A free one today. Because, why not? One freebie a week seems fair. But if you like it, you should consider subscribing. Deal? We do this way more than once a week ya know….

Subscribe now

These January 6 hearings are surreal. A cavalcade of Republicans are pulling up a chair and detailing a myriad of felonies committed by the former President of the United States and his lackeys. So, in a sense, these hearings are turning out to be just as partisan as Trump feared, albeit surely not in the way he intended.

It must be exhausting to be a MAGA. On one hand they are screaming that the entire committee is "illegitimate", not because it doesn't include any republicans (it does), but because it doesn't include any republicans who would allow Trump to make a pee-pee tape with them. Trump is now blaming Kevin McCarthy for all of this, despite the fact that McCarthy wouldn't pick out his morning tie without clearing it with Trump first. In other words, this is exactly what Trump wanted, and he fucked up. Again. Sensing a pattern here?

There's video. Audio. Eyewitness testimony. Videotaped testimony. These people did everything but leave shit on the oval office rug. Hell, there was an actual DOCUMENTARY of all of this being made in real time, although nobody seems to have paid attention to the lights and the cameras and the microphones all over the place, and proceeded to dance and commit their crimes like nobody was watching.

On the first day of the hearings the President's own daughter casually mentioned that he was full of shit, and on the second day the President's staunchest legal advisor was forced to deny being drunk as a monkey on election night, which has gotta be bad juju even in the alternate universe these clowns are living in. The immoral banality of these people has been on display for so long that it's no longer shocking. If you catch it just at the right time and under the proper chemical influences though, it can actually be funny as hell. Kinda like watching the movie “The Wall” stoned when you were 15.

My personal highlight so far is the stream of unindicted criminals who went crawling to Trump for pardons when it became clear that nobody was going to "find" 8 million votes no matter how many phone calls Trump made. The list is a who's who of deplorables, including rape apologist "Gym" Jordan, actual rapist Matt Gaetz, and Louis Gohmert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, currently in an Affirmed/Alydar dead heat for the dumbest person on planet earth.

Also included in this group is our very own PA Congressman Scott Perry, who made a legal oopsie and called the allegation a "soulless lie", only to have a Trump aide testify today, under threat of perjury, to the contrary. Perry is a cowardly bootlicker, a piece of garbage that sanitation workers might refuse to throw in the truck. As the Capitol was being stormed that day, in no small part due to Perry's repeated false claims of election fraud (he claimed, among other things, that election results were being tampered with "via satellite from Italy", that hackers had manipulated a voting machine that had "accessed the Internet through a smart thermostat with a net connection trail leading back to China" and that the CIA director was covering up involvement by "the Brits" to "manipulate voting machines") he ran like a scalded dog to a secure location, ushered by the same law enforcement agency that were outside being speared by confederate and Trump 2020 flags. Perry and his ilk are why my state is often described as Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, with Alabama in between. That being said, if he doesn’t end up in jail he’ll probably get re-elected easy. Because Pennsylvania.

And on top of all this fun the SCOTUS, in the wake of Uvalde, decides to make it even easier for it to happen again by ensuring that everybody on the NYC subway is gonna be armed going forward, the kind of gift the NRA didn't think they were in line to receive anymore. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of three justices on Team Normal, has been issuing dire warnings about the 6 gun loving religious zealots to the right of her, but like a good liberal is quick to point out that Justice Thomas, other than being a legal shithead, is a nice guy who knows the names of all the plebes in the building. So we've got that going for us. Which is nice.

Oh, and the fact that Justice Thomas is married to the crazy lady who was at the January 6 rally and pressed Arizona officials to overturn Biden's win in that state rally should not really concern you...because if Sotomayor did the same thing for a Democratic candidate Tucker Carlson would never even mention it. A real nothingburger, as the kids say these days.

Enjoy the fun while it lasts boys and girls! Because it never does.

In a bit..

--tf

Scranton Time - bits and pieces from Tom Flannery

"A cavalcade of Republicans..."