Welcome back. We’ve been in San Francisco immersed in my native culture: WASP. I keep trying to tell Bar she needs to talk about politics much, much less—and drink significantly more—because of the discussion of “current events” but especially because her relative sobriety (a glass of white and a gin and tonic is what you have before a driver’s test in my community) is upsetting everyone. Anyway, today I’m missing the pheasant hunt to bring you these headlines.
→ Greater America: Trump is apparently “100% serious” about taking over both the Panama Canal and the autonomous territory of Greenland, according to the New York Post. He already said he wants both, but the news here is that he actually is for real, which is going to be how most major reporting goes. Trump says everything, all the words, in a long stream of consciousness and unconsciousness, for some 16 hours each day, across four or five podcasts. So the Watergate reporting of this era will be determining which things he is, according to credible sources, not joshing about.
Anyway, apparently we’re getting back into the territory expansion game. And you know who has no army? Europe. Docile socialists with no children and long winters, the Europeans yearn to be conquered. They will emerge in natural fibers from their cozy hygge, blinking, and we will be there at the door, in technical jackets made entirely of melted plastic, blasting carcinogens with every whitening toothpaste breath, ready to assume the throne, which I assume is a special hot chocolate cup.
→ Congress is an eldercare facility: A sitting Republican congresswoman, Rep. Kay Granger, has been discovered living in a senior care facility after not being seen in public for five months. While still serving as a congresswoman, if that wasn’t clear. It emerged because locals started wondering how she was going to vote on various relevant issues, and the Dallas Express visited her office to ask, only to find it totally shut down. After a tip from a constituent, the reporters went to a memory care facility, and there she was: “This is her home,” said the assistant executive director, and reporters were not allowed to go in to inquire about her vote. He added (here I’m joking): “It’s mahjong tonight and she has to focus, so please, no questions about the house appropriations bill.” (Her office denies she is in memory care.)
I’m not blaming Rep. Kay Granger for the ravages of time, and it’s horrific to me that Botox can’t be used on our brain and other organs (doesn’t mean I won’t try). But what in G–d’s name is going on in D.C.? We’ve all made much hay of the fact that our president is a little loopidy-doopy, a little “take the keys from Grandpa”—meanwhile, Republicans have been hiding the fact that a congresswoman is residing full-time in a care facility for five months? My only conclusion is that our congresspeople do literally nothing and the whole of D.C. is run by warring staffers, whose personalities and faces make them unelectable but who are smart and hardworking. Yes, that’s right: Hiding behind our charismatic (incapacitated) political leaders are keyboard communists and meme-brained right-wingers, too horrible to face the public, too tall and also too short. They’re perfect for running Congress. Thank you, freaks, for your service, I guess. Get back under your desk.
→ Tech MAGA meets Paleo MAGA: Sriram Krishnan, a venture capitalist and very smart tech thinker (he and his wife have a podcast and such), has been tapped to be a senior policy adviser for artificial intelligence. And his appointment has led to the first big MAGA schism of the season. Because Tech MAGA is finally meeting Paleo MAGA, which is a movement that sees the name Sriram Krishnan and shrieks. And shriek they have.