A Note from Jill Biden

Dear America

Please excuse Joey from the election today. He wanted to come, he really did, but he became grossly incompetent and strange overnight. We had no warning. He didn’t even have a chance to tell you in person so he asked me to write this note. That’s so sad.

Joey sends his best wishes to whoever (is it whomever?) decides to run for… 

(“What was it, Jill? Class president? Well, that’s no big deal. There’s always someone else, usually some babe or jock. I was never a jock, but let me tell you, me and Corn Pop, he was a bad dude… “)

(“I know dear, I know. Calm down. Let me get your special juice.”)

But back to this note.

Bibi Whatshisname is supposed to come by this week. He’s from somewhere, maybe Greece or Argentina. Joey wonders why. Can someone please explain it to him in small words and tell him what he’s supposed to say? And then tell me? Understanding things makes Joey very tired. Sometimes he has to call a lid before lunchtime. That’s sad, too, because Joey loves his lunches.

Joey misses his friends, although no one stops by anymore. Where are all those MSNBC people and their cameras? They always say the nicest things about Joey and they make him feel good and important. Sometimes they even leave money.

Joey loves it when people salute him. Do you suppose you could get a bunch of people to come over and just salute? Saluters, maybe? And maybe some applauders, too? Yes, I suppose a sound track might do. He really wouldn’t know the difference. Ask Spielberg. But I don’t think you can do that with saluters. Well, maybe with Disney but I don’t think there’s enough time today.

Where is that Kamala person these days? 

Joey misses his German Shepherds, too, the ones he had to send to the American Home for Mad Dogs. Could someone from the Secret Service bring some of them by for a play visit one of these days? It would really cheer Joey up to see them run.

Well, gotta go. They’re standing Joey up for photos now and he just smiled. I have to think of smart things to say.

“All the way in 2020!”

Jill Biden (Joey’s wife)

 

Existential Threatism

    

    The informed idiots who have preached (and I use that word advisedly) Trump's existential threatism have reaped the hell they have sown. Politicians, labor leaders, Silicon Valley tyrants, preachers, community organizers, you name it. Trump survived this time. One family was destroyed and we're waiting on the results of two others. They, and we, are cautiously hopeful.

    Those same informed idiots motivated some deluded boy to do what they would not or could not do, take matters is his own hands and change the course of America. God forbid that there should be a free and fair election where they might lose. This is what they secretly hoped for in their political wet dreams, Trump gone and their hands ostensibly clean. But their hands aren't clean, are they?

    We've heard, ad infinitum, "Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy." Even, and especially, from the president's own mouth. It is a talking point that seems to need no substantiation. If he says it, who would dare challenge it? Like Nixon, if the president did it, ipso facto, it must be legal. In this case, ipso facto, it must be true. But, as with Nixon, it's not true.

    Merriam-Webster tells us that adding -ism to a noun defines an act, practice or process. Good enough for me. Thus, existential threatism. If you preach existential threatism enough times to enough people, especially in schools where no one is strong enough or knows enough to say otherwise, someone will be foolish enough to act on that threat. That's what we do when we're faced with a threat. That's what fight or flight is all about.

    Now a twenty-year-old kid, two years from his high school graduation, has attempted a major political assassination. Failed, and most of America thanks God for that, but still murdered another man and critically injured two more. He was twenty, for God's sake, yet he had heard enough about the Bad Orange Man to make him want to kill him and damn the collateral damages.

    Murdered for what? Some kid's provoked imagination gone haywire? Who provoked him? Teachers? Hmmm. Church? Maybe, but unlikely unless you subscribe to Pastor Jeremiah Wright's doctrine of "The chickens have come home to roost." Scouting? Sports? Even less likely. Gangs? We know so far that he acted alone. Was he deranged or drugged? No history of that to date.

    Do you suppose he was provoked by the non-stop political vilification of Donald Trump? Yes, I think we're onto something now. Donald Trump's Existential Threatism.

    Shades of Gavrilo Princip and Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and the latter's threat to Serbian independence and Princip's unforeseen consequence of WWI. Damn the chaos. The shooter wanted to make a point in both cases and did his best. 

This time the leader survived. Will we?