Liberals accused of Insensitivity for mocking Mentally-Disordered President Trump

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—Martha Mollycoddle, the mother of a man diagnosed as a psychopath and currently undergoing treatment in a hospital for the criminally insane, has begun a campaign to shame liberals and Democrats for mocking President Trump as a result of his similar mental disorder.

“For all his chaos and irrationality and amorality, the real shame isn’t Trump,” she said. “It’s the Democrats who pretend to be warriors for social justice, who rail against cyber bullies and cut a man’s testicles off if he brushes up against a woman in the workplace. But then as soon as they think they’re free and clear to attack a severely mentally ill individual, they burry him beneath a thousand avalanches of insults and put-downs, and bitter cartoons and parodies at his expense.

“And all merely because Trump is destroying the country!

“Well, if a fellow in a wheelchair had the power to crush all Americans beneath his wheels, would the proper course be not to take away his wheelchair, but just to stand there and ridicule his handicap until the end of time?

“It’s the same with Trump: taking away his presidency would be one thing—but just to make fun of his hair and his face and his voice and his idiocy and his narcissism and his hypocrisy and his mendacity and his vulgarity and his ignorance and his racism and his sexism and his corruption and his treachery? That would amount to spitting on Franklin Roosevelt because he sometimes needed to move around in a wheelchair.

Donald Trump, she pointed out, “is ridiculed on the talk shows and the cable news channels and in newspapers and blogs and wherever else liberals congregate, day after day and hour after hour. They’re taunting a man for his antisocial personality disorders, for his malignant narcissism and his psychopathy. For shame!”

Mollycoddle knows firsthand the frustration and resentment of having that sort of insult added to injury. Her son was arrested for attempting to rape three women simultaneously, while he was wearing a costume to look like ET, the alien from Spielberg’s classic movie.

“My son is finally getting the medical treatment he needs,” she said, “but not before the journalists and the policemen mocked him for the strangeness of his behaviour. Two psychiatrists found that his mind doesn’t work like most people’s. So what’s the point of making fun of someone for something he can’t help?

“Trying to hold down three women while wearing an ET costume may amuse some, but the mental illness has serious consequences and you can be sure those three women weren’t laughing. Likewise, the prospect of Donald Trump trying to run a powerful country may seem like the makings of a comedy goldmine. But what’s less classy, Trump acting like the psychopath he is? Or making a gazillion nasty and smug remarks about Trump, whose mind is evidently malfunctioning?”

Mollycoddle pointed to what she called Hillary Clinton’s “understatements” that Donald Trump’s behaviour is “unprecedented” and that he “lacks the temperament to be president.” According to Mollycoddle, Clinton had to be vague during the general campaign, without specifying the gravity of Trump’s mental imbalance, because had she “laid the cards on the table” and called him a literal and full-blown sociopath, Clinton would have “pulled the rug out from under the comedians who fuelled her campaign.”

Hillary’s Clinton’s “lazy and overly cautious strategy” was “to throw shade against Trump, not to stand on her own inspiring policy platform. But had she followed through and charged Trump with being manifestly unwell in the head, her base might have found it unseemly to mock Trump at every turn, instead of just feeling sorry for him.”

Hillary’s “bloodless, calculated, and thus ineffectual rhetoric” notwithstanding, President Trump’s psychopathy is evident to many professionals, including Brandy Lee, who leads a coalition of 800 medical professionals that seeks to warn the public about the danger of Trump’s medical condition, and John Gartner who wrote a petition saying Trump should be removed from office, as required by the 25th amendment to the Constitution. Trump has slightly more psychopathic traits than Adolph Hitler, according to an Oxford study by Kevin Dutton.

The danger is so significant that some of these professionals voiced their concerns despite the so-called Goldwater rule of the American Psychiatry Association, which says that psychiatrists shouldn’t speak out against a public figure unless they’ve personally examined that person.  

“The rule is bogus,” said Mollycoddle, “and is only meant to protect psychiatrists from lawsuits for slander. In Trump’s case, there’s no reasonable dispute about whether he’s mentally healthy or ill. You don’t need a fancy degree to know he’s deranged, just like you don’t need to be a mathematician to know that two and two are four. Just read through the characteristics of a psychopath, derived from Hare’s checklist, and see for yourself if they apply to Trump. It’s all there in black and white.”

Mollycoddle has protested outside the offices of comedians Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, and Bill Maher, and has published articles against their “bullying humour.” “Mocking Trump,” she wrote, “is as disgraceful as laughing at a disabled person who collapses after dropping her crutches. Despite their presumed moral high ground and conceit of being masters of political correctness, liberals are highly insensitive to the grievous nature of psychopathy.”

Moreover, she contended, “Republicans should be praised for their optimism,” since “they’ve given a flagrant psychopath the chance to hold the highest office in the land. Instead of tearing down Trump with mockery and derision, they lift him up with a can-do attitude and with an onslaught of gaslighting and spin to keep Trump from learning the unsettling truth about his mental condition, which would only prevent Trump from making-believe he can do anything.

“Do you tell the child diagnosed with terminal cancer that he shouldn’t dress up like Spiderman and pretend to solve crimes, if that’s what his heart desires? No, you indulge that fantasy in such a terminal case. Likewise, if there’s no cure for someone like Trump, who’s had the luxury to indulge his antisocial personality disorders for many decades, the least we can do is humour his last hurrah—even if it destroys the country. That’s just the price of political correctness.” 

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God praised for outfitting Donald Trump with Self-Destruct Button

Dateline: LOS ANGELES—Thousands of Americans, who resist Donald Trump’s presidency on the grounds that he is literally a psychopath, have formed a religious group calling for praise of God for supplying the psychopath Donald Trump with a self-destruct button.

The group is called Small Mercies and was founded in Los Angeles, by Joey Garbanzo. Members of the group call themselves The Thankful, thus fulfilling the phrase, being “thankful for small mercies.”  

According to Garbanzo, “President Trump’s grotesque antics were on full display while he was campaigning for the presidency and they only got worse after he took office. But viewers should be twice astonished by Trump’s lunacy, as we The Thankful are.”

First, American viewers should be “grief-stricken to learn that a country with an alleged manifest destiny could award such a psycho clown with control of the White House. Was it our God-given destiny to be mocked all over the world for the travesty of Trump’s presidency?”

The second shock, however, “should be in noticing that every time Trump acts so bizarrely, he pushes a red button on his palm that’s clearly labeled ‘Self-Destruct.’”

Reporters also noticed the red button and attempted to normalize it, comparing it to a red-button that was allegedly located on Bill Clinton’s hip, which Clinton pushed during his intimate relations with Monica Lewinski; to the red button allegedly found above Barack Obama’s left ankle, which Obama pushed while picking his neoliberal cabinet members and advisors; and to the red button allegedly hidden behind George W. Bush’s right ear, which Bush pressed every time he opened his mouth in public.

“All modern American presidents have self-destruct buttons attached to their persons,” said one news anchor. “There’s nothing untoward about that.”

But Trump’s red button is located on his right palm, which is, of course, readily seen by viewers and which is a frequently-used part of the body. This has led The Thankful to theorize that Trump is compelled to push his self-destruct button more often than past presidents pushed theirs. The more frantically the button is pushed, the greater the psychopathy that must be crying out for escape.

Chief psychologist of Small Mercies, Laura Littlebitty, explains that psychopaths are “evil robots cleverly disguised as people,” and as such, each is outfitted with a self-destruct button. “I mean, would you want to be an evil robot, getting into all sorts of waywardness and utterly unable to learn from your mistakes or to fit into normal society and be happy? No, of course not, and neither would the psycho robot.”

The psychopath therefore invariably sabotages his “sham of a life,” to escape “his private hell built on glibness, high intelligence, inability to learn from experience, pathological self-centeredness, incapacity to love, callousness, shamelessness, impulsivity, recklessness, grandiose sense of self-worth, manipulation, juvenile delinquency, and pathological lying.”   

The “small mercy” of President Trump’s “big, honking red self-destruct button right there on his palm where he can’t avoid pushing it is that the existence of this button is perhaps the greatest proof that God loves us after all,” said Garbanzo.

“Yes, God cursed us with the psychopaths in the first place. But the Creator was evidently careful to install a self-destruct button on each and every otherwise-unbearable monster he sent our way. That’s why as loathsome as a psychopath like Donald Trump is, we’re blessed with the saving grace of getting to watch him flame out like the Hindenburg.

“It might look merely like Trump is doing this to himself, because he knows he’s in way over his head, he can’t stand being so abominable, and he’s unconsciously looking to get caught for his atrocious sins, like the serial killer who keeps writing the cops letters bearing cryptic clues to his whereabouts. However, we The Thankful see the hand of Providence in the fact that Trump can’t help but spoil his inhuman schemes, by being the way-over-the-top psycho that he is.”

Critics question why Trump’s presidency hasn’t yet ended in ignominious failure if Trump has been so repeatedly trying to destroy himself.

“Sure, it’s obvious Trump has a flaming-red self-destruct button attached to his hand,” said one Trump supporter. “And sure, he couldn’t help but push that button over and over again, just by going about his daily activities. But what if the wiring were cut or the mechanism were otherwise disabled? In that case, Trump could keep acting like the monster we on the alt right want him to be, and nothing could stop him.”

Others blame the mass media for inadvertently propping up the dead weight of Trump’s presidency, by showering him with the kind of titillating news coverage that only adds to his infamy, making him an exception to ordinary rules of conduct. In return, Trump supplies the infotainment industry with an enormous ratings boost.

Small Mercies maintains that there’s a mathematical relationship between the number of button-pushes needed to bring down the monstrosity in question, and the scale of that psychopathy. “The more hideous the psychopathy, that is, the older and more settled in his grievous outlook is the psychopath, the more times he must tap his self-destruct button for that outlet for his despair to have any effect.”

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Prophet of Doom cheated out of his Due Respect

Dateline: Year 2032, somewhere in the former United States—After the collapse of Western civilization in 2031, followed by the ruination of the rest of the planet, a self-proclaimed former prophet of doom has been reminding the survivors that he told them so, but they’ve declined to favour him with praise for his foresight, on account of their being too busy clawing for scraps and fending off the cannibals and scavengers who threaten their squalid encampments.

The doomsayer styles himself Ludovico the Magnificent, and carries a scrapbook bearing photographic evidence of the years he spent as a rabble-rousing anarchist standing on street corners, holding accusatory signs, and barking at strangers about the coming end of all things.

In addition, his scrapbook contains printouts of articles he wrote on his pessimistic blog in which he predicted at length how and why the world would be imminently destroyed.

“I saw the end coming and I told them so,” said Ludovico. “I told everyone back when no one cared. They were all bustling from here to there, happy as clams and blissfully unaware of the dangers of their way of doing business. They didn’t care about the blowback, because they lacked the vision or the commitment of a prophet.

“That’s where I came in. But no one listened! No one put their briefcase down for even a single nanosecond to stop and listen to summaries of the case I laid out in meticulous detail on my blog. And look where they are now: dead from war, plague, or starvation. Just as I predicted!”

Ludovico has taken it upon himself to continue his rounds, albeit now clad in a flamboyant red cape and sparkly magician’s suit he’d preserved in his bug-out rucksack. The prophet, however, has switched from predicting catastrophe, to rubbing the bitter truth in the faces of the beleaguered remnants of humanity.

“Oh, what’s that you got there?” he asked a bedraggled old woman who sat by her mud hut. “Is that rat flesh you’re feasting on? Gee, I wonder who predicted ten years ago on his blog that everyone was going to be reduced to eating rats. I wonder if that genius survived the apocalypse and might even be standing right in front of you, waiting for an apology because you would have failed to give him even the time of day, let alone the help he could have used marketing his website and spreading the news that could have saved the planet.

“And what’s that I hear? Nothing at all? You’re just going to keep sitting there, gnawing on rat, your sad old eyes staring at nothing? How typical!”

Later, the prophet came upon a wretched family wandering the hillside, whereupon he badgered them for hours but failed to receive the thanks and the praise he sought for his labours.

“Just a middle-aged couple now with their two daughters, eh?” he told them. “They would still have been old enough to read when my blog was at its peak. But did any of you read a word of it? Of course not! And look where you are now; look what’s befallen you. No more amenities for you, eh?

“And who predicted all of it? Did you? Of course not! No, let’s think now. Who both saw it all coming and had the foresight as well to protect the hard evidence of his wisdom? Could he be—Oh, I don’t know—stumbling along right beside you in a flipping red cape, waiting for—hmm, I don’t know—someone to acknowledge he was right all along and everyone else was stupid and arrogant?”

The family never did pay its respects to Ludovico, oppressed as they were by the weight of all that had befallen them.

At any event, they were soon set upon by cannibalistic ravagers whom the prophet addressed in turn.

“And who do we have here?” said the prophet. “Cannibals from the tar pits yonder? And I suppose you’re just going to go ahead and rape those girls without even setting a moment aside to honour the personage who’s wearing a wondrous red cape, who just happens to be called Ludovico the Magnificent, who bears evidence of his genius in this here scrapbook, and who foretold all this misery. Sure, don’t mind me! I just saw it all coming, is all. Just ignore the prophet while you chop up their flesh. Don’t even give him the time of day or anything! Just like before.”

The prophet made his escape by convincing the savages that his cape conferred magical powers on him. But his getaway provided him little joy, because the savages likewise neglected to acknowledge that some years ago he in fact had shown remarkable foresight.

“What really gets my goat,” confessed Ludovico, “is that the world itself is screwing me over a second time. The first time, everyone was too busy to acknowledge my greatness. Now, when all the businesses are ashes, everyone’s too depressed or horrified to do so. Either way, I’m being cheated twice over!”   

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Beautiful Women conceal their Hotness to attract Nice Guys

Dateline: NEW YORK—A growing number of beautiful single women curse their physical charms, fearing that worthy men aren’t attracted to them so much as intimidated and liable to defecate in their pants before even thinking of approaching them.

Suzanne Kroener is a model and considered a ten on men’s “hotness scale.” Instead of reveling in her facial symmetry, luxurious hair, flawless skin, long legs, and hourglass figure, however, she laments these physical features.

“In some ways, having perfect breasts is an advantage,” she admits. “When I want to manipulate a guy, my beauty comes in handy. But what if I want to attract a mate, a potential husband? In that case, my hotness works against me. It’s actually a nightmare.

“The only guys who will approach me in a bar or a supermarket or anywhere else are the slicksters and sociopaths, the arrogant and vain assholes who are too dumb to deal with their flaws.

“Sure, they’re fearless and they think they deserve to date a woman like me, because they’re usually fit and handsome. The problem is they’re able to approach me not because they’re courageous or confident, but because they’re douchebags. They’re con artists, selling lies and interested only in the ‘conquest,’ in hooking up with a trophy girl, using her up, and then moving on to their next prey.”

Michelle Bordeaux agrees with Suzanne. A lawyer and also widely considered a smoking hottie, Michelle can scan the men at a bar and tell who will approach her and who is “pissing in their pants.”

The irony, she said, is that those who are cowed by her beauty are “the nice guys who would make for the best boyfriends or husbands, if only they had more self-esteem. But the more self-esteem a guy has, the closer he is to being a jerk.

“It’s no accident that the nice guys piss themselves as soon as they see me looking at them in a bar. They’re hypersensitive and overly familiar with all their weaknesses; all day long they’d apologize for being unworthy to breathe the same air as I do. And so the only guys left standing are the game-playing phonies. They may have money and good looks and so they’re great for hooking up with, but if you’re looking to form an emotional connection with a guy, you’ve got no one and it’s all because of your slamming, smoking hot body.”

Michelle once tried approaching a nice guy at a bar, but before he could stammer his response to her flirtatious remark, he ran screaming to the restroom. He died of a heart attack ten minutes later, sitting with diarrhea on the toilet.

“I literally have looks that can kill,” Michelle said, “which is fine if I want to seize power as a tyrannical queen like some babe out of Game of Thrones. But that’s a fantasy. In reality I just want a nice guy for a life partner. And sooner or later every guy I hook up with reveals himself to be a scumbag. Again, that’s no accident, because a nice guy couldn’t even say hi to me without urinating all over the floor or dying from anxiety.”

Frustrated by “the irony that feminine beauty doesn’t belong in this godless world,” as their manifesto states, Michelle and Suzanne teamed up to form Hotties for Nice Guys, an association of women who train to disguise their heart-stopping beauty so as not to burden ordinary men with a vision of womanly splendor.

“Instead of dressing up for the bar scene, we dress down, way down,” said Natasha, a recruit of HNC. “I wear busted-up glasses and the grossest baggy clothes to hide my assets. I wear no makeup except for fake scars, warts, and pimples I apply to my skin to look hideous. Then I walk into that bar with bed head and nauseating body odour, and I hit on the nice guys for all I’m worth.”

No longer compelled to lose control of his bodily functions, the “properly-shielded nice guy” feels as though he’s on more equal ground and the pair can engage in a meaningful conversation.

“Eventually, however, the moment arrives when I have to reveal my true form,” said Natasha. “I dated a nice guy a few times, thanks to my homely disguise, and everything was going well.

“Then I showed up at his place for dinner, all dressed up, my disguise left in my drawer at home. When he saw I was in reality a smoking hottie, he screamed and fell to the floor, pulling his hair out of his head. Then he ran around the room breaking everything he owned. He kept shouting that he could never keep me, because of the competition from superior men, and that he could endure seeing beautiful women only in porn. I tried to comfort him, to build up his confidence a little, but he fainted like he was a little boy and I was the monster creeping out from under his bed. So that was a bust.”

“We babes who want nice guys are caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Michelle. “First, we have to build up the nice guy’s self-esteem slowly, before revealing our outer beauty. But we can’t build it up too much or he’ll tip over into sociopath territory and lose his niceness. So it’s a delicate balancing act.

“Honestly, I never thought I’d have to work so hard to land a good guy.”

Men, however, doubt the very existence of “alleged hotties who want nice guys,” said Todd Gunderson, an auto mechanic and a nice guy who maintains that the assumptions of HNC are absurd.

“They’re just out to take your money,” he said, “these babes with a so-called heart of gold. Then when your guard is down, they’ll laugh in your face and move on to the next sucker. The nice guys who don’t hit on the smoking hotties in bars or who run away screaming? It’s not because they’re scared; it’s because deep down they know better, not to believe in something that’s too good to be true.

“If good looks usually corrupt guys, why would it be any different for good-looking women?

“That’s why I prefer to date women who are genuinely threes or fours on the hotness scale. Leave the beautiful women for the hunky guys. They deserve each other.”

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Club Punishes Talk Show Audiences for Drowning out Guests with Lingering Applause

Dateline: LOS ANGELES—Investigators have uncovered a club devoted to shaming audience members of American talk shows whose clapping and other loud reactions to the guests’ remarks often drown out what the guests are saying, wasting the time of the viewers at home.

Based in LA, the club is called Citizens for Silencing Audience Noise. Ray Akaji, CSAN’s spokesperson, expressed befuddlement at the audacity and self-centeredness of the studio audiences.

“If you watch Real Time with Bill Maher,” said Akaji, “almost a quarter of what you hear is the clapping, hollering, laughter, and other obnoxious noises made by the audience. The live audience members seem to think they’re more important than the millions watching around the world—as if anyone on earth is tuning in because they want to hear a single peep from Joe Blow sitting in the studio audience. No, of course we want to hear only the celebrity guests themselves.

“That’s what truly makes no sense. The noise-makers think they can interrupt the guests with impunity, wasting valuable airtime in an hour-long show with their cacophony of worthless cheering, as though there were no danger of reprisal. Well, not on CSAN’s watch.

“We treat the noise-makers as thieves, because that’s what they are: they steal the meaningful content that could have been, the funny jokes the comedian would have said had he or she not been rudely interrupted by the infantile noise-makers. Sure, the live audience buys the tickets to enjoy the show, but that doesn’t entitle those members to curtail the show’s content with their idiotic noises. Make annoying sounds at home if you insist, but not in what is effectively a public space.”

CSAN members have thus taken it upon themselves to camp outside television studios, wait for the offending audience members to exit at the parking lot, and yell in their ears or work party horns, blowouts, and kazoos such as you would find on New Year’s Eve.

“Our mission,” said Akaji, “is to render the offenders unable to hear themselves speak—at least until they reach the comforting silence within their vehicle. That way, the analogy should strike home and they may desist from repeating their bit of foolishness in the future.

“They should be asking themselves, ‘Isn’t it annoying to have some strangers blast nonsense in your ear so you can’t hear what you’d rather be hearing? Isn’t life better when those who should be quiet keep quiet, so you can get stuff done?’ That’s what the insolent noise-makers should be thinking when CSAN has taken vengeance on behalf of the millions of more polite audience members at home.”

TV critic Marsha Marshmallow and CSAN member reasons that the sources of the disturbance may be Los Angeles and New York in particular, those being the cities where most American talk shows are taped.

“These self-centered fans who get tickets to sit in the TV studio audience come from parts of America which aren’t known for their humility,” said Marshmallow. “Most are relatively well-off, so they feel entitled and are thrilled at the prospect that their clapping might somehow match the guests’ discourse, as though they were on equal ground. They thus forget that they’re nobodies whatsoever in comparison to the celebrity guests, and should therefore oblige the vast audience at home by shutting the hell up when the cameras are rolling.”

The TV show producers often whip the crowd into a frenzy, inviting the wider viewership to tune in by holding up signs about when to clap and using that in-studio noise to create the impression that the show is entertaining.

“CSAN understands that side of the television business,” said Akaji. “But that doesn’t entitle the audience to drag out its mischief, squandering the precious airtime and causing a backlash of frustration. It’s the same reason listeners are quick to tune out a radio program when even the guests talk over each other so no one can understand what they’re saying. Who wants to listen to noise?”

Not everyone agrees with CSAN, however. Ted Cruikshank insists that he prefers the noise, including the audience clapping or laughter. “I just go ahead and fast-forward whenever the guests are talking, because I like to hear on TV only the eruption of applause. Guess you could call me a connoisseur of noise.”

Cruikshank lets the clapping, laughter, or booing wash over him, testing his peculiar ability to discern what strike him as interesting variations in what would otherwise seem to be the equivalent of so much space-wasting rubbish.

“The clapping in particular just appeals to me—much more so than the opinions of the actors, professors, and pundits who, I take it, are the starring attractions for most viewers. I know I’m in the minority on this one, but there’s no accounting for taste, right?”

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News Media Confuse Viewers by speaking as if all Oligarchs are Russian

Dateline: TENNESSEE—American corporate news media baffle viewers by presupposing that all oligarchs are Russian citizens.

“You never hear CNN speak of American oligarchs,” said news media watcher Alonzo Plompus. “For some unknown reason, whenever you hear about oligarchs on cable news, they’re always Russian.”

An oligarchy is a state ruled by only a few people, or by a small minority. Officially, the United States is a democratic republic, not an oligarchy. But Russia under Vladimir Putin likewise holds elections, giving at least the appearance of being democratic.

According to Plompus, viewers of CNN are perplexed by the cable news meme “Russian oligarch,” because they’ve become “familiar with the phoniness of American democracy.”

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, said Plompus, but lost in the Electoral College, and that "college of elites" was “established by the Founders as a bulwark against democracy.”

In 2001, George W. Bush was handed the presidency by the Supreme Court, which ordered Florida to stop its controversial, grossly-dysfunctional vote count.

And a 2014 Princeton study found that because American governmental policies for four decades have demonstrably favoured the wealthy and ignored the majority’s stated preferences, and because the richest ten percent therefore has held a virtual veto on public policy, the United States is effectively a plutocracy, which is a type of oligarchy.

“Then there’s the gerrymandering that renders the congressional elections a total charade in numerous states,” said Plompus. “Because of corruption in how redistricting was done to lock in arbitrary advantages after the 2011 census, many Republicans found they could pick their voters rather than the other way around.”

According to the Forbes list of the world’s 500 richest people in 2017, only 28 are Russian citizens. The United States has over 200. The richest Russian is only 46th on the list, whereas 8 of the world’s richest 10 billionaires and 14 of the richest 20 are American.   

“But you never hear the phrase ‘American oligarch’ on US cable news,” said Mr. Plompus. “Even the business elites who ruled in the American Gilded Age are called ‘robber barons,’ never ‘oligarchs.’

Mr. Plompus held a contest to brainstorm hypotheses to explain this puzzling news media phenomenon. The winner, whose solution was voted most promising, received a basket of assorted muffins.

One of these hypotheses is that journalists are lazy and so once they devise a meme, they become glued to it because they’re averse to creative thinking. But this hypothesis leaves open the question of how the meme got started.

Another solution is that the word “oligarch” sounds vaguely Russian to the “clueless egomaniacs” who read the news on the corporate news channels, according to the teenager who suggested this explanation. The word “oligarchy” is actually rooted in ancient Greek.

The winning possibility, raised by Delilah Butte, is that the news media believe that all the world’s oligarchs packed up and moved to Russia, “because they like vodka or because Russia is so geographically enormous that it can better fit all their gargantuan possessions.”

Ms. Butte generously shared her muffins with the others who attended the contest.

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President Trump attended Secret Workshops to learn how to Lie like a Politician

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—Leaders in both the Democratic and Republican parties have been holding secret workshops with President Trump to teach him how to lie well.

According to an anonymous source who attended some of the meetings, there has been widespread frustration in Washington that Trump has been giving politicians a bad name due to the “pitifully weak” quality of his lies.

“The problem isn’t that Trump lies all the time,” said the source. “No one expects a politician to tell the truth. The problem is that Trump has no idea how to lie well.

“A politician is supposed to be such an expert at lying that even though you know it’s the politician’s job not to tell the truth, you go along with the lie because of its plausibility and the smoothness of its delivery.”

Trump’s problem is that “he’s too old to keep track of his infinite lies, and he lies about things that are obviously not as the president is making them out to be, so he gives the game away. A classic example was his lie about the size of his crowds at his inauguration.”

Moe Backalley, a presidential historian believes the problem may be a deficit in President Trump’s short-term memory capacity.

“The president seems unable to remember what he said a week ago on Twitter or at a press conference, when he later says the opposite, and so some of his lies are easily exposed because the press can just check the record and confirm the contradiction.”

Trump’s defenders insist, on the contrary, that he’s a master of deception. “No one know which way is up or down anymore,” said a Trump voter. “That’s all thanks to Trump’s audacity. He’s gaslighting the nation, creating a whole new narrative and making the facts—so beloved by the establishment—irrelevant. That means he’s winning!”

The workshops included tests of Trump’s understanding of the difference between truthfulness and deception. Trump was shown a plate with one apple on it, and was asked how many apples are on the plate. He answered, “There are three apples. Very, very nice apples. Shiny and red. One of my companies sells apples, you know. The best apples in the world. You should buy some.”

The apple was removed from the plate and Trump was asked, “What’s on the plate now?”

The president answered, “There’s a dog turd on the plate.”

But there was in fact no such dog turd.

“And where’s the dog that produced that turd?”

“In my coat pocket,” said the president.

According to the source, the president then swiftly devoured three of the ten present politicians and their bodyguards, somehow unhinging his jaws like a snake and swallowing the men and women whole.

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Liberal Morality Emasculating, argues noted Political Pseudoscientist

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—Horace Mollycoddle, political pseudoscientist at the Machiavelli Institute, has theorized in his interview with Subversion Magazine, that being morally right on the political issues is correlated with being a wimp or a sissy, which is why politicians who need to best each other in the bloodsport of politics either can’t justify their policies or are unwilling to fight for what’s right.

Quoting Yeats, Mollycoddle said, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Liberalism is more rational and ethical than conservatism, according to Mollycoddle, and liberalism entails assigning equal rights to women and minorities “whose feminine interests and slave morality rub off on liberal men, draining liberals in general of the strength to wage war on the manifest villainy of so-called conservatives.”

Thus, in the United States, Republicans trounce Democrats and “push their odious ‘free-market’ policies of plutocracy and their anachronistic and incoherent family values to evermore insane extremes. Alternatively, liberals somehow scrape together a victory, but lack the stomach to apply their progressive principles, as in the case of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.” Mollycoddle added that Hillary Clinton would likewise have governed as a neoliberal centrist, had she defeated Donald Trump in 2016.

Mollycoddle therefore posits a Wuss Factor that renders liberals “girly-men,” as Arnold Schwarzenegger called them. “This is the flip-side of Obama’s famous lack of ‘drama’: he didn’t create any drama while in office only because he didn’t care about anything, which is why, in turn, he didn’t fight for anything.

Obama’s defenders have said he’s cerebral rather than spineless or nihilistic, but Mollycoddle contends that “intellectualism, as in Woody Allen’s perennial movie character or Dostoevsky’s ‘mouse’ in Notes from the Underground, can provide cover for cowardice.” Instead of admitting to “a lack of the irrational inner strength that’s often needed to take decisive action, the hyper-aware intellectual will rationalize in an endless cycle of doubts and half-measures.”

Obama didn’t fight for a public option in the healthcare debate, said Mollycoddle, and so he will “suffer the irony that ‘Obamacare’ may be repealed even though Obama’s Affordable Care Act wasn’t at all a progressive alternative but was a conservative, Romney-style non-solution to the problems with the American healthcare system. And when he discovered that Vladimir Putin was waging cyberwar against the US in its 2016 presidential election, Obama dithered and choked instead of punishing Russia.

“Ultimately,” Mollycoddle continued, “this is because it’s impossible to be both moral and manly. To be sure, the liberal’s heart will always be in the right place. Unfortunately, this means Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, or any other liberal leader necessarily lacks the killer instinct to destroy his or her enemies.”

Ordinarily, in a healthy democracy, politicians would have “no need for battlefield virtues, no need to attempt to systematically annihilate their rivals,” because both sides would have the common welfare in view and would gladly compromise to retain the nation’s dignity.

But the twenty-first century American political system is “evidently dysfunctional” and “the so-called conservatives are actually radical anarchists who seek to further impoverish the majority of Americans to benefit the wealthiest one percent who have no need of any social safety net, since they live in their own worlds.” 

Mollycoddle then cited Lewis Mumford on the Rabelaisian culture of the sixteenth-century Country Houses in Europe: “The conditions which underlie this limited, partial good life are political power and economic wealth; and in order for that life to develop well, both of these must obtain in almost limitless quantities. Honest labor cannot achieve such wealth or command such leisure: it is possible only through privileged exploitation of the resources and labor of an entire country, for the benefit of a minority. The ease, the grace, the dignity, the spacious days of this society are therefore purchased at the price of the toil, the constriction, the ceaseless economic anxiety of the mass of the population: not only at home but in the exploited territories abroad. Under all its patent refinements goes a ruthless monopoly of land and political power. Force and fraud, either remote or recent, are the twin foundations of Country House existence” (The Condition of Man).

“The reason conservatives rig the American economy,” said Mollycoddle, “is to recreate that grotesque inequality. It’s a war of princes, lords, or plutocrats against the planet in general, but particularly against the majority of mere ordinary mortals.

“So conservatives haven’t a prayer of being anywhere near right on the issues. Their political views are so many loathsome, decadent monstrosities or bestial sneers and postures. But they inevitably end up on top because liberals are pussies, and the reason liberals ‘lack all conviction’ is precisely because they’re in the right.

“Morality itself is the Wuss Factor.”

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A Cocktail of Journalistic Insights

Dateline: NEW YORK—Make no mistake, journalists were fired up, so they drilled down and rolled out a cautionary tale of the bombshell that landed on a dumpster fire in the middle of a firestorm, after the grilling of senators who pivoted to whether they’d reached a tipping point or were just playing politics, not fearing the optics of thinking outside the box at the crossroads of their last ditch effort, although there was plenty of blame to go around in this searing indictment of the favourite Washington parlor game that turned a blind eye on a potent symbol of the game-changer which donned the mantle of a hotly contested feeding frenzy.

Needless to say, it remains to be seen in the 24-hour news cycle of the digital age, whether, at first glance, the woefully inadequate, byzantine rules that burst onto the scene will allow the punditocracy to breathe a sigh of relief or will force it to probe the powers that be for the American people, but those rules double-down with strange bedfellows in the wake of keen observers of tongue-wagging, well-heeled lobbyists who met with an ignominious end in the final analysis at the end of the day when, for all intents and purposes, cooler heads prevailed at the inflection point of no return that was shrouded in secrecy in an ill-advised, much-ballyhooed, hastily-convened, closely-watched and oft-cited paradigm shift of a broken system that underscores the object lesson of this Rorschach test.

Be that as it may, this is not your father’s tectonic shift, if you will, and Christmas came early for skittish donors in that land of contradictions which ushered in an eye-popping era in a nutshell that, contrary to popular belief, prevented anyone from acknowledging the new normal in which there are no face-saving compromises and we all press each other’s hot-button issues which are the talk of the town, yet a portrait emerges of a grizzly veteran who endured withering criticism in a dizzying array of wide-ranging interviews in a nondescript office building, and of the poster child of an unsung hero who was tapped to rise from obscurity and spark a debate that raised the specter of hand-wringing partisans on both sides who traded barbs in a war of words and walked on thin ice in a charm offensive, going forward as creatures of Washington in a stinging rebuke to the fevered speculation of the proverbial growing body of evidence that shines a spotlight on a political football, which raises more questions than answers about the tightly knit social fabric.

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Putin contends Trump wasn’t Competent enough to have Colluded with Russia

Dateline: MOSCOW—In an exclusive interview with Fancypants Magazine, Vladimir Putin took offense at the allegation that Donald Trump was competent enough to have colluded with the Russian government in the hacking of the American political system that helped win Trump the presidency.

“Trump deserves no credit for that Russian triumph,” said Putin. “Just as the Soviets did the lion’s share of the work in defeating the Nazis, my army of hackers vanquished American imperialism almost singlehandedly by securing Trump’s victory, sowing chaos in America that won’t be repaired for generations.”

According to Putin, Trump is merely his and his oligarchs’ pawn, not a co-conspirator. “Sure, we helped elect Trump by various underhanded means. And sure, Trump would have applauded our efforts. But Trump is brainless and has nothing he could deliberately offer us without screwing it up first. We wouldn’t accept his conscious attempts to pay us back since he’d just bungle any pro-Russia scheme in his typical ham-handed manner.

“No, we saved Trump from ignominious failure after his near financial ruin, when no American lenders would touch him, given his tendency to bankrupt his companies. Through Bayrock Group, Russian oligarchs invested in his brand and in his family’s ventures at the start of his media career, in 2002. As Eric Trump said, ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.’

“We did this to prop up that psycho-clown, positioning him as a living WMD to one day blow up the American empire.

“Then we pulled the trigger in 2016, when we helped to bring down Hillary Clinton by hacking the DNC and manipulating the egomaniacs and bean-counters in charge of American mass media, supplying them with fake news they couldn’t resist recirculating.

“Again, we did all this and asked for nothing in return from Trump. Trump’s being Trump is thanks enough. Being himself, he couldn’t avoid bringing down the American government from within, once he became president. He couldn’t help but divide and trash his own country due to his mental disorders and stupendous incompetence.”

Putin insists on taking all the credit for Russia’s role in helping to bring Trump to power. Although during the campaign Trump publicly called for Russia to hack the DNC and retrieve Hillary’s secret emails, the Russian hackers were busy waging a full-spectrum cyber assault on the American political system.

“Yes, we heard Trump’s plea for aid against Hillary Clinton, but Trump deserves no credit for the genius we displayed in our steering of the American election. He’s a bumbling buffoon that we wanted to win, because Clinton, the vicious neoliberal, is a hundred times more threatening to us than Trump, who can be led by the nose just by flattering him once in a while.”

Putin hopes, though, that Americans continue to “feed Trump’s ego” with charges of his treachery.

“You have to know what you’re doing to be a co-conspirator,” Putin said. “You have to be able to put one foot in front of the other without knocking over a table, slipping and landing on a dog, rolling through a wall and bringing the whole house down.

“But the more Americans are dazzled by the conspiracy theories and build up Trump as a criminal mastermind, the more they’ll stoke his rage and hasten their downfall via his clownish overcompensations. Naturally, they’ll ignore what I have to say, since who could trust Putin?”

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Democrats begin Impeachment Proceedings on the Grounds that Donald Trump is an Old Man

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—After the 2018 U.S. congressional election, Democrats won back enough seats to bring impeachment proceedings, but they decided to simplify their case against Donald Trump, citing only the undeniable fact, as the reason for the urgent need for Trump’s immediate removal from office, that Trump is “an old man.”

There are hundreds of scandals, crimes, conflicts of interests, gaffes, inadequacies, or other embarrassments that can be attributed to Trump’s presidency, but leading Democrats believe they can avoid getting into the details by reminding everyone that, after all, Trump is just an old man and thus is obviously unfit for high office.

“There’s something that happens to you when you get old,” said Senator Al Franken. “You go downhill, as they say. That means your brain doesn’t work as well as it used to. Why should your brain stay the same when the rest of your body is clearly deteriorating? I mean, your skin sags and gets full of wrinkles, you lose muscle mass and bone density.

“You go downhill. At the bottom of that hill is the sort of old guy ridiculed in The Simpsons. You get to be like Homer’s dad who babbles incoherently and can’t take care of himself anymore because, you know, he’s gotten, like, really, really old. That’s what’s happened to Donald Trump: he got old, far too old to run a country.”

Democrats contend that, although he’s always been a boor, Trump’s senility is responsible for the outlandish scope of his incompetence. Thus, there’s no reason “to get into the weeds,” as one Democrat put it. “You just go with what’s obvious and can’t be denied. Trump is super old and he acts like it. So he needs to be pushed into retirement.”

Republicans have accused Democrats, in turn, of being hypocritical, since numerous top Democrats are over seventy years old, including Bernie Sanders, Barbara Boxer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Carl Levin, and Dianne Feinstein.

Franken replied that while many Democrats may likewise technically be far too old to be entrusted with driving a car, let alone with the enormous responsibilities of holding high political office, they’re “functional old fogies,” whereas Trump is “off his rocker and off his meds.”

Sociologist Millie Hildebrand credited the PR firm Old Folks Rule for conspiring to generate the misplaced confidence most people have in the elderly, which is why, she said, the elderly are often reelected.

“In an election,” Hildebrand said, “voters see the old man or woman next to the fresh-faced challenger, and the young gun doesn’t stand a chance because he or she lacks experience. That’s what most voters think; they go with the greater experience.

“What these voters forget is that the more experience you have, the older you must be, and after a certain number of years you suddenly become simply an old man or an old woman. When that happens, it becomes absurd for others to expect much in the way of competence from you.

“For example, an old politician won’t be able to keep to a tight schedule, because he or she will be in the bathroom all day and all night. How are you going to talk tough to dictators on the phone when you’re always sitting on the toilet?”

Jay Wackadoodle, a political pseudoscientist at the Machiavelli Institute, offered a different explanation for old people’s success in politics, pointing to the fact that most American voters are themselves elderly, given the shockingly-low voter turnout in all U.S. elections over many decades.

“We vote for people like us,” he said. “Bald guys are more likely to vote for baldies. Blondes vote for blondes, racists vote for racists, and the elderly vote for the elderly.

“That’s how narcissism works, and we’re self-obsessed because our materialistic culture drives us to be consumers, first and foremost. We have to attend to all our needs and wants, and so we have to buy all these products; we think the world revolves around us. Naturally, then, we presume we ought to run the country, but because we’re too fat and lazy to do so, we vote for the next best thing, someone who reminds us of ourselves.” 

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Man unable to apply a Lifetime’s Research into Self-Improvement, dies wholly Unsuccessful in Life

Dateline: NEW YORK CITY—A connoisseur of self-help books has died alone and impoverished after having spent years locked in his apartment, practicing to be a better person.

Albert Dunderhead had an impressive collection of self-help manuals, as attested by the landlord who found Albert’s body. “Albert once showed me his library,” said the landlord, “and he boasted he was learning everything there is to know about techniques for increasing your confidence, winning friends and succeeding in business and romance.

“‘One day,’ Albert told me, ‘I’ll have learned enough to put my knowledge into practice, to apply the lessons in real life. And then nothing will stop me. I’ll finally have a job and a family and a life I can be proud of. Until then, I’ve got to keep hitting the books.’”

Albert’s body was found in front of a mirror, his hand on an open book turned to a passage about mastering your fears by reciting mantras in front of a mirror.

Having no friends or family, living on a small inheritance from his grandmother, Albert ventured out of his apartment only to purchase groceries and to peruse the self-help section of bookstores.

Albert’s neighbours sometimes complained about the noise from his apartment, when Albert practiced his lessons by holding conversations with imaginary employers, coworkers, and romantic prospects.

“The conversations went on for hours on end,” said one neighbour, “but it wasn’t the volume that bothered me so much as the annoying repetition. He tried out every conceivable variation on a job interview, for example, playing both parts himself.

“Or he’d imagine he was trying to pick up a girl at a grocery store, and he’d say, ‘I see you’re interested in avocados.’ ‘Why, yes I am,’ he’d say in response. And then he’d launch into a disquisition about the merits of different recipes for guacamole.

“But that wasn’t the end of it—not by a long shot. He’d carry on the same conversation over and over again, but switching from avocados to bananas, and then to spinach and watermelons and every other fruit or vegetable in turn. It was really, really annoying having to hear that blather through the wall throughout the evening and night.”

Albert received a posthumous award for “Most Ironic Life” from the Irony Association of America.

“Ironically,” said the Association’s founder, “our awards have no cash value, nor do we publicize them. Had Mr. Dunderhead been alive, he wouldn’t have been eligible for the award, since his life would have been ongoing. But even if he would have been eligible, he wouldn’t have known he’d won, because no one would have told him. And even if he found out about us and our awards, he may not have cared, because, as I said, our awards have zero prestige. There’s nothing to them, not even a little statue or anything. 

"All we do is whisper about the winner for a while, maybe writing up a certificate and then quickly burning it so as not to spoil the irony of the self-effacing honours.” 

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Delaware Man Masters Martial Arts, using only Initial Free Lessons

Dateline: NEW JERSEY—A man from Delaware earned the equivalent of a black belt in Taekwondo, Karate, Jiu-jitsu and several other martial arts, by exploiting the free trial lesson offered by hundreds of martial arts schools across North America.

Johnny Mayhew began his martial arts training in 1997, having been invited by his friend and martial arts enthusiast to attend a trial lesson at Tiger Kicks Taekwondo, in Wilmington.

“The first lesson’s free,” Mayhew remembers his friend telling him. “After that, once you get hooked on how wonderful taekwondo is, you’ll of course need to pay for the yearly membership.”

After that first lesson, Mayhew was indeed hooked, he said, but he conceived of an alternative to paying the membership. “The next day,” Mayhew said, “instead of returning to Tiger Kicks Taekwondo, where I would have had to pay hundreds of dollars in advance for a year’s worth of classes, I went down the street to Master Myung’s Taekwondo Academy and enjoyed their free lesson, since Master Myung also offered the first lesson for free.

What Mayhew realized is that since every martial arts school offers its first lesson for free, he could master the martial arts without having to pay the schools any money, just by travelling from one school to the next, never attending the same dojo twice.

“So I moved into a motorhome and travelled the country,” he said, “visiting each town’s assortment of martial arts schools and making the most of the free classes. At first, I was a novice, so the lessons were arduous.

“But eventually, as I became fitter and more practiced in striking and grappling, the instructors became puzzled and even suspicious of my skills. I must not have seemed like a novice who needed a free hour’s instruction from some backwoods karate school, because I was kicking the daylights out of the heavy bag and hurling my sparring partners across the mat.”

Mayhew still remembers one evening in Yonkers, at Fuck ‘em Up Karate Academy, when Master Moo confronted him. “You no fight like beginner,” Master Moo told him. “You kicking the ass of my best students. Why you here? The free lesson for beginners.”

Mayhew reminded him that he was a beginner, since he had never before been to Fuck ‘em Up Karate Academy. “But Master Moo was having none of it,” said Mayhew. “He kicked me out, and I only got half a free lesson that day. After that, I vowed I would get the full free lesson at each martial arts academy I visited, by feigning ignorance and secretly absorbing the advanced techniques.”

At Dragon Tail Karate School, Mayhew pretended not to know how to throw a punch, while he carefully observed the master and his top students, picking up ways of improving his skills. “That way I made the most of each free lesson, whether it was at Big Butt Brazilian Jiu Jitsu School, in New York, Paint the Fence Karate Academy, in Dallas, or Eagle Claw Kung Fu, in Los Angeles.

Mayhew studied each of several martial arts in turn, from Karate to Aikido, only switching from one to the next when he had successfully beaten the pants off of the master during one of the free lessons. “I’d pretend to be a novice, begging the master near the end of the free hour to take pity on my ignorance and favour me with a sparring match. Then I’d unleash all I’d learned from the hundreds of free lessons, and beat him down six ways from Sunday. That’s when I knew I’d have to move on to a different fighting tradition, just to keep it fresh.”

While Mayhew is unapologetic about his approach to martial arts, some instructors are indignant. “What he’s doing may not be illegal,” said Master Li, of Muay Thai Kick Ass Academy, “but I fear something’s gone wrong somewhere. Why doesn’t he just pay his instructors, instead of paying the gas companies for all the fuel he’s used exploiting the trial lessons?”

“Martial arts training isn’t just about self-defense,” said Master Kwon, of Warrior Way Academy. “We train for honour. There’s no honour in what this Mayhew creep is doing.”  

In response to this criticism, Mayhew said, “What did honour do for the fatheaded samurai, when the ninja killed them in their sleep? I may not have honour, but I can kick ass, beeyatch!”

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