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."

The NRA, as usual, went silent in the aftermath of another mass murder. This time it was a guy with an AR-15 gunning down a bunch of people in a synagogue because he hated Jews, which happened in the aftermath of another guy trying to get into a black church with a gun to kill black people, which he couldn’t do, so he ended up shooting two black people at random in a supermarket parking lot.
 
It was left to the Traitor Tot to say something stupid and insensitive about the killings, and he lowered himself to the occasion in his usual form. He avoided mentioning the black attempted massacre entirely, probably reasoning that people of all ethnic groups get shot in parking lots all the time, so the racial tinge in that killing could be safely ignored.
 
On the synagogue shooting, he blurted out that the synagogue should have had an armed guard. They could have, because all the armed guards whom he wants at all the schools in the country to prevent kids from being shot up on school days have Saturdays off, and triple overtime would probably persuade one of them to stand in front of a synagogue and look bored.
 
Until he was the first one shot, of course. Around here, we don’t like the chances of a single fat security guard, his arteries clogged with donut grease and his reflexes slowed by ennui, armed with a handgun, against a stealthy assassin with an AR-15. He would have been collateral damage, along with the four cops the killer winged. We're just assuming they were good guys, continuing to make the record of Good Guys with Guns resemble that of the San Diego Padres, an occasional win followed by a string of dispiriting losses.
 
Secondly, he bellowed that we needed to bring the death penalty back. News flash—Pennsylvania, where the synagogue shooting occurred, has the death penalty, and while it is seldom employed, a guy who shoots up a place of worship, leaving 11 dead, may have just won the Death Penalty Super Lotto in the Keystone State and will probably get strapped into Old Sparky sooner or later.
 
Lastly, he inserted one of his musty old feet in his mouth when he proclaimed the murders to be “the worst kind of anti-Semitism,” which implies that there are better kinds of anti-Semitism. Any kind of anti-Semitism that doesn’t result in Jews getting actually killed, like not letting them into your country club, calling them ethnic slurs after the elevator door has closed on them, or looking around quickly before telling a Jew joke, all behaviors which anyone with any imagination can see Trump indulging in, are acceptable.

You can light up a tiki torch and organize a parade during which you and your bros chant, "Jews will not replace us!" and be described by Trump as a fine person.
 
And Trump is definitely is cool with is letting his mob of followers think that George Soros, a simple, gentle, octogenarian Jewish-Hungarian billionaire whose only provable offense is hanging out with the Clintons, is funding the antifas, paying demonstrators and providing aid and comfort to the caravan that Trump wants us to be terrified of, ought to be locked up or simply killed, as one of Trump's boys, a retired male stripper with a thing for pipe bombs, tried to do.
 
Fortunately for Soros, that guy is apparently a lot better at shaving off his body hair than he is at making pipe bombs, and so the billionaire still lives.
 
Maybe he’ll start paying for those security guards.

​It’s not looking too cool for the Republicans in next month’s election and Trump, in another example of the level-headed bravery he’s so good at, has already declined to take any blame if the Dems prevail.
 
Even though the last time the economy was this good, the party in power actually gained seats in the House in the midterms, nobody thinks the Republicans are going to do that, and many pundits already think the reason that the Republicans might do quite poorly is that the current President is much more of an orangutan-colored blowhard than the guy who was President in ’98.
 
The White House’s analysis of the forthcoming election is supremely Trumpian. If the Republicans do better than expected and keep the House, the election will have been a referendum on Trump and if they don’t, it will not have been.
 
What then, to blame if the Dems win? The Top Ten scapegoats for Republican defeat are ranked below:
 
10: The Rapture. Where did those missing Evangelical votes go? Sucked up into Heaven by the everlasting Hoover of God’s love, leaving the election in the hands of Jews and atheists. Even the most devout will concede that Trump himself is unlikely to be Raptured, but it certainly won’t be his fault that many Republicans will be hosannaing instead of voting.
 
9: Hexing by Wiccans. This has already been attempted by a few covens, with no noticeable effect, because hexes bear the same relation to reality as far as  changing it goes as thoughts and prayers. But if Trump decides to blame Republican losses on being hexed, and decides to go after the Wiccans for it, we will actually have that witch hunt he’s always talking about.
 
8: Attack by powerful Luciferian beings from another dimension. For more information on this threat, click here.
 
7: Jeff Bezos. Many states get their voting machines on Amazon, and Bezos has a secret password that unlocks them all and stuffs them full of Democratic votes.
 
6: The lying, lying press. The Republicans actually win the election, but CNN is going to keep you from finding out about it.
 
5: Kneeling NFL players. They’ll be stationed at crucial polling places in swing districts. Football fans mob them, seeking autographs and forgetting to vote.
 
4: Omarosa!
 
3: Nobody in his Cabinet votes Republican, because they’re sick of his shit. Except for De Vos.
 
2: The caravan! 4,000 Honduran rapists make it across the border, rendering Trump’s female supporters afraid to leave the house to vote. We hear you saying “4,000 people? That’s not even the population of Holtville, California. And more than half of them are women and children, so not really good rapists.”  So you say, but at the rate he’s going, Trump’s female supporters might all be able to fit into one rally by November.
 
1: Massive alleged voter fraud. This is what we’re putting our money on. Republicans lose, and blame it on illegal aliens being bussed from polling place to polling place, eating tacos on the way. All the tacos and the bus drivers will paid for by George Soros.
 
You combine one of these factors with the number of clear-thinking Americans who already think Trump is a despicable twat, or who feel sure that no matter how well things are going now, sooner or later he’s going to blunder off a cliff and take the country with him, and the Dems may well win the day.
 
But when you put it that way, it does kind of sound like it might be his fault. Better put your tin foil cap back on.

From an account of the Presidential rally in Nevada:
“A lot of people in California don’t like [sanctuary cities] either,” Trump said. “They’re rioting now, they wanna get out of their sanctuary cities.”
 
It is dawn in California now, and the smoke still curls from the wreckage of taco shops destroyed by arson. The sewers run green with rivers of guacamole, dumped by the bucketful as vengeful rioters, fueled by one cup of covfefe too many, perhaps, smashed storefronts of Hispanic-owned business in a fury that threatened to make the Bowling Green massacre look like a church picnic.
 
Blind with mob rage, they have overturned every landscaping truck they could find. Shovels and rakes lie scattered on the roadway, occasionally picked up and wielded as weapons by the angry gringos who can remember which end to hold them by. Housepainters and plumbing contractors not named Sanchez or Domingo are hastily wrapping banners that read “White-Owned” around their shops and vehicles, so that the rioters will spare their property.
 
They are biting down hard on the hand that feeds them, as every busboy, cook and chef has fled the city. We are waking up in a town without chile rellenos, machaca or burritos of any kind. Hell, we don’t even have a Denny’s with enough staff to open. But the rioters feel that’s worth it, to rid themselves of the onus of living in a sanctuary city. Even though they will have to start trimming their own hedges and cleaning their own gutters, the rioters are wiping the blood off their knuckles with satisfaction, professing to have no worries about a tomorrow where they will have nothing to eat but tuna salad on white bread. The sanctuary has been destroyed, the immigrant banished. They gaze hopefully towards a future where they no longer have to hear "Por Espanol, marque el dos," when they are on hold, and the smiley-faced “Rollback” signs at Walmart cease being bilingual.
 
Haw! Just kidding. Everything is cool here. Trump is full of shit, but nobody should be surprised by that.
 
It’s his default setting.

​The Pope recently came out against abortion again, comparing anyone having an abortion to a person who hires a hitman to solve a problem.
 
The first thing you’re thinking is “Wow, that’s harsh.” And you would be right, and surprised, maybe, because this is the same Pope that let atheists and gays into Heaven, showing a shred of comprehension that some of the Church’s long-held positions don’t make a crap-ton of sense.
 
This Pope is not Italian, as Popes were for hundreds of years, so the guess here is that he just doesn’t understand the honored place hitmen hold in Italian society. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe he’s never seen “The Godfather.” There are some similarities, true—abortionists get rid of unwanted pregnancies and hitmen eliminate unwanted witnesses—but differences abound. Abortionists are commonly addressed as “Doctor” in places where abortion is legal. Hitman are known for their colorful nicknames—Elmo the Knife, Garroting Gary, Squidge, Snake, and Tommy Trigger are a few of them.
 
In places where abortion is still illegal, abortionist tend to have colorful nicknames too—Coat Hanger Marie and Drano Debbie are two that come to mind--but here in the US, where the Supreme Court says abortion is legal until it says it isn’t, abortionists tend to work in sterile environments with competent assistance. An abortionist doesn’t have to know how long it takes for cement to set around a snitch’s socks, or how shallow a shallow grave can be hurriedly dug.
 
The abortionist helps a woman assert control over her own body. The hitman helps the boss assert control over his own crime syndicate. You can make the case that this is morally equivalent, but the police don’t think so.
 
Unwanted blastocysts and inconvenient witnesses have one thing in common—if they escape with their lives, the government takes care of them. For kids, it’s usually group homes where they can grow up with a bunch of future serial killers and be tormented by foster parents, unless they’re in the South, where they have to learn to play banjo on the porch. The witnesses have it much better—the Witness Protection Program gives them new homes, new identities and boring jobs like the rest of us have.  
 
The Catholics still operate orphanages, despite the fact that donating your baby to the priests is way less popular than it used to be.
 
All of this Catholic action is done in the name of God’s will, which is the Pope’s position. Whether you were raped, roofied, incested or just fell victim to the male habit of ejaculating frequently and unexpectedly, it’s God’s will that you have that baby, girls. It’s also His will if the father of your baby disappears forever or turns out to be your uncle or your married boss, because God wills some shady shit, if you haven’t noticed.
 
Whether hitmen use the God’s will thing with their customers is not known to this column, and we don’t want to find out. Sure, hitmen might whisper “It’s God’s will that you take your last ride in the trunk of this Cadillac, my friend,” after they’ve locked you in there, to comfort you in your last moments, but they don’t have to.
 
If they wanted to do that, they’d have become Popes. 

Another month, another massive hurricane sweeping through the underparts of Dixie. This one seemed even more calculated to hit Trump country than the last. It was originally projected to hit right around Disney World, but it swerved left, sparing Mickey Mouse but taking dead aim at the redneckiest portion of Florida.
 
The parts of Florida inhabited by retired Democrats were likewise treated to little more than a steady breeze. Miami and West Palm were untouched. Daytona survived unscathed, so the next spring break will party as hard as ever. Not a single Life Alert went off in Tampa Bay, the unofficial waiting room of the afterlife.
 
The Panhandle, though, which voted about 80/20 for Trump, looks today like it was hit by a titanic Leaf Blower from Hell. We Democrats in California, smug in the knowledge that we don’t get hurricanes, can blame Michael on global warming, which we are also going to suffer from less that Florida, because most of our state is many feet above sea level, whereas most of Florida is only the height of a tall bar stool above the ocean, but the deplorables in the panhandle of FL cannot, because they are not allowed to believe in it.
 
It is one of the inarguable articles of Republican faith that global warming is a myth perpetuated by Democrats and solar-power salesmen, so the thinking here is that perhaps the Trump voters of the Deep South are coming to a faith-based conclusion that God hates them.
 
Not all of them are, of course. Here’s a link to a claim by a self-described prophet who thinks that the Democrats control the weather and created Michael out of pique at the Kavanaugh confirmation. Only the most gullible of the deplorables would believe that. Even the ones who firmly believe that Hillary operated a basement child sex-slave ring out of a pizza shop with no basement are going to scratch their noggins and think, “Hey, if the Democrats controlled the weather, Mitch McConnell would get hit by lightning about fifteen times a day.”
 
You bet he would. And we’d also have a storm surge wipe out both Fox News and PornHub, so Trump wouldn’t have anything to watch on TV.
​

So, it’s God that hates you guys, and who can blame Him? Imagine you just took your first Oxy of the day and re-posted the meme above, even though you know that’s a picture of your favorite step-niece sleeping off the roofie you slipped into her PBR at the family reunion, and there’s not even a pool in the picture. God takes one look at that in His feed and thinks, “That little fuck deserves to have a 12-foot wall of water hit all 8 rusting vehicles in his front yard, drown all the hounds beneath his porch and wash his Obama hanging in effigy out to sea.”
 
Or maybe you’re hiding behind your local statue of a Confederate hero, clutching your AR-15 and waiting for the antifa to show up, and God spots you and says to himself, “I’ll show that bonehead what he really needs to be afraid of,” and drops an oak tree on your brain case.
 
Here, we’re just saying it appears that God has taken time off from spinning the galaxies to bring a little retribution on your flat asses, according to your own theology, so maybe you ought to lighten up a little. Put your Nikes back on. Quit chanting “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” when you’re buying donuts at the Piggly-Wiggly.
 
In the meantime, the damage has been done. But don’t worry. Trump will be in your hood soon, tossing paper towels your way, with Melania by his side, wearing her flood flip-flops.
 
And over here, we’re sending you our thoughts and prayers.
​

A group of twelve vocal music students has been accused by South Korean authorities of conspiring to gain weight in order to dodge that nation’s mandatory draft--News item.
 
This note, from that far-off Asian land, should serve to remind us how lucky we Americans are not to need to conspire to gain weight. The tools for getting massively fat are all around us—monstrous cheeseburgers, pizza slices that can barely fit on an end table, deep-fried cheddar and bacon-filled donut holes, all washed down with milkshakes or sugary Big Gulps. You don’t need to form a secret conclave of friends in order to lard up. In fact, joining a support group to pack on the pounds might be a hindrance to growing that treasured jelly belly—they might steal some of your fries.
 
Americans know how to gain weight. South Koreans should stick to what they do best, which is making TVs. The link above reveals that the conspiracy exchanged notes on drinking protein powders and “a thick aloe beverage” in order to show up for their draft exam wearing their too-fat-to-serve pants. How pitiful is that? The only use Americans have for protein powders is to combine them with steroids in order to win bodybuilding contests, and aloe is for sunburns.
 
South Koreans are naturally thin, though not as thin as North Koreans, who are at an even farther remove from Little Debbie, Papa John and Colonel Sanders, all of whom help to keep the demand for XXXXL Hawaiian shirts strong here in America. Choking down protein powders is hardly necessary when you can buy frozen sliders at the 7-11 for fifty cents each.
 
Another thing Americans used to do well is dodge the draft. We don’t have a draft anymore, just because it was so easy to dodge. The authorities here just shrugged and went to a military force composed solely of people who wanted to join it for various reasons, ranging from a strong desire to commit multiple murders and get away with it, to just wanting to get outside the city limits of their bumfuck home towns, and that’s the way it remains today.
 
But in the glory days of draft-dodging, Americans excelled at it, and we’re not talking about the wussies who ran north to Canada. We’re talking about men who matured into strong advocates of international and personal violence, while cleverly avoiding exposure to life-threatening danger themselves. Here, in their own words are the stories of three men, who, when offered the chance to walk the paths of military glory, said, “Pass.”
 
DICK CHENEY: “Have a little lesbian baby As soon as I heard they were going to start drafting married men without children, I threw Lynne’s birth control pills in the compost heap and started raw-dogging her morning, noon and night. Got her preggo and got myself deferred just in the nick of time. I even experienced the thrill of shooting somebody later on in life, so it really worked out for the best.”
 
RUSH LIMBAUGH: “Two words--pilonidal cyst. Basically, it’s a big, permanent pimple on your ass. You have one of those suckers, you can’t wipe your butt in the jungle. 4-F all the way. Of course, later on I got hugely fat, so I can pass some pointers along on that as well.”
 
TED NUGENT: “Just do it, baby. And by that, I mean just shit yourself. Are you surprised that you haven’t seen one of those Nike parody memes on Facebook featuring my face, the swoosh, and the words ‘Go poop yourself. Just do it?’ I know I am. Surprised, that is.”
 
Of course, the most successful draft dodger of them all isn’t mentioned here. He’ll be too busy tearing up the trade agreement that keeps South Korea an ally while you’re getting your not-quite-fat-enough ass blasted by artillery fire to help you in your quest to ditch military service, but you know he’s with you in spirit.
 
You can bet your bone spurs on it.

It’s popular these days to send thoughts and prayers into the ether when circumstances call for it, which is usually after someone or a group of someones has experienced something horrible. It is a kind sentiment, for sure, but I question the final destination of these T’s and P’s.

I imagine the prayers are aimed at a deity of some kind, or perhaps the universe as a whole. But God and the Universe seem to have inboxes that constantly full and voice mailboxes that are clogged. Perhaps they just use the calendar function to say they are unavailable. You may be able to catch them on Insta just by pure luck. But they swipe left. A lot.

Thoughts are a different matter. Presumably you have them, much as I do. Is the neighbor a douche? Where are my keys? Why does the dog want to lick my face after I catch him eating the cat’s shit again? But I don’t expect you to ponder the same things. Apologies to all of the home philosophers out there who think someone might care about their thoughts. The Philosophy Hall of Fame is a tough one to get in to. Seems to help if you are Greek.

The phrase is often used by public figures to dismiss pretty much any awful thing without actual effort. The current candy-corn colored leader uses it, when he sticks to his script. Which he rarely does. And let’s face it, we mostly want him off of it.

When I asked a friend what phrase we might try to popularize to replace the T’s and P’s, his daughter suggested “Aw, rats!” Which I thought was excellent.
So, as these thoughts disappear into nothingness without being contemplated by the vast majority of deities, universes and living humans, I notice the dog has his nose in the litter box again.
​
Aw, rats!

In this age of endless Trump, when every headline every day screams of the profound effect he is having on us and the world, over here we occasionally crave quieter eras, when we could editorialize on more mundane nonsense.
 
In those innocent days, spotting a story tagged with a headline as fascinating as Mountain Goats Being Airlifted Out of National Park Because They Crave Human Pee, which can be found here, would be riffed on by this column as intrinsically funny by itself. Apparently, every time you using the toilet, you are flushing away nutrients vital and delicious to mountain goats, so if you go hiking in the wilds of Washington’s Olympic National Park and find it necessary to relieve yourself on the ground, a mountain goat will sooner or later come along and lick up that pee, digging as deep into the ground as it needs to consume every nourishing drop.
 
This may not prevent the goat from goring you to death afterwards, which thankless act one pissed-off mountain goat has performed on at least one hiker, resulting in the National Park Service starting a project to airlift all of the goats to another, more remote forest in the Cascades, where fewer humans hike to pee and get gored. In better times, reading a story about the consumption of human urine would not remind you of the President of the United States, but these are not those times, so it falls to this column to point out the eerie parallels between goat and Trump behavior.
 
Nothing in the goat article indicates what kind of human pee the goats prefer. Whether it be the sweet pure piss of a devoted vegan lass, or the rancid discharge of an alcoholic prep school shitbag who thinks he belongs on the Supreme Court, the goats will thirstily consume it. Not so the President; it is said he prefers prostitute piss exclusively. So that’s one important difference between him and a mountain goat.
 
Goats gore people in the pristine wilderness. Trump gores people on Twitter. A dominant male goat gathers a herd of females and keeps them to himself, randomly forcing himself on them at will. Again, there is a crucial difference here between the goat and Trump—the male goat never feels it is necessary to pay $130,000 through a crooked intermediary to a girl goat he has humped.  
 
A male mountain goat can weigh up to 309 pounds and the smart money is on Trump weighing about the same. A mountain goat can climb an incline of up to 60 degrees, which is far steeper than the average golf course, so superior to Trump in that respect. It can also withstand a wind of more than 99 miles an hour, which Trump probably cannot. Neither could about 3,000 Puerto Ricans, so let’s not be too harsh on Trump for that.
 
Finally, the goats get airlifted and so does Trump. Whether it be to one of his resorts, the UN to give other world leaders lulz, or one of his rallies where he can make fun of rape victims, his trip always starts with Marine One gunning its rotors and lifting 300 pounds of bloated Presidential hiney into the sky.
 
Of course, Trump’s helicopter doesn’t drop him into the high Cascades to fend for himself through a brutal high-altitude winter, searching vainly for urine on which to subside.
 
Which wouldn’t be a bad idea. Just throwing it out there. 

I knew all the best dirty words, I thought. Even though I’m about to sail out of middle age, my wildly misspent youth had given me a firm grasp of the slang of sex and scatology. Often, I amuse my girl and my beer-drinking buddies with my ability to rip off an impressive series of synonyms for either male or female genitals whenever prompted. My grasp of invective is truly impressive. Cut me off in traffic or knock over my beer and you’ll find out how profound it is.
 
Yet I can no longer take pride in it. Apparently, nominees for the Supreme Court have even more bottomless vocabularies in the vernacular of sex, drinking and puking, as per the writings of Kavanaugh.
 
I knew many of the expressions, of course. “Ralphing” is old school, as old as “talking to the toilet,” “going to Europe,” “praying at the altar of the porcelain god,” and “blowing donuts.” “FFFF,” which I first heard from a fifth-grader named Jimmy, means “Find ‘em, feel ‘em, fuck ‘em and forget ‘em.” I heard it when was at an age when I had never accomplished any of those feats. Probably Jimmy hadn’t either, but he could talk a better game than me. And talking sex with other young men has always been at least as important to youths as getting sex. It’s a lot easier, for one.
 
I had never heard of “boofing,” however. After Googling it, I’m still too uncertain to use it, although it definitely does not mean farting, as the wannabee Supreme has it. It means either anal sex, or ingesting alcohol through the anus. Possibly it means both. To “boff” someone has always meant to have sex with them, so I guess using “boof” provides an important distinction when bragging about one’s accomplishments in that field.
 
“Boofing” as a method of ingesting alcohol strikes me as sloppy, smelly and unnecessarily difficult. There almost has to be special equipment involved, and who’s going to clean that stuff afterwards when you are all boofed-up? Certain shapes of beer bottles would probably fit in the cavity without needing additional clamps or tubing. People do show up at emergency rooms with beer bottles broken off in their asses. Now we know what they’ve been doing. Boofing.
 
It’s nothing I would ever even consider, unless the only beer I had to consume was Bud Light.
 
“The Devil’s Triangle” was another expression I had never used, and Google informed me that it meant two guys having sex with one girl at the same time, and trying not to look at each other while doing it. If you consider the possible ways two guys can have sex with one girl at the same time, you can see how difficult this would be short of using blindfolds. Kavanaugh and his buddies may well have used blindfolds, because of the implied icky cloying gayness involved in being very close to another guy having sex, which most hetero teenage males would find uncomfortable.
 
Or maybe not—after all, they’ve been shooting beer up each other’s asses, which almost inevitably would lead to some light spanking.
 
Whether Kavanaugh makes it to the high court or not, he’s at least boosted the average American’s vocabulary a couple notches. That might be his sole accomplishment, though.
 
I hear the FBI is out to boof him.