"Frankly, Literally."

President Mutt: "I am not a crook."

I was reading Rollins's column in LA Weekly. Henry calls Overcomber Don "Comrade Trump" –– keeps plugging away at that name just like I keep calling him Overcomber Don. I think my name is better. Rollins reckons Overcomber's on the ropes. Dunno if it's so. Wish it were, dunno if it is. Every night CNN seems like they have THE PRES checkmated in their pincer move, and next day it's like all the infamies and blatant mendacities have been quietly reset and forgiven by the heavenly host. The Press Secretaries shriek at the journalists with green and black bile, White House and Fox News tells us it's all gravy for the coalminers, everything's great. Dunno who to blame –– the Republicans "up on Capitol Hill" or the red state meth-lab meatheads down to Old Kaintuck. I think I'll blame them all.

Anyway Rollins can rant and wheeze "like an asthmatic county fair town crier" (–– Michael Azzerad) about Trump, but I remember before the election pretty well he was of the crowd that said "I shan't vote. Clinton or Trump it's all the same, bruh." Morrissey was another although thank gosh he don't have a vote. I guess they had never watched The Celebrity Fucking Apprentice.

There is an awful epidemic in Washington that I have drawn attention to in a previous missive, possibly one of those missives that rated two hits from the "readership" so I'll repeat it –– since it is repeated daily, and with shocking frequency.

Everybody is saying "frankly" in their sentences now. It has started. Linguists, note my early remarks on the subject. Years ago I pointed out that everybody had begun to say "Look" to preface anything they wanted to say, after Obama did it. That still happens. Now "frankly" is the new "literally". Both words are strictly redundant in this context. We expect our politicians to speak "frankly" (or rather –– we did) just as we expect people to speak "literally" unless they actually say "figuratively speaking".  It's another dumb thing people to do to mark time while they gather their jumbled thoughts.

It's like they said "I am not lying when I say this one." But when people say that, of course, they are probably lying.

How can you tell when the President is lying?
It's easy –– his lips move.

* * * * * * * * * *

Jeffrey Toobin outdid Rollins the other night in the "hoarse bellringer from Hell" stakes. He was speaking directly into the camera projecting his thoughts into the minds of the viewers with great enthusiasm. I almost expected him to put on a mystical turban with a ruby in its centre and acquire a greenish glow. "PRESIDENT'S A FRAUD. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET. " Anyway in the midst of one of his (righteous, correct) tirades Erin Burnett started coughing and wheezing and she just couldn't stop. It was funny, she couldn't speak for about two minutes without coughing. It was like the situation, the President's firing of Big Jim Comey, had simply drained her lungs and their intricate alveoli.

Toobin was in the CNN studio with her, across the desk from her, while she was coughing. Then the hour finished and the show shifted to Anderson Cooper 360, and as is the fashion Anderson used some of the same pundits as Erin had had on. Like when Presidents keep on administrators from a previous presidency. Like say Trump did with Big Jim –– until he didn't.

Some of these pundits do twenty hour stretches. They are passed roughly from one compere to the next like cheap hookers at a rugby club dinner. Jeffrey Lord can go it for ever, saying the oddest things in defence of OV

ERCOMBER, but he must stop at some point and take the three hour limo trip from New York back to his centenarian mother in Maryland before Don Lemon's show begins. "Too late for mother," says Jeffrey.

Anyway, Anderson Cooper was talking to his various guests on sundry screens, and when he got to Jeffrey Toobin, that good worthy man (who was in another CNN studio and so on a remote feed) began a revised "THIS IS NOT NORMAL" address to the nation. He was like Walt Whitman, tinkering with Leaves of Grass over decades and through successive prints, refining it each time. But this time Toobin was interrupted all the while by the sound of coughing. He was obviously still sitting at Erin Burnett's desk in another CNN studio, and Erin Burnett was obviously still there hacking up a storm. I thought, "Why don't they take off her microphone now and give her a lozenge?"