When this paper hits the street, less than 100 hours will remain of the most psychotic political campaign in U.S. history.
This would be good news, if only we had some assurance—hell, we’d settle for a hope—that the election on November 3rd might have a curative effect.
Nothing will be cured, though, on November 4th, or even on January 3rd, when the winners of the House and Senate races will, one likes to think, take their oaths of office. Naturally, things being as they have been lately, we must take into consideration the possibility that some of the actual winners of the elections will be denied their seats.
That such an outcome springs to mind might have been taken as possible evidence of editorial derangement a couple of decades ago. These days, ignoring that potentiality would be prima facie evidence of editorial negligence.
Our hope for Election Day is that it will result in the leadership of the House and Senate being taken from the hands of the current enablers and be assumed by individuals willing and able to do the necessary thing: diagnose these Wildly Disparate States of Part of North America [W.D.S.P.N.A.]*
Crazy, we know: put the diagnosis before the cure. What a concept. That’s us—always the weirdo contrarians.
We learned long ago that when things seem terrible everywhere you look, it can help to think of something—anything, no matter how small or ridiculous—that gives you even the tiniest bit of delight.
Well, we’re delighted that the concept of “the elephant in the room” pre-dates our current mishegas. Without that precedent it would be nonsensical for us to say that it’s past time for this country to talk about the decaying elephant corpse that’s stinking up the room, to wit: our prevailing national state of psychosis.
This is not some trifling matter. Anyone aspiring to fulfill the duties of a citizen is obliged to pay at least some attention to the actions of public figures associated with the government. This can be hazardous to the well-being of ordinary mortals who, through no fault of their own, find themselves living in a land where the highest court has effectively made white collar crime perfectly legal.
Consequently—wealth being such a reliable indicator of intelligence—criminal masterminds get to pick who’s in the government.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. What, exactly, do we mean by psychotic?
In March of 2025, Jeremy Lewin, 28, showed up at USAID and started firing people. On April 1st—an appropriate day, provided one has a sufficiently dark sense of humor—Rolling Stone reported that Lewin had “a history of violence and racist remarks.” The charges in the paywalled article were paraphrased by The Guardian: “a girl had complained to police that Lewin had threatened her with a knife, that he physically assaulted a fellow student in the cafeteria at the elite private school he attended, and that [he] had a history of racist remarks.”
What once would have been disqualifying traits have now become qualifications. The proof is in the bloody pudding. Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health published a study last November which estimated that 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children, had died already as a result of the shutdown of USAID.
On Tuesday, Wired reported that Lewin’s appointment “was so mysterious that USAID security was unable to issue him an ID card because they had no records of his employment,” and therefore, “it isn’t clear that he had the legal authority to do so.”
Meanwhile, in Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, freshly fired as Ambassador after being caught soliciting a $100,000 bribe, is “all alone in [the Ambassador’s residence], screaming at her old staff that they are leakers, and waiting to get kicked out. It’s an insane situation.” The President barely admits to knowing her name; she was engaged to his first-born son for six years, and he made her the Ambassador.
Now that he’s safely dead, three male prostitutes are alleging in a video that the late Senator Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] paid them for sex—one of them being 17 at the time. Those who are surprised by this could assemble in a phone booth.
Vanity Fair hit the psycho jackpot, reporting that El Presidente’s son-in-outlaw, Jared Kushner, had access to a huge slush fund set up by Middle Eastern potentates, and handed off some of the loot to a Cuban former hit man. For what it’s worth, the internet has concluded that the target was Charlie Kirk.
Top travesty of the fortnight: Secretary of Cosplay Pete Hegseth trashing Ike’s WW II globe.
Is it too much to ask that our AI-enhanced overlords grant to us mere mortals the dignity of acknowledging the true circumstances of our existence?
* What the hell? Things are being re-named willy-nilly these days; we might as well get in on the action. Nobody can say our version isn’t more accurate.