Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

Upon hearing that a mural of murder victim George Floyd had been destroyed by lightning in Toledo, Ohio, Donald Trump Jr. said on Twitter, "It’s almost like a higher power is telling us something. When was the last time you heard of a brick building being destroyed by lightning? I am a builder and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of it."--News Item
 
God appeared to me again the other day. Not in person, but via Zoom, the way He has manifested Himself to me ever since the pandemic started. “And that’s the way it’s going to stay,” He told me in an aside. “Me, Jesus, even Mother Mary are going to appear virtually from now on. Mary bitched about it, but I told her, ‘Hey, even peasant children all have iPhones now. All that burning bush and weeping statues shit is so pre-millennial.”
 
Mostly, though, the Creator of the Universe wanted to talk about Donald Trump, Jr. “You tell that greasy little peckerhead to keep My name out of his yabbering mouth!” He said emphatically.
 
So, you deny destroying a mural of George Floyd via lightning bolt to send a message to humanity?
 
“Hell, yeah. First off, I don’t do lightning bolts—that’s Zeus, that crazy old Greek show-off. Secondly, if I was in the habit of destroying monuments to correct moral ambiguities, there wouldn’t be a Confederate general on a stone horse left south of the Mason-Dixon line. Thirdly, all this is part of My plan. I made George Floyd a very large black man with a substance abuse problem so it was inevitable that he’d be an angry white cop magnet. I made Derek Chauvin a sadistic murderer.”
 
And you made Donald Trump, Jr.
 
“Yeah. Why did I do that?”
 
Umm—it’s part of Your plan?
 
“Must be, although even I get lost in the details of that thing now and then. Why would I need an unctuous, insensitive, spoiled twerp like Trump, Jr.? I work in mysterious ways, sure, but why would I create such an obvious waste of human life? To make Eric look useful by comparison, maybe? I mean, I do have a plan for the whole Universe, but sometimes the details elude even Me. I have an archangel that keeps track of that shit for Me. It’s on a spreadsheet around here somewhere. Also, tell Trump Jr. to quit calling himself a builder when he can barely stick two Legos together.”
 
Anything else?
 
“Just let that grubby little prick know I’ve got more important things to do. I just collapsed a condo tower in Florida, remember? And flooded a good portion of Western Europe.”
 
Yeah. Why do you do stuff like that?
 
“Condominiums are creations of Satan. That’s pretty obvious to anybody who thinks about them. And I put Belgium underwater to remind people to never live in a country so small I can flood the whole thing. You know who’s laughing his ass off about that?
 
Umm—Noah?
 
“You got it, bud. Nice talking to you.”

“If I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley”—Statement by former Caucasian-in-Chief, Donald Trump.
 
It is tempting to dismiss this utterance as a half-assed attempt at an insult that quickly bloomed into a full-bore self-own. So, let’s do that right away. You could spend a whole night stuffing yourself with frijoles soaked in habanero sauce and washing them down with an eighteen-pack of Modelo Negras and still blow something more intellectually rigorous out of your ass in the morning than these words that Trump actually spewed.
 
The faint basis in reality that Trump’s words have lie in the fact that General Milley, who is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was worried that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump might order him to march troops into the Capitol and arrest Nancy Pelosi before she could certify that Joe Biden had won the election.
 
Milley was not willing to do this, if asked. He and his Pentagon buds hatched a plan to do a series of “rolling resignations,” if Trump tried to order them to interfere with the election, although “rolling resignations” do not have enough oomph, for my taste, when declining to stage a military coup against a 245-year-old democracy. A joint press conference featuring the heads of the American military joining each other on stage and singing “Blow that out your pale fat hiney, Mr. President,” a cappella after publicizing Trump’s request for an end to the Constitution would have been much more satisfying and gotten better ratings.
 
This is all speculation, of course, because Trump never asked the Joint Chiefs to back him in his coup attempt, probably thinking that he might be refused. Instead, he persuaded an extremely motley crew of Proud Boys, Q-Anoners and other drooling near-idiots to bravely pack their pepper spray, suck in their guts, take their Metformin and invade the Capitol with an eye to hanging Mike Pence.
 
The history of the world is rife with examples of successful military coups. There have also been successful palace coups, the Trumpian equivalent of which would have been John Bolton, or Bill Barr, or even Jared and Ivanka having guts enough to borrow some Novichok from Putin and slipping it into Trump’s Diet Coke. All of them and many others who served in the White House while Trump was President knew that they should have done that, as any patriotic American would have, instead of all of them writing self-serving tell-alls after the nation survived on its own, which is what they are doing.
 
But there has never been a successful coup launched by a bunch of drunk dribblers with shitty haircuts, lousy clothes and no actual organized plan to seize power. In an alternate universe, maybe, Mike Pence would have swung from an improvised gallows and Ashli Babbit would have been appointed Vice-President in his stead, but in this one, Trump’s forces just wandered around the halls of Congress in incriminating gear, busting things up and taking selfies of themselves committing treason.
 
So, Trump’s attempted coup went the way of Trump University, the New Jersey Generals and the entire municipality of Atlantic City. It failed miserably, as does anything Trump puts his stamp on.
 
Except the USA. So far.

Controversy tried to erupt again over the Potomac last week as it was revealed that Hunter Biden 1. Paints. 2. Is willing to sell his paintings.
 
The fact that his has been true of every painter since the Cro-Magnon era, when an artist would offer to paint up your cave nice if you would save him the trouble of killing his own mastodon by letting him have some of yours, through Michelangelo bitching out the Pope, to the present day, when people sell their paint-by-numbers projects at yard sales, does not mean that some Republicans are not trying to make a major scandal out of it, and DTJ, as usual, is the loudest voice among them.
 
Trump Jr. has always had it in for Biden, whom he feels is a bottomless pit of moral squalor for cashing in on his dad’s name. The fact that if it wasn’t for his dad, Don the 2nd would be lucky to be a night security guard at a roadside reptile zoo in Florida, kind of trips him up on this, but Junior keeps bravely trying, playing the nepo-a-nepo card whenever he feels necessary to yelp about Hunter Biden.
 
All right, so I’m probably overstating Trump the Younger’s value on the job market. He probably couldn’t get that security gig at the reptile zoo unless his father owned it, and the ex-Caucasian-in-Chief probably wouldn’t own anything besides a bucket of bait if his father hadn’t skirted the tax statutes to leave him 400 million bucks.
 
Hunter Biden’s dad has never given him a job, for example, leaving him to freelance off his dad’s career on his own. Don Jr works in his dad’s company, doing the hot, sweaty work of concealing income and gouging contractors. He has been the guiding hand behind Trump Steaks, which sought to convince the beef-eating public that a man who likes his steaks well-done and smeared with ketchup was the guy to buy their sirloin from, and Trump Wine, because everybody who drinks thinks it’s a winning idea to buy wine from a teetotaler.
 
If Joe Biden really cared about his kid, he’d have bankrupted an airline so Hunter would be able to fly for free, or created a fraudulent university the boy could be provost of. If the President had created a fake charity for Hunter to grift off of, as Daddy Trump did for his kids, would the lad have to resort to peddling art in the alleys of Manhattan?
 
Hunter Biden wrote a book, as did Trump, Jr., but the Democratic National Committee has not bought $300,000 worth of copies like the Republican National Committee did Don the Dos’s in an effort to make Junior’s book a best-seller.
 
All these facts lead to one conclusion, and it’s not that one Presidential scion out-nepotisms the other.
 
It’s that Joe Biden, while he might be an okay President, especially comparatively, is a pretty shitty dad.
 
Especially comparatively.

Matt Gaetz, showboat Congressperson with a side gig of avoiding indictment, spoke out on the topic of critical race theory the other day, and contributed something marginally less intelligent than he left in the Capitol restroom the last time he went there. He claimed Russia has a significant military advantage over the US because the white people in Russia don’t feel guilty about being racists.
 
He may have missed the mark on this, both because no matter how much thoughtful history you have been exposed to, ruminating on it is not the first thing you do when you are swept into battle. I’m just guessing this, I have to admit. I have never been in combat. It is probably far scarier than having the airplane you are traveling in struck by lightning or having to make an emergency landing after one of your plane’s engines caught on fire, two (separate) situations I have been in. Neither one of them caused me to start thinking about our nation’s fraught racial history. “Man, I hope my ass gets out of this alive!” is about the most profound thing even the most adept of thinkers can manage when the oxygen masks drop.
 
The genius in Gaetz’s making a big deal about CRT is that most of the people who vote for him don’t know what “critical” means. They think that it means the same thing as “criticize,” and they don’t like to be criticized, especially by people that got A’s and B’s in high school. The only theory they know of is the theory of evolution, which they know is taught by Satan. So out in backwoods Florida, they’re nodding their heads in agreement with Gaetz, and saying, “That Matt Gaetz is a good congressman. Sure, he may have had sex with a 17-year-old girl, but we’ve all done that, and she wasn’t even his stepsister!”
 
After a brief break, and they finish thanking Jesus for PornHub, they flip on Tucker Carlson, and he’s also having a bizarre meltdown over critical race theory. Tucker wants teachers in the US to be required to wear bodycams to make sure they’re not letting slip any facets of CRT to American students. Carlson, who recently claimed he was being spied on by the government, and was wildly irritated by that, wants to make sure the government is able to spy on every classroom in America to make sure the version of history Tucker reads while his mom cuts his hair is the one being taught at schools. Tucker doesn’t mind castrating the First Amendment like it was a sweaty hog on a hot Iowa farm, apparently.
 
Meanwhile, his bosses at Fox News are blaring clips of Trump arguing that teachers should be armed. So, in the Fox classroom of the future, the teachers will  wear a bodycam and pack a pistol.
 
At that point, who’s going to blame them if they get a sudden urge to kill unarmed black guys?

US Senator Ted Cruz, likely shining with the glow of patriotic inebriation yesterday, fired off a Tweet in which he praised American patriots for uniting to fight “Red Coats (sic) Nazis and even space aliens—Americans never surrender, never stop fighting for freedom!” He attached a GIF from the 1996 film “Independence Day” to the tweet.
 
Even a casual observer would readily notice the difference between Redcoats, Nazis and space aliens attempting to destroy the planet in terms of actually existing in reality. There were Redcoats, and the colonial armies fought them. There were Nazis, and most of the nations of the world, including us, united to stomp them down. (Side note—Nazis are attempting a comeback here, and Cruz is counting on their votes the next time he makes one of his pathetic Presidential runs).
 
But the US beating hostile, powerful alien beings bent on seizing the planet is a movie. Quite a popular one, too, despite a couple plot holes big enough to drive a Chinese container ship through, one of the biggest of which was what was the aliens’ actual motivation? Did they want to steal Earth’s oceans so they could have surfing on their home world? Or did they want to probe us viciously for inventing Nickelback? Nobody ever knew.
 
It only happened on the big screen, though. Americans never put aside their political differences to unite against the space threat in reality. If it does happen, though, for sure don’t count on Ted Cruz to strap himself into a fighter jet and fly a suicide mission into the guts of an invading enormo-saucer like Randy Quaid did in the film. Hell, Ted runs away from the weather.
 
Ted’s not the biggest uniter in America, either, having voted to throw out the votes of millions of Americans because they didn’t break in favor of the man who called his wife ugly and his dad an assassin. He regularly accuses anyone who doesn’t favor tax breaks for the Texas energy industry of being a socialist, because patriotic people, like Ted himself, believe the government only exists to benefit Ted’s political donors.
 
No, the first thing Ted would say is that the aliens were encouraged to pulverize our planet into gravel by Joe Biden’s weak stance on immigration. Then he would accuse AOC of communism by offering to give the aliens EBT cards, even though she would propose that we do so only in an effort to keep them from eating us.
 
Then Ted’s face would twitch in horror. He would convulsively gulp his last sip of pina colada, and he would say, “Fuck—are they invading Cancun, too?”

I’ve had them both. I grabbed myself an appointment at the local baseball stadium as soon as one was available, saying “Please, please, put that experimental shit right here,” as I bared my arm.
 
I wasn’t afraid of Bill Gates putting a nanochip in my liver. The man wants to know how many times a week I go to the liquor store, he is welcome to that data. I wasn’t afraid of the vaccine being new—I got the polio vaccine when it was brand new, and I’ve never had polio, or experienced any side effects from that, unless you count a lifelong tendency to make cripplingly bad decisions.
 
I was way more afraid of being stuck in the house for another year. Overall, it’s worked, although there are side effects. I don’t have to say “What?” repeatedly when another masked mumbler is trying to tell me something. My hearing is not the best in my elder years, probably due to spending a good portion of my youth standing in front of speaker banks in night clubs. I miss the flare of anger in masked people’s eyes when I told them, “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
 
I don’t have to soak my hands in hand sanitizer every time I use an ATM. It’s true this isn’t necessarily a bad habit, and dropping it will lead me to going back to getting my usual regimen of a cold at least once a year, but I still look at the vast tubs of marked-down hand sanitizer at every chain pharmacy, Target and grocery store and chuckle, remembering the days of spring 2020, when we searched and paid for hand sanitizer like it was made of dissolved bitcoins.
 
I buy toilet paper just to burn it in the fireplace.

​I get mistaken for a Republican when wandering around without a mask on, but I'm an old white guy, so I was getting mistaken for a Republican long before the pandemic, probably.
 
But the main side effect is I don’t worry about catching covid any more. This is the most serious and lingering side effect of the vaccine. It has led me to fishing in Mexico, flying on airplanes and buying tickets to baseball games. I don’t have to wonder where I’m going to end up on the Covid Spectrum if I get infected, whether I’m going to merely be sick for a few days, or hospitalized, or bring it home to other people and kill them.
 
The Delta variant means less to me than Delta Airlines, Delta Dental and Delta Truck Parking, which are three of the things that pop up besides the virus when I type the word “delta” in the Google search bar.
 
These are some pretty fraught side effects, I admit, and I don’t blame you for being afraid of them, if you are. You can be vaccine-hesitant all you want. I’m not afraid of your unvaccinated tushie.
 
Where we going?

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a compilation of old, mostly white guys that like to wear nice dresses, is getting ready to issue a formal statement on the meaning of Communion and, believe me, they are not going to come to the conclusion that it’s a meaningless piece of ancient Catholic drivel left over from the Middle Ages.
 
No, they are going to announce that Joe Biden and other Catholic politicians aren’t going to be allowed to get it, because they aren’t working hard enough to make Catholic theology into US law. In this they are joined by evangelical Protestants, who believe that the Gospel forbids abortion, even though it actually does not, and that this nonexistent provision of Scripture should also be enshrined into law.
 
Such a confluence of influence would have been unheard of in my Catholic youth, when we Catholics believed all Protestants were going to Hell, and they confidently believed the same about us. Good times.
 
Now the nation’s remaining Catholics and their Bible-belting friends have joined forces, and the hill they have decided to be martyred on together is women and how their uteri need to be controlled by the states. They have not decided that the states should try to get men to keep their dicks in their pants. They seem to realize that some causes are hopeless, even for God.
 
So, the President may be left tapping his foot at the communion rail pretty soon, while the priest busily stuffs wafers into the mouths of every other kind of sinner standing alongside him you can imagine, including members of his own brotherhood whose fingers reek of altar boy ass.
 
It is the existence of this band of underground pedophiles, which the Conference of Pointy-Hatted Pricks mostly chose to ignore for decades, that is causing the Church to lose membership faster than you can say ten Hail Marys. Yes, formerly reverent Catholics are saying, “I just don’t want to go to Church this Sunday,” and then, because they were raised in a faith that finds value in suffering, they say, “I think I’ll watch the Jets game instead.”
 
Fear not, Mr. President. There are plenty of faiths that will welcome your abortion-tolerating person. You won’t have to have some brave young priest sneak your wafer into the White House while Protestant soldiers with pikes lie in wait to chop his head off, like some Netflix drama about persecuted Catholics in Elizabethan England.
 
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster will be happy to have you as a member, and while slurping pasta may not be gourmet dining, it’s at least gustatorily superior to letting a tasteless wad of what seems like Walmart copy paper dissolve on your tongue. Wearing a colander on your head might cost you a few suburban swing votes, though, although the CFSM would not forbid you from taking it off your head and hitting Putin with it, next time you see that guy.
 
Personally, I’m a Dudeist, and all we have to do is abide. Sure, it’s recommended we bowl and drink White Russians, but I don’t do either of those things, and nobody’s excommunicated me yet. Abiding is good. Abiding in the White House is even better, and will help you keep your equanimity when that sewer clown Mitch McConnell kicks you in the nuts again.
 
There’s the Church of the Holy Taco, which I thought I just made up, but apparently was envisioned by another satirist before me. The Church offers Salsa Salvation, which sounds pretty tempting. Imagine standing at the rail of the Taco Church, sanctified, munching a consecrated Dorito while the Holy Hot Sauce runs down your chin. Just hope you avoid the dreaded Ring of Fire, which is that Church’s version of Hell.
 
Tacos also have a double-entendre meaning among the sniggering set (it’s vagina), which means you can cut into the Republican lead among Young Guys Who Talk About Sex Constantly but Hardly Ever Get It.
 
Even incels love tacos. 

​Buffalo Bills wide receiver Cole Beasley made what he called a “Public Service Announcement” the other day. Here it is in its entirety:
 
"Everyone — Hi, I'm Cole Beasley and I'm not vaccinated!... I will be outside doing what I do," Beasley added. "I'll be out in the public. If your (sic) scared of me then steer clear, or get vaccinated. Point. Blank. Period. I may die of covid, but I'd rather die actually living."
 
As someone who has been fully vaccinated, and is actually living in the hellscape of being immune to serious Covid, I feel an obligation to reach out to poor frightened Cole, and let him know that, while my life has been rendered a pale shadow of what it was before I was vaccinated, I nonetheless survive, in a vapid, regretful kind of way.
 
Some of the jab’s alleged side effects don’t affect me much, Cole. I’m not magnetized. Silverware doesn’t fly out and stick to me when I walk past the utensil tray at a buffet. I would regret getting the shot much more if steak knives and salad forks attached themselves to me instead of lying placidly on my napkin the way they did before I got immunized, and, thank Jesus, still do.
 
I don’t shed genetic material on other people, either. Unless they buy me a couple drinks first, and make it obvious they want some of my genetic material. I’m sure that happens to you Cole, way more often than it happens to me. Is that why you want other people to get vaccinated, buddy? So they won’t be afraid to have random sex with you when you and the rest of the Buffalo Bills are on the road? I feel you, bro.
 
Yeah, Bill Gates and George Soros now know when I touch myself. I figured Bill Gates did already, by keeping track of when I logged on to Pornhub through Windows, so no big deal.
 
Are you afraid your man-bun might unravel, as a side effect from being vaccinated? I can’t assure you it won’t. I haven’t had enough hair to manage a man-bun since I was your age, but the vaccine hasn’t affected my hair situation one way or another. The most I could manage in the way of a stupid hairstyle would be to let my fringe grow out and put it in a pathetic little ponytail, which is the only male hair arrangement that manages to look dumber than a man-bun. I could do that, to show solidarity with you, my man.
 
I know you’re not a chickenshit, Cole. And I don’t feel superior to you because when I went to college, I managed to learn the difference between “you’re” and “your.” You play a sport where every time you catch the ball, a 240-pound mass of steroided muscle playing linebacker or a swift cornerback brimming with hatred from his abused childhood, or both of them, will try and separate every single one of your vertebrae from each other.
 
No, you’re no coward, Cole, but retiring is probably a good idea.
 
Sounds like you’ve had enough concussions already.
 

We’re going to have a new national holiday next year, which is going to be called, rather clumsily, Juneteenth National Independence Day.
 
You can quibble about the name, and I’m prepared to (wouldn’t Emancipation Day been more to the point? Or Freedom Day, as the pic suggests?) but you can’t quibble about the sentiment, and Joe Biden won’t—he’ll be signing that holiday into law as soon as he gets over his jet lag from his European jaunt—even though we won’t get that day off until next year. June 19th is only two days away as of this writing, and a Saturday this year besides.
 
We need more holidays here in the US in any case, as I have previously pointed out. The US will only have 12 even after Juneteenth is instituted. Cambodia has 22. India has 21, and no, one of them is not Extend Your Car Warranty Day. So, we needed to catch up. Putting Juneteenth in between Memorial Day and the 4th gives us a brace of summer holidays to match the winter triad of Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Year’s, at a time of year when it is much more comfortable to drink outside. I know progress when I see it.
 
And a national holiday is an easy lift for Congress, eager to sponge after the votes of black Americans. Easier than actually making it a snap to let them vote, for example, or to figure out how to keep cops from killing them on videos. Republicans are dead set against both of those things, but Juneteenth grubbed up votes from both sides of the aisle, with no one opposing it in the Senate, and only 14 Republicans in the house against it.
 
These 14 Republicans, all from outback districts in the South and West, claim that the new holiday is “divisive,” and that they were just listening to their constituents when they opposed it.
 
I believe that, but I also believe that their constituents were actually saying things like, “We already got one (N-word) day. Why do they get two?” These are not people who crab about divisiveness, because they are the same people who are always talking about Texas seceding, or re-arranging state borders so they can quit being out-voted by them college-educateds and people of color.
 
What holidays would make these people happy? Sure, Trump Day, but what day would that be? The ex-Caucasian-in-Chief just had a birthday, and what with Juneteenth on the books, making the 14th a holiday as well would be crowding up the month. Same with making the day he had sex with Stormy Daniels a national holiday, because that was in July of 2006 and would push up against the 4th.
 
Maybe Put A Flag or Four On Your Pickup Truck Day, Pal could be considered, and it would have the additional benefit of limiting redneck goon fake patriotism displays to one day a year. That would probably be its downfall. Also, people calling it Small Wang Road Rage Day.
 
January 6th as Fake News Day? Naw, Democrats would want to call it Big Lie Day. That’s never going to get through Congress.
 
We can wait for Trump to die. Some of us would want to use that occasion to build a giant disco over his grave, so that as many people as possible could dance on it at the same time, with cheap beer and roomy, no-gender restrooms located centrally in the structure for obvious reasons, but some people would feel a sense of loss at Trump’s demise, and a holiday would console them. And I would certainly drink, set off fireworks, blow off air horns and yell, “Trump’s still dead!” at my neighbors all day long.
 
We currently don’t have any national holidays from President’s Day in February until M-Day kicks off the summer, so if Trump could gulp that fatal cheeseburger sometime in March or April, it would give us a break from that current long stretch of soulless work days.
 
But, hey, let him know he doesn’t have to wait that long on my account.

Louie Gohmert, the low-in-the-Q’s perpetual Congressman from West Texas, has obviously had it with newcomer idiots Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Greene. He must have felt the title of Head Clown of Capitol Hill slipping out of his grasp at the antics of the new girls in town. The lightning bolts of boneheadedness in DC were no longer bursting solely out of his office.
 
Boebert had proclaimed that you can’t rewrite the Constitution, despite rewrites on the Founding Document that gave her the right to vote and become a Congressperson. She ran for office solely on a platform of wearing her favorite pair of tight jeans in front of racks of AR-15's, and has since introduced—yep, you guessed it--a Constitutional amendment.
 
And she did go to Congress, because the people of her district said, “Hell, I don’t care if that girl just got her GED. She owns more guns than she does pairs of pants. That’s the kind of representation we need in Washington.”
 
Greene went to the House because she was tired of threatening school shooting survivors and wanted to threaten other people, mostly female (AOC and the Squad, Pelosi), members of Congress. She also believes in guns. And Jewish space lasers.
 
Gohmert was obviously discomfited at losing his perennial front-runner status as a publicly-elected lamebrain. It was like the Yankees falling behind a pair of expansion teams. Gohmert needed a bold move to retake the lead and on Tuesday he made it, by asking an official in the US Forest Service if the Service, or perhaps BLM, could change the orbits of the Earth or the Moon to combat climate change.

And, hey, valid question, especially to a Tea Party stalwart like Gohmert. If you can't change the orbits of heavenly bodies, why have a government at all?
 
Also, that’s BLM as in Bureau of Land Management, not Black Lives Matter. If Black Lives Matter wanted to change the orbit of the Earth, Gohmert would be strenuously against it. For sure. Forest Service rep Jennifer Eberlien replied that she would have to get back to him on that question.
 
This showed a either lot of self-discipline or cowardice on Eberlien’s part, because she should have just burst into laughter, tears and perhaps a sustained rolling on the hearing room floor until sedation was called for.
 
Or she could have pointed out that changing the Earth’s orbit even a few miles would require installing a rocket about a trillion times bigger than any we currently have at the South Pole and burning the world’s entire stock of fossil fuels in it at once, resulting in both incomprehensible pollution and all of Gohmert’s constituents in West Texas having to buy solar-powered pickup trucks and electric tractors anyway. Or that moving the Moon wouldn’t have much effect on climate, but if you moved it closer, the tides that wash into the streets of Miami now would be much higher, maybe sloshing over all the way to the Everglades.
 
She could have asked Gohmert why she was putting pressure on the Forest Service to change the Earth’s orbit when the job would logically fall to NASA, although maybe she was afraid Gohmert would answer, “Honey, all NASA does is fly helicopters on Mars. I’m looking for an agency that has a lot of earth-moving equipment already.”
 
I know people work long and hard and kiss startling amounts of ass to get government jobs so high-placed that they get to testify before Congress, and once they have them, they think that keeping them means being very circumspect about what they say. Eberlien is one of them. I’m not, which is why I never testify before Congress. I would have told Gohmert, “Buy me a bean burrito and wait an hour, and I’ll be able to flush something smarter than that question.”
 
But Louie wouldn’t care. He’s back on top.