnik, 28 [Our records say 33 – Fact Checker], an assistant producer, takes a sip of her lukewarm coffee and grimaces at the bank of monitors in front of her at Fox News World Headquarters.  Her mind is filled with questions.  What did that f***in' idiot Brian just say?  Why can't he just read from the prompter in front of him?  Is this what I spent four years at New York University for?  Why can't I find a decent apartment in Williamsburg for less than $3,000 a month?  Would it really be so bad to marry Sidney Feigenbaum, DDS?  He's boring and bald and lives in Mineola, but at least his income would pay off her student loans.

Not only that, she has a segment to fill up for Cruella de Vil at 10 tonight and she has nothing.  Democratic mobs?  Last week.  Leftist intolerance on campus?  Last night.  Planned Parenthood's plot to murder millions of babies?  Alison remembers the memo from Bill that said no more pro-life stories; it's not helping in the suburban swing districts.

What then?  She scans the monitors and sees a bunch of people walking, mostly women and small children.  They're not white.  They're aliens.  They are only 1,200 miles away from the U.S. border!  Perfect – by the time Alison is finished, the tape will look like a Honduran blitzkrieg.

3:44 a.m. Las Vegas, Nevada

The old man sleeps badly.  Despite his billions, he is racked by worries.  Finally, he gives up, rings the bell for his night attendant and flips on the light.  Far below his 48th floor penthouse the lights of the Strip blaze, luring a never-ending stream of suckers and lushes into his casino, where they will be only too happy to turn over their life savings to him.

His night attendant Yossi and two women whose names he can no longer remember wrestle him into his robe and onto his scooter.  He maneuvers his way into the living room, with its bank of monitors and secure phones.  He sees one of his underlings in Tokyo and barks, “Do we have that Tokyo casino license yet?”  The stricken look on his minion's face tells him everything he needs to know.  The old man spits out, “F*** this.”

5:46 a.m. Memphis, Tennessee

Inside the battered RV, the lights are already on.  Nathan Forrest, 72, finishes his first Winston as he helps his wife change her oxygen tank.  He has to hurry because his 12-hour warehouse shift begins at 7 a.m. and he must walk four miles to get there.  There's no retirement for Nathan: he needs the $7.25 an hour to make ends meet.  He took lower Social Security payments beginning at 62 because his former employer had gone broke and stopped paying his pension.  Some days his back hurts so much from lugging 45 pound boxes that he wonders if he'll survive until his shift ends.  He bids his wife farewell, and leaves his trailer, proudly wearing his Make America Great Again hat.

6:48 a.m. Rockville, Maryland

The sun hits the driver right in the eyes as he turns off the Beltway.  Back in Iran, he was a doctor, but here he drives a Toyota Camry for ride hailing apps.   As he hoped, it's a lucrative downtown run.  For an hour battling traffic on Connecticut Avenue he'll gross $15 after gas and lease payments.  If he can get a decent fare downtown, so much the better, although the $3.25 he gets for the run from Farragut to Capital Hill won't pay too many overdue hospital bills.  He stops in front of a raised rambler with a dying lawn.  The house looks familiar.  He sees his passenger flying out of the house, trying vainly to get into his jacket while cradling his cell phone.  Not this asshole again.  This guy is a reporter for some newspaper or something and will spend the entire ride whining into his phone.  What he won't ever do is tip.

Sure enough, the passenger climbs into the back seat with nary a word of greeting.  Into his phone he whines, “He said what?  An invasion?  ISIS terrorists? . . . Yes, I'll see if I can get any clarification from the Press Office.”

5:52 a.m. Liberal, Kansas

Maria Fernandez, 23, has been at work for almost an hour, making sure that the chickens hanging upside down from the chain are dead and pulling off their heads as they speed by, 50 a minute.  Her gloves and smock are already covered with blood and feathers  but at $10 an hour it's the best she can do with the Social Security Number she bought from Manuel behind the grocery store.  Her supervisor tells her than she is taking too many bathroom breaks and that if she can't manage the work while pregnant she should quit.  Her supervisor also told her that she should have kept her legs together and welcomed Jesus into her life instead.  As he walks away, he tells her to take pride in her work, because one of her chickens could end up eaten by the President of the United States.  She spits at a chicken, hoping she's gotten the right one.

6:59 a.m.  Greenwich, Connecticut

The CEO of the hedge fund that owns the warehouse in Memphis and the slaughterhouse in Liberal cycles away on his Peloton, watching a financial news channel.  The quarterly numbers look good.  The cut in the corporate tax rate has increased his after-tax profits by 40%.  Therefore the stock price is up 40%.  Therefore his net worth increased from $2 to $2.8 billion since January 1.  Finally, he thinks, he can afford to dump his second wife and maybe trade up to a hot youngish actress, like Steve-o.  Life is good, he thinks.

7:01 a.m.  Malone, New York

Inside a vast cold warehouse sit thousands of computer servers and storage units, handling billions of  bytes of data each second for Twitter.  Although the facility sprawls over 10 acres and receives a $24,000,000 of subsidized electricity each year, it employs only 30 people.  In Aisle 255, six servers blink on.   A Tweet from the President of the United States warning of an imminent invasion by Honduran and Iranian terrorists has been sent to 65,000,000 accounts and retweeted by 4.3 million bots.

7:06 p.m. U.S. Embassy, Tokyo

The NIACT alarm goes off in the Embassy's com center.  A cable authorized by the President is to be delivered at once to the Ambassador.  But the Ambassador is taking his weekly visit to the baths and so the message goes to the DCM.  It reads simply: WHERE THE FUCK IS THE CASINO LICENSE?

5:22 p.m., Old Sludgebury, Mass.

The Spy's Special Projects Editor looks at the assembled pointless drivel his team has put in front of him for a big feature about 24 Minutes in the Life of America, which is supposed to cover 8 pages on Sunday.  “This is all you got?” he rails. “You're all fired!”

Never give a Republican an even break?

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-content Generator

There's no doubt that journalists and other scriveners are feeling more beset than ever.  No, we're not talking about a Washington Post columnist and U.S. legal permanent resident dismembered alive by a Saudi hit squad, whose death is being systematically covered up by the corrupt bigot in the White House bought and paid for by the Saudis, among others.

No, we're talking about something really important: the hurt feelings of white male gasbags who are not getting the respect they deserve merely because they have been wrong about everything over the last 40 years.  Today's poster child: former Iraq Warmonger and Bush apologist Max Boot.

These days Boot, like his fellow turncoats Billy Kristol, Davey Frum, Nicolle “Stop the Recount” Wallace and so many others, is enjoying his readmission to the human race because he, like any sentient being but unlike 99% of Republicans, is appalled by the antics of President Tiny Toadstool.

Looks like Max Boot won't need his slogan back

This idyll of hard-won respectability is marred only by a pertinacious few who point out that, prior to 2017, Boot was a hard-core shill for the George W. Bush program of lying us into war, committing torture, and cutting huge chunks out of the Constitution in order to arrest and detain in America U.S. citizens on suspicions, but not legally adequate charges, of terrorism.

Now that Boot has seen the light and the possible moolah he could rake in from selling his new book to people who think, i.e. not Republicans, he's done some good work confessing past sins.  According to Mother Jones, he's come closer to apologizing than the rest of the Iraq War Hot Air Force and other Bush coatholders:

[David Corn, Mother Jones:]You were a golden boy of conservative punditry. You joined the Wall Street Journal editorial page in 1994 at 24. You were the op-ed editor four years later. You became a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and a blogger for Commentary. You were in neocon heaven—a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an adviser to John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. You were one of the major voices in favor of the Iraq War. And in your forthcoming book, you write with great introspection and humility, “I can finally acknowledge the obvious: It was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost.” I mean, Max, this is almost, maybe it is, an apology. What brought you to that point?

Max Boot: Well, it’s basically that I could not deny reality indefinitely.  

Good thinking, Max.  Do go on:

I was in my conservative bunker, and I thought this was a gross libel against the Republican Party to claim that we were catering to racism, or that it was a libel on America to claim that America was a pervasively racist society. And then Trump came along and I realized, “Wait a second. There is a much larger constituency for racism and xenophobia than I had realized.” And it made me think, “Oh, my goodness. This is why a lot of people were voting Republican.” It wasn’t because they loved supply-side economics. It wasn’t because they supported NATO. It was because they were looking for a candidate who would champion the interests of white people. And Donald Trump did that more unabashedly and more unapologetically than previous Republican candidates had done. That was a wake-up call. And then of course I saw other examples of racism coming to the fore in ways that were undeniable, like all these videotapes of police officers killing and abusing African Americans. The evidence is right there, on the tape. You can’t deny it. 

No you can't, as indeed people of color and Democrats have been saying for at least 60 years to the derision of folks like you.   For some reason, those folks who were fighting for the truth and justice all that time aren't always as impressed as they should be by Max's newfound wisdom, according to Max:

Well, a general danger of punditry is that there’s very little incentive to change your position or admit error. If you reverse your position, the people who backed you before will be unhappy, but a lot of the people who now agree with you will still pillory you. I’ve gotten that on Twitter; I’m called a war criminal and told that I’m being opportunistic in renouncing the Iraq War. And so these people on the left are basically saying, “Too late. You can’t renounce your beliefs.” There’s very little incentive, from a political economy standpoint, for people to reverse field. And a lot of disincentives.

That must be why Billy and Davey and Steve and all the others haven't even bothered with any sort of recognition of, much less atonement for, their past idiocies: the pain of not being loved.  It's not as bad as having your legs sawed off or being publicly mocked and humiliated by the most powerful Republicans in the world for sharing your terrifying story of sexual assault at the hands of a Supreme Court Justice, but it's still pretty bad.

Perhaps it's not just sheer perversity that animates those who have correctly seen that the obvious truth that the Republican Party was and is nothing more than a collection of white racists, plutocrats and warmongers.  Perhaps it's the fear that, unlike those few who have made some effort to recognize their past misdeeds, the much greater number of Republicans who have not (what are your Contra buddies up to these days, Ana?) are peddling a new dog's breakfast of whoppers.

As far as we can tell, Max is alone among the Republican Never U Bummers in seeing the line that connects 60 years of racist Republican politics to its current master practitioner, President Tiny Toadstool.  The remainder don't, or won't.

That make us fear that what the Billys and Daveys and Steves and Joeys are angling for is a place at the political trough once we are rid of the Tangerine-Faced Grifter, assuming we live that long.  We fear that they will return to claim what they see as their rightful place in national politics based on the falsehood that Trumpanismo was an aberration from, rather than the culmination of, Republican policies.

They'll be back, trying out new lies to embroil us in new wars, like David “Axis of Evil” Frum, protect plutocracy and screw the poor, like Joe “I Ended Welfare!” Scarborough, avoid tackling climate change in the name of “deregulation,” and deny women access to safe abortions, like Nicolle Wallace, who once accused John Kerry of being insufficiently devoted to “fetal life.”

This is not an idle concern.  Here's one Republican who now fancies himself a moral authority but contributed greatly to the current catastrophe by telling us two years ago that he couldn't bring himself to vote for the one person who would save us from the U Bum Presidency:

The usual both sides bullsh**t.

Where exactly are far-left radicals ascendant?  In the Democratic Party of Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer?  Bollocks.

We can't let Republicans insinuate their shabby discredited policies back into the mainstream under the guise of some non-existent “third way.”  If they want a center-right party, we already have one: the Democrats.

As for Max Boot, we hope he sells a lot of books.  But before we sign our future over to him and his old buddies, you might want to take today's quiz: who liked Evan McMullin's preposterous Tweet?

Hint:  His name rhymes with “Lacks Toot.”  If you guessed right, you win a Coalition Provisional Authority T-shirt.  We've got a million of 'em!  When claiming your prize, please specify whether you want the one with the map of Iraq or Iran.