Reading "Beowulf" to the Ayatollah

 "Joe Biden needs to stop quoting Socrates and reading Beowulf to the Ayatollah.  These are hard men and they want to kill Americans and they want to kill Jews and they want to drink our blood out of a boot.  And we have to respond accordingly."  Louisiana John Kennedy making a point about Anglo-Saxon poetry that no one else has picked up on.  When reached for specifics about Socrates, his office said, "Huh?"

On February 16 a fifty-year-old wrong will be corrected, when Franklin Armstrong gets a better seat at the Thanksgiving table.  In A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973) it was apparently considered progressive to invite him at all.  Now the first (only?) Black character gets a backstory and a seat among the others.  Which Fox pundit will be the first to denounce this "revisionist woke-ism"?

Frank Star Comes Out, president of the Oglala Sioux, has informed Governor Kristi Noem that she is officially "banished" from tribal land in response to her pledge of troops and razor wire to Greg Abbott's Civil War re-enactment on the southern border.  The only people who have a right to complain about immigration are taking the side of the immigrants.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, says a video accusing Joe Biden of being a pedophile does not violate its rules, which it acknowledges to be "incoherent."  It shows Biden kissing his granddaughter but does not involve AI so -- knock yourself out.

Taylor Swift became the first artist to win the album of the year Grammy for the fourth consecutive year.  Apparently Biden also controls entertainment awards, and rumor has it the president loved Oppenheimer.

Tucker Carlson has been spotted in Moscow, fueling speculation that he will be Putin's running mate in next month's presidential election.  Compared to spending the winter in his Xwitter shed in Maine, even Russia looked inviting.

For singles who want to defy medical science there is a new dating site called "Unjected."   Because the sperm of vaccinated men (all vaccines or only covid?) contains something they've dreamed up called "spike protein" and can be passed to female partners.  Evidently this is very bad.  Men who sign up also have to sign a "no ouchies" affidavit and be interviewed by one of the site's "medical professionals."  (No blood test?)  They also have to pay a fee, to weed out "woke liberal cheap men."  At last the Bureau of Statistics can get a reliable incel count.

Tudor Dixon, the Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of Michigan who was easily defeated by Gretchen Whitmer, may have reached her limit.  She denounced Charlie Kirk for saying there are no qualified Black airline pilots, and then she went after Candace Owens for including women pilots in the same baseless slur.  When Tudor Dixon is the sane person in the room, back slowly out of the room.

Our editorial board is considering a weekly feature called Trump Dementia News, until we need to make it daily.  Trump has apparently decided he looks like Young Elvis.  I have to agree insofar as Elvis also dyed his hair and at autopsy was found to be full of shit.  It ends there.

In yet another interview, Trump favorite Maria Bartiromo suddenly remembered she used to be a reporter.  She asked about the large number of people who cycled in and out of his administration despite a claim to hire "the best people" and he couldn't think of any response but to claim that all the presidents had the same problem, so there.  Very very disloyal.  "How do you know, if you get back in, you don't have a network of people around you working against you?" she persisted.  "I will, and so will anybody else that gets in as a Republican, these people are sick, these are sick people."  Sadly, Bartiromo did not ask who "these people" are or the nature of their sickness.  Paranoia, maybe?

Big, tough men, tears in their eyes -- we all know the chorus of this song, and last week he added a new verse:  "I have steel people that every time they see me, they start to cry," he assured Bartiromo.  "They hug me.  They say 'You saved our industry.'"  Between media and cell phones, there should be video of these moving encounters by now, the burly proletarians shouldering aside the Secret Service and snuggling up to "Sir," but I have yet to see one.  

After dragging out his triumphant cognitive test again at a rally in Las Vegas, Trump segued to a blast from the past (as AM DJs used to say), Uncle John the MIT professor.  "Same genes.  We have genes.  We're smart people.  We're smart people.  We have..." and he went on to compare people with horses, a popular argument in 1930s Germany.  "You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones and the slow ones, well, it doesn't work out so well, right?"  And genes are a predictor of intelligence.  "Three generations of imbeciles are enough," wrote the overrated Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1927, leading to hundreds of involuntary sterilizations.

It must be terrifying to feel even a low-grade mind sliding into full-blown dementia.  Clearly Trump wishes Uncle John had been his father instead of Fred, who was in the grip of Alzheimer's at Donald's age.  Is the condition inherited?  No one seems to know.  But if you find yourself expounding on the power of water to cancel magnetism, or claiming that windmills kill whales, or staring into a total eclipse... if you find yourself trying to say "Nancy Pelosi" and hearing "Nikki Haley" come out of your mouth... if you're still obsessed with a one-time opponent who died six years ago... if you think a playground sexist slur of a female attorney is clever... tragically, I could go on and on.