“I wanna thank you for meeting with me in this super-secret high-level meeting in the White House (and broadcast on Truth Social), okay. I brought you here… I am really good at bringing people and stuff together, by the way… I brought you here so we could make the Marx Brothers great again, okay? We are going to make a new Marx Brothers movie. It’s going to be great… bigly tremendous.”
“Wotta you sayin’, boss? The Marx Brothers is dead. How you gonna make a movie with dead guys? You gonna dig ’em all up and do a Frankenstein number on ’em, or what?”
“No, no… We will play the roles ourselves. I’ll be Groucho, you know… the really smart one… the one with an amazing mind. I really am very smart, you know. Everyone says so.”
“And who am I gonna play?”
“Steve Miller, you get to be Chico. You know, the fast-talking Wop guy. You think of the greatest plans. They are really great, you know.”
“Okay, boss, I got one already.”
“Really? What is it?”
“I think we gotta do an executive order.”
“Executive order? What’s that?”
“It’s a order you give like Obama did, you know? You take a pen and phone and say something in writing that everybody’s gotta do, and then, because it’s an executive order and you signed your name to it, you gotta execute somebody.”
“Ooh! I like the sound of that. We’ll call the movie Horsefeather Soup. It’ll be tremendous. The most tremendous thing people have ever seen.”
“Yeah, and the executive order will say we are banning Mexicans that come from places like Venezuela, Colombia, and Somalia. That kind of Mexican has to be sent back to where they came from. You know, just the ones where they might want to vote for Democrats. And we can say we are doing extreme vetting so we are keeping America safe from terrorists. And WOKE Mexicans.”
“Ooh! Yeah! Extreme vetting rhymes with bed-wetting. Tremendous. But what if people say I’m being racist again?”
“We say we intend to protect Americans from those really bad people you keep talking about, you know, the ones that eat the cats and dogs? We’ll claim that nobody who’s innocent will get hurt. And the good thing is, the immigration people will just know that anybody who is a Mexican is a bad person. No matter where they’re from. We’ll get everybody that way.”
“Good one, Steve, I mean… Chico.”
“Wait a minute, boss, who do I get to be in this movie?”
“Hogsweat, you get to be Harpo, okay?”
“My name is Hegseth, boss.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, Heegsop.”
“HEGSETH!”
“Okay, Harpo doesn’t talk, so shut up, Hogsbreath! Here, take this bicycle horn and, when you go on George Stefenopolis’s show and he doesn’t let you talk either, just honk it at him. It will be really great.”
“And me, boss?”
“Oh, JD, I almost forgot about you. What’s the name of that other brother? Dumbo? You get to be that one.”
“Hey boss, we gotta get goin’ on this executive order crap. Somebody needs to get executed in the worst way.”
“Oh, yeah! The worst way to execute is the best way. I feel the need to tweet a truth about it. This new Marx Brothers’ movie will be the best, just the best. It will be so bestest that America will get tired of bestiness.”
Catch a Falling Star 
Who Do You Listen To?
There was a time when you could turn on the TV news and listen to what you were fairly confident was actually news. Walter Cronkite on CBS always seemed to really “Tell it like it is.” He never seemed to put a spin on anything. No one doubted anything he said when he reported space missions from NASA or the assassination of JFK. You never had to wonder, “What is Cronkite’s real agenda?” His agenda was always to tell me the news of the day.
The question of politics and ideas was always one of, “Which flavor tastes best in my own personal opinion?” Because I was weirdly and excessively smart as a kid, I often listened to some of the smartest people accessible to a black-and-white RCA television set.
William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal were both identifiably smarter than me. I loved to listen to them argue. They were equally matched. They respected each other’s intellect, but they hated each other with a passion. Buckley was a Fascist-leaning conservative ball of hatred with a giant ego. Vidal was a self-contradictory Commie-pinko bastard child of liberal chaos with an equally giant ego. I never agreed with either of them on anything, but their debates taught me so much about life and politics that I became a dyed-in-the-wool moderate because of them. They were the key evidence backing up the theory that you needed two sides in the political argument to hammer out good ideas of solid worth. And, though I didn’t trust either side of the argument fully, I always trusted that both were basing their ideas on facts.
Then along came Richard Nixon and the faith-shaking lies of Watergate. The media began to be cast as the villain as they continued to show the violence and horrors of Vietnam on TV and tell us about campus unrest and the terrible outcomes of things like the Kent State Massacre. The President suggested routinely that the media was not using facts as much as it was using opinions to turn people away from the Nixon administration’s answer to the problems of life in the USA. I tried to continue believing in the Republican president right up until he resigned and flew away in that helicopter with his metaphorical tail between his legs (I am trying to suggest he was a cowardly dog, not that I want to make a lewd joke about poor Dick Nixon… or is that Little Dick Nixon, the man who let me down?)
And then along comes Ronald Reagan, the man acting as a “Great President” because he was a veteran actor and knew how to play the part. And with him came Fox News.
Roger Ailes, a former adviser to Nixon, got together with media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a man who would commit any crime necessary to sell more newspapers, and created a news channel that would pump out conservative-leaning propaganda that would leave Joseph Goebbels envious. I make it a rule to only listen to them and their views on anything when I feel the need to get one-foot-hopping, fire-spitting mad about something. So, since, I am a relatively happy person in spite of a long, hard life, you can understand why I almost never watch Fox News. They are truly skilled at making me mad and unhappy. And I suspect they do the same for everyone. They deal in outrage more than well-thought-out ideas.
News media came under a cloud that obscured the border between facts and partisan opinions. And conservatives seemed to have a monopoly on the shouty-pouty angry news. So, I began to wonder where to turn for a well-reasoned and possibly more liberal discussion of what was politically and ethically real. I found it in the most surprising of places.
I turned to the “Excuse me, this is the news” crews on Comedy Central where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were busy remaking news reporting as a form of comedy entertainment. It is hard work to take real news and turn it into go-for-the-chuckles statements of fact that make you go, “Hmm, that’s right, isn’t it?” Stewart and Colbert consistently examine how other news organizations hurl, vomit forth, and spin the news, and by so doing, they help you examine the sources, get at the truth, and find the dissonance in the songs everyone else is singing. And these are very smart men. As I said, the intellectual work they do is very difficult, harder than merely telling it like it is. I know because I have tried to do the same myself. And is it really “fake news”? It seems to me like it is carefully filtered news, with the poisons of propaganda either surgically removed, or neutralized with antidotes of reason and understanding.
So, Mickey listens to comedians to get his news. Is that where you expected this article to end up? If not, where do you get your news?
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