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."

Now that Agent Orange has dropped his demand for a few billion for his border wall, in exchange for letting the government continue to operate, pushed back the argument over it until September, and modified “Mexico will pay for it” to “Mexico will pay for it eventually,” as if was going to work like a thirty-year subprime mortgage deal, it’s time to compare this as yet unbuilt wall to the other famous walls of history.

Granted, many Trump supporters are hugely disappointed that they won’t be starting the trenching for the wall anytime soon, because they are sick of seeing bilingual Walmart smiley faces and they are deeply angry about having to hear “Para Espanol, marque el dos,” every time they dial the drug store to refill their oxycontin prescriptions.

Also eager to see the plans are the Mexican drug cartels, because they want to know how deep they’ll have to go to tunnel under it.

But the wall is delayed, or possibly never going to happen. This gives us a little (or perhaps a lot) of breathing space to make sure the wall gets done right, and to view other walls with an eye to making ours the best wall ever, a really great wall, a beautiful wall. When you Google “wall of,” and “wall between,” here are the top contenders:
 
The Great Wall of China. Used to be a big deal when it was the only human structure visible from space, but now that, thanks to Google Earth, your backyard is visible from space, and in such detail that you can practically see the mosquitos breeding in that wading pool you need to clean out, it’s lost a little of its shine. But it’s still big. It was built to keep the Mongol hordes from invading China, which it did for a while, but then they invaded anyway and took over and had their own nice little dynasty. So, the Wall didn’t work. Still looks effective from space, though. People who have flown with Chinese astronauts complain that those guys never get sick of pointing it out.

Berlin Wall—The guard towers, the machine-gunning people trying to flee Communist oppression only to end up dead in the snow, sometimes obscure the fact that the Berlin Wall did a great job did keeping people out of East Berlin, too. Nobody but a few spies ever wanted to go there, though, since the main entertainment in East Berlin during the Cold War was eating cabbage in unheated rooms and betraying your neighbors to the Stasi, so you could eat their cabbage, too.

Wall of Voodoo— ‘80’s punk rock band whose biggest hit was titled “Mexican Radio.” ​Coincidence? The thinking here is “Yup.”

The Wall from Game of Thrones—This is a huge wall, thousands of feet high, built entirely of ice, so not practical for the Southwestern heat. We could build one against Canada, though, if we want to keep out hockey players and comedians that are taking work away from American hockey players and comedians. Also stops wildlings and ice zombies, which many Canadian citizens act like. And nobody drinks Moosehead anymore.
  
The Wall built by South Korea against North Korea--This is the Schrodinger’s cat of walls. North Korea claims it is a huge structure, which, oddly enough, they also claim is only visible from North Korea. You can’t see it from South Korea. South Korea says “WTF are you talking about?” every time North Korea starts babbling about a giant wall, because there isn’t one.
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I think we’ve found our solution. Reince Priebus, are you listening?

Despite a few hiccups, like not really damaging anything with 59 Tomahawks in Syria or being able to keep track of where carrier groups are exactly located, there's little doubt that there's a new attitude in Washington, an attitude of "Don't f*ck with us, or we'll f*uck  with you. If the Chinese and the Russians let us, of course." 
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It's a whole new game, and when Americans say "Who da playuhs?" the people below shout "We da playuhs!"

Mike Pence—The Consigliere. #2 is the man to send to the front lines. The cold stare that promises mayhem is a Pence trademark, and no doubt Jong un was coughing up his kimchee when he saw Pence glaring across the DMZ. Where does he get that threatening mien?  “He’s thinking about women getting free birth control,” confided one of his aides.

​“Rambling” Rex Tillerson –He goes here, he goes there, but the press isn’t allowed to follow him anywhere, so it’s tough to say exactly what he’s doing. But he’s perhaps the head architect of the Trump foreign policy, eloquently described by a neutral observer as “Not telling other nations what we want, and not telling them what we’re going to do if they don’t give it to us.”

​Jared “Inside Man” Kushner—Don’t let this young international stud fool you by his propensity to take skiing vacations in the midst of crises. He just made former hardass Steve Bannon his pocket lint in the latest White House power struggle. Charged with solving the centuries-old conflict on the Middle East, and questioned on how he plans to succeed, Kushner replied, “Piece of beautiful cake. Once you’ve navigated quagmires such as I have, like being born to immense personal wealth, then settling on the one person whose ass you’d like to kiss for the rest of your life, then marrying his daughter, the Middle East doesn’t look like such a labyrinth.”

Ivanka “Purse Designer” Trump—Never underestimate this femme fatale. Some critics say all she's done for international diplomacy is compare cup sizes with Angela Merkel, but when the other members of the inside circle talk big about things like cutting the cajones off Mexico and making damn well certain an entertaining change of climate is coming our way, she’s always getting what she wants. Which are trademark deals with the Chinese. 

The President--El Jefe. The solid eye of the hard-assity hurricane, few have ever demonstrated his vision, although many have seen him sharing classified information along with some shrimp cocktails at his Mar a Lago Fortress and Golf Resort. The stream of threatening Tweets that burble out of his unsecured cell phone form the orders to which the others march. He claims credit for everything good, while avoiding blame for all evil. Who else succeeds in doing that? Oh, yeah, God. God gets away with that because he blames all problems on Satan, which can only lead this column to believe one thing:

 Satan is God’s Obama.

A policy manifesto from an influential conservative group with ties to the Trump administration, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, urges the dismantling of the Education Department and bringing God into American classrooms. From the Washington Post.

I had a feeling I would hear from the Lord after I saw the above item on the Internet, and sure enough, in a few hours my cell phone rang, while lighting up with this picture of Him.

Yes, He’s on my contact list. Shouldn’t He be on yours?

I knew the news that hyper-religious Christians planning to use the power of government to cram their particular brand of religious flapdoodery down the throats of innocent children would not please Him, and, sure enough, He began His revelation to me wearily.

“Oh, Me,” he sighed. “You’re going to help nip this in the bud.”

“That’s going to be a lift,” I replied. “Betsy DeVos has a lot more influence over public education than I do. Why don’t You want to go back in the classroom?”

“Remember where We met? It was a classroom, as I recall.”

“Sure. Catholic school.”

“And weren’t you the busy little prayer then?”

“I guess. I mean, the nuns actively encouraged it.”

“Do you remember what you prayed for?”

“Honestly I don’t, really.” I hesitated to say this, not wanting to admit I had forgotten a conversation with the Ruler of the Universe, but it was true.

“Well, I remember. Mostly for toys, and to be beaten by the nuns less frequently than the other boys. I granted that last wish, by the way, because I knew, in My wisdom, I had made you a little candyass who would cry if you were smacked around too much.”

I have to admit I was less than completely grateful for that last revelation. “Gee, thanks, Oh Lord, ” I said.

“The point is, why would I want to hear more pious pre-teen drivel? I got galaxies to iron out, man. I have a couple pulsars definitely in need of a tune-up. I have a black hole ready to suck the life out of one of My favorite constellations. I definitely don’t need to pay attention to a lot of prayers for Pokemon sightings and cool avatars.”

“What kids pray for nowadays?”

“Now you’re feeling Me.  You may not know this, but I invented masturbation so little Catholic boys would have something to do with their hands besides making the Sign of the Cross by the time they hit puberty. I admit it kind of backfired in a lot of cases, but not in yours.”

“Always glad to help You out with Your plan.”

“And you’re going to do it again. Remember all those school Masses, where they would herd the whole lot of you little nose-pickers into church and make you genuflect, sit, kneel, pray and sing? Do you think I enjoyed that?”

“Do You think I did?”

“Point taken. Nobody was more grossed out by it than Jesus, though. Imagine how He felt every time His Body was held aloft in priestly fingers that still reeked of altar boy ass? Anytime I feel like creeping Him out, I just bring that up.”

“You Guys like to crack wise with each Other?”

“Eternity is a long time, pal. We got to loosen up every couple millennia. But it’s not long enough to need to listen to Betsy Devos-inspired brats begging Me for favors. Tell her that. Oh, and that other thing she’s been praying for?”

“What other thing?”
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“Hey, she knows. Just tell her to relax, Medammit, and it’ll happen.”

Sean Spicer’s latest blunder, asserting that even Hitler, the gold standard for evil demagogues, did not gas his own people but Syrian President Assad, his boss’s latest enemy, did, and then when the fact of Nazi death camps was pointed out to him, saying that they were different because the Nazis didn’t drop their gas on their victims from airplanes, may end up costing him his job.

It didn’t help when he referred to the concentration camps as “Holocaust Centers,” which put these arenas of murder in the same category as centers of outlet, Lawn and Garden, and Rockefeller.

His argument that diffusing poison gas from the skies was fundamentally different from telling your victims they were going to have a shower and then suffocating them with hydrogen cyanide did not prove convincing. It only shows Teutonic efficiency. Death camps don’t waste gas like sarin bombs do, by poisoning the landscape at large, possibly killing rats, goats, camels or the rare Syrian Desert Beaver* as well as their targets. Death camps just kill your own people.

The Spiceman made the further faux pas of advancing his theory on Passover, the most importantly religious holiday of the year for Jews, who comprised the majority of Hitler’s victims.

All of this was completely unnecessary, because there’s nothing in international law that says you have to be worse than Hitler before you deserve a nice trial for your war crimes.

So, the rumor is, that in the bitter breakfast served at the White House every morning, Spicer will soon be the toast. This is so unfair to him, because his only disqualification for the job is that he can’t lie smoothly enough on his feet. You watch the man lying. His eyes bulge and he lashes out like a drunk uncle at the assembled media. His brain cramps up under the pressure of prevarication, and then he blurts out something about Hitler.

There are many of us, the majority perhaps, that can’t lie any better than the Press Secretary. But his lack of natural mendaciousness make the Spicinator a bad mouthpiece for a President like Trump, who can’t stop lying unless he’s sleeping or chatting about vagina.

But a President can’t not have a Press Secretary, and when Spicey is demoted to making midnight corn liquor runs for Steve Bannon, someone will have to step forward, and the money here is on Kellyanne Conway, spin-mistress extraordinaire.

Sure, the K-girl has been quiet lately, nearly as quiet as all of the victims of the Bowling Green massacre. But I, for one, have never lost faith in her. The glistening fake smile, the perky nose, the lips that can let preposterous nonsense slip through them as easily as if it was coated with grape jelly, and the freezing stare that makes me think that the two last things I’d like to be on Earth is eaten by a wild animal or her husband. There’s a real liar. And that’s no alternative fact.

The only thing that might stop her ascension to Head Mouthpiece is Trump’s reputed distaste for anybody he thinks might be better than him at anything, and Kellyanne is certainly the superior liar to Trump, who is constantly under suspicion that what he says and Tweets are not lies to him at all, just brain flatus caused by excess consumption of Fox TV, a condition he has in common with many of his supporters.

But not Kellyanne. The divine power of deception radiates from every pore of her being, all the more so because it is dead certain that she knows that every time she opens her mouth, she is lying her Spanx off.

So give her the job. Spicer will be able to find other work. And so will Melissa McCarthy.

*Doesn’t actually exist. Would make a great screen name, though. 

Neutral observers of the White House have pointed out that the recent cruise missile attack on Syria shows that this Administration is beginning to formulate an approach to armed warfare that might be called the Trump Doctrine, which is:

Any time you can see footage of dead babies on Fox, the President is entitled to launch missiles.

The President’s favorite news network does not air many pictures of dead Syrians, even though there is a plentiful supply of them, not wishing to alarm its viewers into thinking the hordes of people fleeing that country have a good solid reason for doing so. Fox prefers that its audience think that these people are just faking desperation in order to get here to become terrorists.

Syrian head hombre Bashar al-Assad, in his ongoing campaign to be to his own people what Colonel Sanders is to his chickens, mostly uses conventional weapons like bombs, guns and grenades to kill children, but last week he was apparently running low on those supplies, and decided to use some sarin gas. He was supposed to have handed all his sarin over to the Russians a few years back, but apparently was allowed to keep a little bit. Probably he told Putin he wanted it in case he needed to termite-tent his palace.

Gassing innocents is against international conventions, whereas killing them with planes, missiles and artillery is okay. Not crossing this line is what keeps civilization intact. Dead babies killed by sarin gas are a war crime, whereas babies killed by bombing runs are just a regular thing. Even Fox gets this, and broadcast footage of the gassed children.

The President was watching. We can only imagine the scene. Trump was viewing Fox, along with Steve Bannon. He had one hand on his phone, ready to Tweet any conspiracy theories his favorite network might crank out. The other he had in Sean Spicer’s jar of cheese puffs, which he eats for complexion maintenance.

“Look at those dead babies,” the President exclaims. “This Assad guy is a monster. Why, he’s worse than Planned Parenthood. Let’s organize a hasty raid like we did in Yemen and get his ass.”

“Worse than Planned Parenthood? I wouldn’t go that far, Mr. President,” Steve Bannon, ever the voice of reason, replied.  “Assad just kills babies. He does not provide birth control, STD testing or cancer screenings. We don’t need to wipe him off the face of the Earth like we do Planned Parenthood. Let’s just toss a couple Tomahawks at one of his favorite airfields.”

“All right, but it will be a good cruise missile strike. A beautiful missile strike. The best cruise missile strike.”

“And we’ll tell Putin in advance,” Bannon suggests.

“Why would we do that?”

“The tapes,” Bannon replies, tersely. “Plus, they can remove all their best stuff and their nicest airplanes from the target, and probably be able to use it the next day.”

“That sounds like a good plan. That sounds like the best plan. Hey Steve, why can’t we just bomb Planned Parenthood clinics?"
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“It’s been tried, Mr. President. It’s been tried.”

In this world, riven by religious and political disagreements so profound as to make us doubt the humanity of our opponents, science has announced that all of our species, despite our differences, and nearly completely unaware of it, is united in a single purpose—mucking up the future.

Whether we cook ourselves to death with greenhouse gases, blow each other up in a nuclear war or merely sit passively about until we are smacked with the Sweet Meteor of Doom, humanity’s time on this planet will someday be up. What, then, will be left of us? Science now provides us with an answer—a thin layer of crap all over the entire planet.

We will have our own geological layer. You can see other geological layers in places like the Grand Canyon, where the Colorado River has cut through eons of rock, revealing the strata underneath us, each layer representing another eon in the history of dirt. The strata are usually formed deep under the oceans, as a couple hundred million years’ worth of tiny lifeforms get together and decide to be crushed into sandstone by the weight of the sea, some of which eventually gets thrust up into the air by the continents drifting around and smacking into each other.

All of these strata tend to be made of a uniform type of rock, but our layer is going to be different. Way different. None of us knows what a geological layer composed of TV remotes, old tires and Mickey Mouse ears will look like after it has been crushed under the weight of the earth for a billion years, but it won’t look like sandstone. Your smoke detectors, rubber bouncy castles and George Foreman Grills will form a layer which will make any future geologist look at it and say “Weren’t they a bunch of busy little bitches?”

They will give our era a name. I suggest the Craptastizene, or possibly the Shitshowazoic, but I hardly expect to be around to be asked for my input. We don’t even know who these geologists will be. Maybe they will be advanced aliens who finally show up a billion years too late to save us from ourselves, which I personally consider pretty goddamn inconsiderate of them.  They will notice the satellites still orbiting the planet, and decide to dig for more evidence that we once existed. They will come up with Pokémon cards and cell phone batteries. Digging deeper, they will discover eight-track tapes and cars with huge fins. Beneath that, coonskin caps and muskets. You get the picture.

Of course, advanced aliens might be advanced enough not to bother. Our galaxy might be lousy with lost civilizations by then. Then our discovery would have to wait until the cockroaches that survived the nuclear winter we sprang on them would evolve into intelligent insects. I’m pretty sure sentience wouldn’t make these creatures any less disgusting, so it’s fortunate we’ll all be long dead by the time they start scurrying around our strata.

Maybe these future brainy bugs will all be noble scientists, conscious at all times of their place in the cosmic order and dedicated to the pursuit of fact. It’s more likely they’ll be more like us, however, with just a few capacious minds probing towards the future, while most of them just flame each other on BugBook and occasionally attack their fellow intelligent insects with pesticides.

They will come up with highly speculative theories about us, like we do about our remote ancestors. They may decide that we worshipped in stadiums and stored grain in our churches. As they bite each other’s heads off in mating rituals, they will wonder if we were cannibals, too. Answer—just a few of us.

We don’t really have to wonder what they’ll see, though. The future is now, and we can view it at any time. Just meet me at the landfill. 

Another reason to shut off the pipeline of refugees emigrating to the US just emerged from the chaos of war and travel bans and fear of sharia law—these Muslim monsters are taking jobs away from natural American stoners.

Employers are hiring refugees because they can all pass pre-employment drug screens, which native-born citizens are having a tough time doing because we are all on drugs. Up to 80% of the workforce at a company in Colorado failed a random drug test, because everybody in that state has been toking their faces off ever since weed became legal there. You can’t fire 80% of your employees at the same time, so these stoned people still have jobs. But they can’t get other jobs, because a lot of employers would pee test them before putting them on the production line.

And all these refugees can pass that test, because none of them are on drugs. Why this is no one knows. A war-torn hellhole would seem an ideal spot to experiment with psychotropic substances. Look at Detroit.  But these Syrian types have resisted the urge to use drugs, despite their living conditions, which include regularly being buried in rubble and the occasional surprise amputation.

And there’s no better place to cook meth than Aleppo. If your lab explodes and destroys your house, no one would even blink, because to go up in fiery flames is the natural fate of all the housing stock in that city. But, surprisingly, no one bothers. Being constantly in fear of death and torture makes you too busy to learn how to take a bong hit or rail out some cocaine with your American Express card, is all I can think.

So, what we have now is a White House that promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US and at the same time is blocking the entrance of refugees who are the only people clean and sober enough to fill them. Something has to give, and it’s definitely not going to be opening the golden door wider for a bunch of brown-skinned foreigners that make our skins crawl, even though that itchy sensation may be caused by heroin withdrawal as well as xenophobia.

The only answer is to let Americans work high. Look at the picture. Don’t you think you could make a zillion cheeseburgers a day even if you were totally baked? Sure, your company would lose some product to the munchies, and occasionally you’d have to use some of your vacation time going to rehab, but it’s better than letting a gang of people fleeing the death and destruction of their homeland and who speak a language that makes Spanish, which we also hate to hear, sound almost comprehensible, snatch all the mindless jobs in the land.

Otherwise we face a future in which the Walmart smiley faces are trilingual instead of merely bilingual. It makes no sense to deport a bunch of hard-working people because we hate their ethnicity merely to replace them with refugees we hate because of their religion. Let native Americans be hard-working as well as highly stoned. Eliminate drug-testing! The future is at stake.
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You finished rolling that joint yet?