What Huckleberry Finn Can Teach Us About the Shitshow Our Country Has Become

I question whether the assassination attempt on the Vile Excrescence was faked. I can understand a considerably older person, especially if he or she has a terminal disease, or is hopelessly in debt, or depressed, agreeing to be shot dead in exchange for his family benefitting hugely. Maybe a loved one receives medical care the family can’t afford. Maybe enough money to put the kids through graduate school finds its way into a trust fund.

But a 20-year-old like Thomas Matthew Crooks?

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I’ll admit that when someone calls for the Vile Excrescences’s impeachment, I have to restrain myself from sending them a message wondering, given their obvious intellectual impairment, if they made it through the third grade. “We” don’t have the numbers! A third failed impeachment will lead to yet another gloat-a-thon by the Vile Excrescence, following a gigantic waste of time and taxpayer money. Do the math, innit.

Should the Democrats, in accordance with the ancient wisdom that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, get pally with Secretary Musk, and use him to bludgeon the Vile Excrescence into self-exile? I’m not at all sure, on two counts. First, Muck is much smarter, but hardly less execrable than the Vile Excrescence. Second, are we really going to be better off with Jadie Vance? I’m not at all sure we would be. TVE is evil and a moron. Vance is evil and very clever, and seems comfortable with playing the puppet to an older monster’s puppeteer. Raise your hand if you imagine Peter Thiel pulling Vance’s strings being substantially better than the Vile Excrescence’s pulling them.

Me neither.

I continue to dream of a day when the whole lot of them — the Vile Excrescence and all who kowtowed to or enabled him — are marched down a succession of major American cities’ iconic streets in sackcloth, with shaved heads. In the cases of Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Joni Ernst, and Pete Hegseth, for instance, I’m not entirely sure, having just re-read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that I wouldn’t condone a 12-hour suspension of the proscription of cruel and unusual punishment. Tell me with a straight face you wouldn’t enjoy seeing them tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

If you can’t afford a trip to the District of Columbia (whose NFL team I will believe with my final breath should have renamed themselves John Mendelssohn’s Birthplace rather than the very Handmaid’s Tale-ish Commanders), you can still enjoy the Vile Escrescence’s obscene birthday parade: