BOOT! EDGE! EDGE!

I had an entire 70-screen PowerPoint presentation all prepared to impart on Pete (I call him Pete) how much I respect and admire and enthusiastically support him—and how we’d make awesome duet partners at the piano—but there was a bit of a time crunch so we were able to jam on only six piano concerti together. But still. I JUST MET PETE!

Gah! I look 1,000 years old here. I think Pete's photo-taking lady must have hit the wrong filter when she grabbed my camera to take our pictures.

It had never even remotely occurred me to even think about the possibility of having a gay President

And now.

And now.

And now. Here’s Pete Buttigieg—a happily, proudly, openly married gay man—not only running for the Democratic Presidential nomination, but consistently LEADING in the polls. And being so bulletproof-respectable that even his most cretinous opponents have instinctively known to keep their faggot insults choked deep in their rotting guts.

His rally today in my beloved hometown was more fire-up-the-followers than parse-the-policies, and his followers—gay and straight, young and old, single and grouped—clapped and cheered and celebrated everything he said.

I was standing by my mom at the rally. And I hugged her tight at one point. Because I was too choked up to do anything else.

And I was so, so happy about it.

Apparently there was a presidential debate a year ago today

Apparently I live-blogged stuff like the below paragraph as I watched it because there are tons of similar angry, dumbfounded posts in my Facebook memories today, and apparently the debate was -- in the pussy-grabber's own ad-nauseam repeated attempts at talking -- a "disaster."

Once again, Hillary is talking in thoughtfully nuanced paragraphs to answer the question about what she would do about the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Trump just calls her a "disaster" and has to be re-asked the question TWICE plus have the subject patiently explained to him by Martha Raddatz and he not only can't answer the question but he says he's never even talked about it with his running mate. HOLY SHIT.
If only Dotard McCovfefe had given us some sort of sign a year ago that he was a catastrophically incompetent psychopath, maybe we'd have a president today who can locate Puerto Rico on a map.

10 things Andrew Jackson accomplished before he died in 1845

1. Got really angry about the Civil War that happened 16 years later
2. Invented Post-Its
3. Skipped the White House Correspondents Dinner to enjoy some beautiful chocolate cake with Frederick Douglass
4. Knew more about ISIS than the generals like a total badass
5. Carried the all-time record for the biggest crowd at his inauguration ... until you-know-who came along
6. Launched the man-bun
7. Figured out the difference between Syria and Iraq before bombing them
8. Was -- fun fact! -- the first president to tweet about fake news at 5:00 in the morning
9. Opened a state-of-the-art Holocaust center
10. Watched helplessly as Barack Obama started the 1861 Civil War

Flying around

First of all, Obama shouldn't use Air Force One to "fly around" for politics? I know you have no FUCKING idea what a president does -- or even the conventional way the presidential plane's name has been written since 19 FUCKING 53 -- but politics (and diplomacy, which you slowly destroy with each private phone call and each joint press conference and each painfully awkward handshake) is the EXACT reason presidents "fly around" -- as a toddler would describe it -- on Air Force One.  

And don't get me started on "play," you three-weekends-in-a-four-week-presidency Mar-a-Lago moron. I mean hypocrite. I mean liar. I mean asshole. I also mean demagogue, but you have no idea what that is. So I'll stick with asshole.

You're an adult. You have been an adult since the dawn of the Internet and the Information Age. You know that everything you write online is permanent and searchable and that when you're a prominent social figure -- even before you somehow become president -- every intellectually grotesque tantrum you voluntarily tweet will be found and used to hold you to the standards that you publicly and willingly establish by yourself for yourself.

You are too stupid to function in the public sector. You are too puerile to maintain reciprocal relationships of any public value. You are too morally and intellectually repulsive to manifest any public integrity. And you are beneath -- BENEATH -- contempt as any public figure.

SCOTUS hope

Aside from the expected and tediously toe-the-line hard-right bona fides regarding big-business interests, pro-life absolutists and religious "liberty" whiners that he has amassed in his short 49 years, I don't totally loathe the political extremes of Trump SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorsuch the way I did those of Antonin Scalia. Don't get me wrong; I'm not going to gay-marry Gorsuch -- and, to be fair, my initial research has revealed only cursory instead of virulent LGBT hostility on his part -- but I'm going to give myself some time to hear more of what he has to say before I condemn the Republican softballing of his confirmation hearings and resign myself to the inevitability of his SCOTUS appointment.

I'm concerned about Gorsuch's penchant for concentrating power in the high courts, which are immune from elections, and his textualist approach to the Constitution, which in my estimation cloaks easily biased historical speculation under an impossible-to-substantiate assertion of historical objectivism. But again, these are just more of his predictable hardline bona fides -- and he is on record as having cried over the death of hardline patron saint Scalia -- so none of this is terribly surprising.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've done slightly more than a little bit of research on Gorsuch since his nomination was announced today and while he's cookie-cutter predictable as a republican SCOTUS nominee, he's still not among the intellectual and moral trainwrecks Trump's barfed up with his appalling federal nominations like Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions and -- holy fucking shit -- Steve Bannon.

So I'll try to be as impartial as possible in wherever our Gorsuch discovery process takes us in the coming days. Which I never thought I'd say about ANY Trump nomination.

Besides, Donald Trump shouldn't be making SCOTUS nominations in the last few months of his presidency anyway.

It's called a lie

No, this isn't a gratuitous political attack. No, it isn't an overgeneralized, unresearched meme being blindly and irresponsibly passed along in an uncontrollable chain of self-righteous repostings. If you've never seen it before, it's actually an endlessly ubiquitous and years-old fill-in-the-dialogue cartoon that's been used quite regularly to illustrate and/or affectionately mock everything from Super Bowl rivalries to conversations with grammar purists ... admittedly along with much uglier topics.

The dialogue in this cartoon changes from topic to topic, month to month, year to year, but the image never does. Yes, it's a violent image. Yes, that violent image accompanies messages encapsulating what can be intensely heated and violently provocative disputes on any number of volatile topics. But even the most extreme outlier knows that the violence in this image is between two fictional cartoon characters who live in a fictional cartoon universe that's perpetually embroiled in a disproportionately overwhelming climate of physical violence ... and that that universe is depicted in comic books and movies and practically every facet of popular culture readily available to consumers of practically every age. So even the most desperate argument that the cartoon violence in this image is in any way special or inflammatory or irresponsible is ridiculous and ineffectively distracting and categorically unworthy of consideration.

So. On to the message.

Sean Spicer, the Trump administration's press secretary, held his first press conference last Saturday, a little more than 24 hours after Trump assumed the presidency. The press conference lasted an alarmingly -- and uselessly -- short five minutes, where instead of taking questions from the press, he parroted Trump's ponderous whining about the "dishonest" media and disturbingly spent the majority of his five minutes defensively obsessing about the size of the crowd at the inauguration the day before. He cited as "facts" his estimations of the crowd sizes on select platforms and areas of the Mall and the number of riders on the D.C. Metro, a figure that the transit authority promptly disputed. He dismissed the photo of the half-populated Mall printed in the New York Times as a "misrepresentation" without providing any proof or citing any quantifiable, representational population numbers.

And he provided this gem: "Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted. No one had numbers, because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out."

Let me suss this out for you: He clearly stated -- with supporting evidence -- that "no one had numbers." Yet he prefaced that by declaring that those non-existent numbers were "inaccurate."

This rambling, uninformed, factually illiterate man who is demonstrably incapable of linear thought is the morally, financially and Constitutionally suspect Trump administration's most visible conduit to the entire Fourth Estate. And that is terrifying.

The next day, Kellyanne Conway, the Trump administration's senior advisor, went on record on NBC's "Meet the Press" in defense of Spicer's vague declarations, unquantifiable refutations and disputed statements about the inauguration crowd sizes. Which by this point were nothing more than a transparently calculated distraction from issues of real substance regarding the new administration.

But Conway was adamant about reframing the language -- the facts, if you will -- about this runaway narrative, and in the space of a minute she TWICE introduced to the American lexicon an instantly viral phrase:

"Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts."

And then:

"We feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there."

Put alternative facts out there. PUT ALTERNATIVE FACTS OUT THERE.

Why is this important?

These are two highly senior, high-profile Trump surrogates who, before Trump even started his first official day in office, have clouded and obfuscated and obstructed the newly imperative national political dialogue with distractions, generalities, unquantifiabilities and demonstrable lies they're instantly reframing with even more distractingly ridiculous euphemisms. And there's no telling how far they'll go from here to obstruct Trump's much-heralded transparency when it becomes politically or suspiciously expedient to do so.

Donald Trump has a thoroughly documented history of lying and -- when challenged -- lying about his lies since the dawn of his presidential campaign. The moment he was inaugurated, his two most high-profile surrogates carried on his ignominious behavior and then concocted a euphemistic lie to cover their tracks.

This cartoon is arguably puerile and oversimplistic, but it all but literally smacks down the outer shell of the Trump administration's expanding nesting dolls of lies. It quickly captures attention, succinctly makes its point and provides an effective way to spread its message quickly.

It's a message people need to know. It's a message people need to understand. It's a message that offers people a vital understanding of the way the Trump administration behaves toward -- and about -- its citizens.

It's an administration that is already hiding its questionable behavior behind desperate, intellectually insulting euphemisms.

Because all it does is lie.