An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king

Newspapers have been publishing my columns for 40 years. One column got me fired; one got me demoted to the night copy desk. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. But no.

Our politics are so sad today I can’t make a joke of it. Name one funny tragedy.

These bastards are intentionally hacking our country apart with a broadaxe, setting neighbors against one other.

That’s not funny.

Fomenting violence upon state and federal judges and employees is not funny.

Crippling education, science and the arts is not funny.

Resuscitating measles is not funny.

Spitting vituperation and venom at people and calling it humor is not funny.

Turning what was once the “greatest deliberative body in the world” — the United States Congress — into cringing, slavering cowards in a deluded, paranoid chamber of greed and fear, into slaves of a destructive and incompetent dictator, is not funny.

Nothing funny at all about any of this.

So let’s call it odd. Or counterproductive. Unless you’re trying to produce … what?

Kneecapping the Constitution?

Why have all 220 Republican members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and far too many Democrats, bent over and ponied up the Vaseline for this congenital liar with his head so far up his own ass he shouldn’t need anyone else to lick it?

That’s a lot of questions, with one answer: It’s because the members of our “greatest deliberative body in the world” are afraid of being “primaried.”

Because they’re afraid of losing their perks, as members of Congress.

Such as:

— free postage for their propaganda

— a “base salary” of $174,000 ($3,400 a week)

— six months paid leave from the office each year

— generous, cheap health insurance and health care

— armed guards

— travel expenses

— “office costs,” including, in a single month last year, $98,300 for a Steinway grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home; more than $24 million on “surf and turf dinners;” $225 million to buy furniture — nearly all of this Neronian excess in five days in September 2025, just before the federal government’s fiscal year ended: splurge on an urge, patriots.

This spending spree included a record $6.6 billion in purchases from foreign governments and foreign-owned businesses, eclipsing the previous high of $5.2 billion from September 2023. It’s like Trump turned Melania loose, with guns, at Neiman Marcus.

No, folks: Our once-great deliberative body has lost it, ordering their aides (read: underlings) to see if they can snatch a few pennies fallen under the congressional couch, from our $39 trillion national debt ($39,000,000,000,000), so Hizzoner can divert it into his cronies’ pockets, and his own.

This is a sham democracy.

I’d make a joke now if I could think of anything funny about this.

Since our commander in chief is semiliterate, and doesn’t like to read, I’ll bet you dollars to dead people that he couldn’t tell you who Percy Bysshe Shelley was, or when he lived, or anything he wrote.

But I can.

Here is a lovely sonnet which I have retitled, for purposes of this broadcast, “What goes around comes around.”

England in 1819

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn — mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field;

An army, whom liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

Religion Christless, Godless — a book sealed;

A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed —

Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.