Tag: Saudi Arabia

Eenie Meenie chili beanie, the spirits are about to speak!

Last Week(s) in Weird

by Darien Sumner

Sequence break

It’s a true fact: this week’s column was meant to begin with my snotty Memorial Day entry, which you’ll find below. Then I was going to segue into Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride and go from there. It really just ate away at me, though, that I had the weirdest authentic Trump moment of all time and I was going to bury it halfway down the article. And with that image! That amazing, iconic, unedited, un-DC-Funk-Parade-foam-fingered image. So we’re doing things a little bit out of order, because, my friends, on this roller coaster that is life, the weird is in the driver’s seat, and all the rest of us are being pulled along remorselessly, with our hands and feet firmly secured inside the carriage at all times.

So what we see above is — and I swear I’m not making any of this up — president Trump, king Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, and president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt in a darkened room surrounded by fascinated onlookers, placing their hands on, um, a magical glowing devil orb as part of a ritual to end all terrorism forever.

No, that’s true.

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The Last — and Worst — of Obama’s Wars

by Darien Sumner

That can only be the war in Yemen. This is a truly disgusting and cynical war; Yemen is almost impossibly poor, and is no threat to the United States in any conceivable reality, and your United States government is aiding and abetting the butchers that are the house of Saud in what amounts to the most lopsided partisan religious persecution of all time. This is a "war" fought for no purpose, with no defined endpoint, and with no objective other than the wholesale slaughter of helpless children, all to curry political favor with oil-rich barbarian war-chiefs.

Now, just because I labeled this an Obama war, don’t think I’m leaving the new guy off the hook. I was wholeheartedly in favor of giving him a chance, but at this point he’s had it, and he’s officially blown it. If the Trump administration can’t even see through this most insincere of all wars, it clearly has never seen and will never see a war it doesn’t like. All we can hope for at this point is that maybe they won’t start quite as many new ones as the last administration did.

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If only

Last Week in Weird

by Darien Sumner

Honest Journalism

You’ve probably heard by now, but the next president of the United States will be Hillary Rodham Clinton. We know this because a stalwart bastion of journalistic integrity said so — specifically Newsweek, which made the decision to go ahead and print its special commemorative "Madam President" issues well in advance of the election. Newsweek defended itself by pointing out that this is a common practice; production times being what they are, generally both commemorative issues do get printed, and only the correct one sees distribution. CNN even provided intellectual cover by referencing the true correct fact that MLB produced both Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians World Series championship memorabilia, but only sold the Cubs version (the Indians gear will be offloaded in the third world as discount apparel — no, that’s true). There’s just one problem with the story.

As CNN explains to its slower readers, "this is the media version of World Series keepsakes that were on sale in Cleveland and Chicago last week. Street vendors printed "Cubs win" and "Indians win" T-shirts, then trashed the Indians shirts after the Cubs won Game 7."

There is just one very notable difference: in the case of the World Series, there were two sets of shirts created. However, in the case of the infamous Newsweek special edition, the publishing company Topix, decided to print just one.

Guess which. [Emphasis original]

Whoops missus!

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