
And idiots had a better than average week here. One of their reigning chieftains, Rush Limbaugh, proclaimed his opinion that the discovery of liquid water on Mars by NASA was "part of the leftist agenda," and that the space agency "was turned over to the Muslim outreach."
People listened to this and said "Ditto!" as they do whenever Rush speaks. These solid thinkers know that water on Mars greatly increases the probability of life there and apparently they are worried that life may be Muslim and have plans to illegally immigrate here to vote Democratic and to enforce Martian Sharia law, which is an equally oppressive but lower gravity version of Sharia law on Earth.
If you can't be bothered to worry about anything Rush says, ever, join the club. As age advances on me, I find I worry less and less about almost everything. This is a medical condition known as "male pattern apathy" and also as a "receding careline." There is no cure. For that I am usually grateful.
But if you are looking for fresh actors on the casting call for the brainless that is daily life in our United States, I hope you are following the story of the Catholic priest in New Jersey who was arrested for threatening an eight year-old boy with a gun before Mass.
As a former altar boy, I know that threatening juveniles before Mass is as time-honored a Catholic tradition as fasting and Holy Water, but the use of firearms to do so is a new wrinkle. Perhaps the priest in question, Father Kevin Carter, was merely over-excited at the just-completed visit of the Pope to nearby Philadelphia and would have waved a gun at anybody he could corner in a spontaneous burst of religious ecstasy, or maybe he was just reminding the lad to keep his outhmay utshay about what happened in the onfessionalcay.
In any case, the weapon he chose to brandish at the disobedient pre-teen was a working replica of a single-shot musket from the Revolutionary War era, reminding us that no matter how many atheists and gays gain entrance to Heaven under the reign of the current Pontiff, the Catholic Church remains at its core old school.
And we had another heartwarming mass shooting, this one at a junior college in Oregon, to which the Presidential Candidate That Nobody Wants, Jeb Bush, reacted by staying "Stuff happens." Really, Jeb, it's okay for me to admit that apathy is the king of emotions, but if you want to be our President, you have to at least pretend to care.
But the man probably can't help himself. You'll recall that his brother said the same thing about Hurricane Katrina.