JD Vance Stepped On The Pope's Oxygen Tube

Excepting that headline, 5 serious thoughts from a satirist

1. Pope Francis dying the day after meeting JD Vance is like the most JD Vance thing that could have happened.

Why is JD Vance so weird? Seriously, comment on this any theories or character studies you have! I think the cultural reaction to JD Vance has been very funny:

Maybe Democrats should be like Republicans and try out hyper-partisan politics for a change, and just have everyone start accusing JD Vance, with no evidence, of killing the Pope. All the news networks can report that “people are talking” about it like Trump constantly does.

People are wondering, was JD Vance so creepy that Pope Francis lost the will to live? Did klutzy JD Vance decide to touch some medical equipment, and accidentally turn some of it off, and make the Pope’s vital functions plummet? You heard it here first, everyone: people are saying JD Vance was stepping on the Pope’s oxygen tube for their entire chat!

2. It’s a good thing the Pope election isn’t in America.

Despite the wild politics of Italy, the election of a new Pope has a better chance of being a stable, responsible election on the Apennine peninsula. I don’t think American society and culture could handle electing a new Pope.

We would utterly bastardize it, and cleave Catholicism into two with our deranged political chasm by televising it, and gambling on it online, and stretching out the election for as long as possible with marathons of campaigning and agonizingly slow caucus mini-elections first, and airing nonstop tv commercials with attack ads smearing the leading cardinals, and bombarding everyone with endless email harassment full of fear mongering for money.

But maybe it’s inevitable for the Vatican that the Pope election will eventually follow our example, and become more of a sports-like competition keeping viewers on the edge of their seat. At some point it will have to be if it wants to stay relevant in our wildly hedonistic attention melees. Religious participation is not exactly trending upward in our modern, digital society.

The Papacy is such a human affair full of our usual political rivalries and intrigue. I’m not Catholic, but the position and authority of the Pope being considered infallible sure seems to contradict the behavior and words of a bunch of conservative bishops around the world who don’t like Pope Francis’s more moderate, liberal views of Christian ethics, and have let us know about it.

As an institution the Papacy is extremely archaic. It’s history is very colorful full of Popes who were corrupt and probably sociopathic fuckboys, and the Catholic Church definitely lost the thread on having effective HR policies on sexual assault and pedophilia. So it’s probably not good I’m a little excited to watch how the election of the new Pope plays out, and what new person now the whole world will regularly hear about.

3. Turning to Evangelicals…

I saw an interesting post about the idea of protesting churches the way churches protest Planned Parenthoods to draw attention to their seeming lack of moral conviction in not speaking out against the religious (as well as Constitutional) violations the Trump Administration is vigorously perpetrating against immigrants illegal and legal alike.

Any why stop their? Why not vocally critique their silence on guns being the leading cause of dead children and teens? And their culture war discrimination against people who don’t live and pursue happiness the same way they do? And their very unJesusy insistence that the government collect much less money from the mega rich to help the less fortunate in our society with healthcare, welfare, retirement security for the elderly, food for hungry children in school… and I could go on for a long list of things that sui generis goodness and charity personified Jesus would no doubt approve of.

Protesting conservative Evangelical churches, and demanding they actually be the kind conscientious, loving people they never tire of telling us they are would be well deserved.

And why not throw in a few protest signs about the congregations eating shrimp? If conservative Evangelicals constantly use Leviticus to attack the gay community, we ought to be just as annoying back about all the other violations of random, contemporarily irrelevant Leviticus lines they commit every day.

4. Pete Hegseth’s Signalgate scandal gets worse as he’s found to have texted secret intel to his wife and lawyer.

Well, turns out we critics of Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense were right right when we said during his confirmation hearings he was unqualified, not mature enough, and not competent enough to lead such a giant and critical bureaucracy.

Pete Hegseth was a weekend Fox News host. He wasn’t getting any operational or bureaucratic experience while sitting through his daily makeup routine and drinking on the job. It’s a joke he’s the Secretary of Defense! I think you can imagine that Pete Hegseth’s weekend show supports Fox News’s claim in court every time it gets sued for blatantly lying and misleading people that the network should be viewed as entertainment and not real, serious news.

Trump hired him because he likes the way Hegseth looks on TV, appreciates Hegseth’s enthusiasm for fascist styled governance, and likely felt some kinship that Hegseth also has been accused of being a sexual predator. And Senate Republicans (excepting Murkowski, Collins, and McConnell) let Trump hire an amateur. A real DUI hire if I’ve ever seen one.

I’ll die on the hill that the biggest benefactors of political correctness in America the last two decades has been Congressional Republicans who don’t get yelled at enough in public that their lazy political opportunism, moral cowardice, and legislative spinelessness is ruining America. Pete Hegseth can’t get literally basic levels of intel security right, but Republicans rubber stamped him into a job overseeing the US military’s globally massive budget and its millions of staffers, soldiers, and contractors.

We’re find out what could go wrong.

5. Make El Salvador Great Again

Trump’s claim he doesn’t have the authority to get back wrongly deported and detained US residents from El Salvador is the antithesis of “America First.”

El Salvadoran President Bukele’s accompanying claim that he can’t “smuggle” Kilmar Abrego Garcia into the US is just pedantic trolling. As if Bukele wouldn’t do it if Trump asked him… you know — if Trump wanted to follow the Constitution’s mandate for due process.

What is patriotic about this posturing? El Salvador is a tiny country of 6 million people, and its GDP is a measly $34 billion (there are 24 individuals in the US who have more money than ALL of El Salvador). It’s disrespectful to every American and a disgrace on the Office of the Presidency for Trump to allow El Salvador to ignore and disregard the rulings of our Supreme Court. A real patriotic president would want El Salvador to be afraid of flouting US law.

This is the absurdity of Trump’s foreign policy dismantling the US hegemony and rules-based order we created that disproportionately benefits us. We’re telling Canada and our blood brother European allies to go fuck themselves in exchange for becoming best buddies with Russia and El Salvador. To use Trump’s vernacular, it’s the worst deal in history.

Reading suggestion:

Inside the Mind of an ICE Agent by Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark. This article is paywalled halfway through, but the free portion gets you in the shoes of these ICE agents who might right now be turning into America’s Schutzstaffel. 🥃

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