I tried to line the thing up so it was picking the other guy's nose, but I couldn't get it to look right. So you get this.

Last Week in Weird

You have the obligation to remain silent

Ah, America. Land of the free! Home of the Barves! Where the only thing more cherished than apple pie, baseball, and motherhood is the absolute, rock-solid, George Washington-approved, First Amendment-guaranteed right to free speech. I’m sure you know it by heart:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Of course, as any fule kno, the Constitution is a "living document." What necromantic rites were involved in this black sorcery your humble narrator shudders to think, but apparently the Constitution, quite unlike every other piece of paper in the history of the world, has the power to update itself whenever the disembodied flying devil head of Uncle Sam wills it to be. And, in an astonishing turn of events, He communicates His grand design to us through the federal judiciary. Last week, the holy judiciary handed down the magical new text of the First Amendment, which has apparently been updated with a rider adding "… unless minor bureaucrats don’t like it."

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The Anti-Trump Mentality

I’m not entirely sure who first coined the phrase "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but whoever it was hit the nail on the head. The term accurately describes the way the media — first during the primary season, and even moreso since — seems to lose touch with reality wherever Trump is concerned. Whether they’re breathlessly reporting that Trump didn’t evict lawful Iranian tenants from a building he bought in 1998, reading secret Nazi codes into his campaign announcements, pretending obvious jokes are sincere invitations to establish a new Soviet Union, declaring him both a terrorist and a toddler, or whatever other crazy thing, media flacks just become entirely unhinged when the subject turns to Trump.

It’s interesting that, while Trump Derangement Syndrome hasn’t really accomplished much by way of stopping Trump, it appears to be rather contagious. I’ve noticed an increasing number of regular people who appear to be coming down with this dread disease in recent weeks, as is brilliantly illustrated by this conversation (paraphrased, of course, but close to the original) between two of my dyed-in-the-wool Democrat-4-life friends:

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Hope and change and also death

Last Week in Weird

Government in microcosm

On Wednesday, CNN did one of its hilariously phony "Town Hall" bits, in which a carefully-screened group of people asks prearranged questions, and president Obama uses them as an excuse to talk about how great he art. This week, the widow of a soldier who committed suicide asked the president what could be done to reduce to rate of veteran suicides from its current level of twenty-two per day, and the president, in between two different anecdotes about how many lives he personally has saved through the awesome power of bureaucracy, dispensed this pearl of wisdom:

We are hiring more mental health professionals. But the fact that there’s still 20 a day who are feeling hopeless means that we’ve got to do more. And, you know, anybody who’s watching right now, if you call the, you know, veterans help line, there’s going to be somebody there to answer.

So, really, all those suicidal soldiers need to do is call up the government’s suicide help line, where the highly-trained professionals from the government will be there to help. I guess this story would have a happy ending, then, if it weren’t for one niggling little detail: quite often, when people call the suicide help line, there actually isn’t anybody there to answer.

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Last Week in Weird

A new low in identity politics

The big shocking news this past week was that Donald Trump, the most hateful man in America, running for president on the Hate Party ticket with the slogan "Make America Hateful Again," hatefully spoke hate speech about how much he hates the Jews. What horrible effluence of hatred emerged from the Donald’s Twitter feed this time? This hatefully anti-semitic hate picture of Hillary Clinton:

(((Hillary)))

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