I’m writing this the morning after Thanksgiving. I had already seen the news about Donald Trump’s celebration of the holiday at Mar-a-Lago on TV. But seeing the words “Donald Trump says he’s most thankful for himself this Thanksgiving” in print is much funnier than hearing a news anchor repeat it. I promise.
Business Insider had that headline last week, over a picture of Trump orating at the turkey pardoning ceremony, waving his hand over the live turkey, “Trump warns of ‘bedlam, chaos, injury and death’ if US judges allowed to do their job.”
John Roberts, who is a Bush judge, says there are no Obama judges, no Trump judges and no Bush judges, there are only judges. This proves that Bush judges are not as bright as other judges. A Trump judge wouldn’t make that mistake. What a loser.
Trump dismissed the idea that the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman directed journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. So he was asked whom he thought was to blame for it. He said the world did it. The world is a vicious place.
Guns don’t kill people, they’ve said so often. People kill people. Trump has a correction: Guns don’t kill people, people don’t kill people. Worlds kill people. Mean vicious planets.
I’m imagining how different events would have played out had Trump been elected in the year 2000 instead of George W. Bush, following the attacks of Sept.11, 2001.
Trump certainly would not have been caught reading “The Pet Goat” to Florida schoolchildren in front of a sign saying “Reading Makes a Country Great.” He most probably would have been in Mar-a-Lago, interrupted mid-tweet, if Twitter hadn’t been invented six years later, while waiting for a taco bowl and cheeseburger breakfast to be delivered.
Presented with evidence that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were behind the attacks, Trump would have had none of that. Osama bin Laden, after all, was Arab, and we can’t risk offending the Arabs. Anyway, planes don’t kill people, people don’t kill people, worlds kill people. A vicious planet killed all those people. What can you do when a vicious planet runs amok?
If you go off and attack everybody who kills a few thousand Americans, how can you ever have any allies? People kill thousands of Americans all the time.
If it had been planes flown by Mexicans, that would have been different. That would have been proof that we need the border wall sooner than later, and that it would have to be a very tall wall, so it couldn’t happen again.
Speaking of the border wall, another thing that Trump had to say this Thanksgiving was that he would be fine with a shutdown of the federal government if Congress doesn’t give him the border wall he wants. The message is clear. He’s fine with blaming the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives should they block passage of a federal budget if it includes authorization and funding of a border wall. So he will, in effect, punish the country for electing all those Democrats. See what happens when you don’t do what Trump wants you to do? You lose all your government services. You are part of the vicious world. You don’t deserve those services.
You might say, “Wait a minute, I pay taxes for those services.” He would answer that he pays the most taxes and his taxes are the very best of all the taxes paid. Besides, everyone knows Democrats and the people who vote for Democrats don’t pay taxes, all they do is collect welfare.
Did you hear the one about John Allen Chau, the guy from Vancouver, Washington, who got himself riddled with arrows and buried in sand on a shore of North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal? What a fascinating story of ignorance and stupidity.
Chau wondered why the Sentinelese were so angry after they shot him with arrows the first time. Then he went back to the island in a canoe, which they destroyed, and they finished killing him.
Meanwhile in our country, Donald Trump said he has authorized the Army to use lethal force if the caravan of migrants traveling through Mexico crosses the U.S.-Mexico border. Would it matter if the hundreds of migrants were all carrying Bibles and proclaiming their love of the Lord as they approached?
It’s a comedy of parallels. How dare the Sentinelese refuse to accept uninvited guests to their island. They aren’t Americans. Only Americans get to do that.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd.
Read the full Nov. 28 - Dec. 4 issue.
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