"That Is So True."

Is Overcomber Don aware how it looks when he extemporizes with the ejaculation "That is so true" in the middle of his prepared speeches?

"These words I am saying, I actually think this part is true. Most of what I say I don't know or care whether it is true or not. These words are not from me they are from some hack in my staff. But he wrote a true thing when he said that the Turkish nation fights with great bravery."

When the Turkish President talks in his native language, the empty crinkly smirk on Trump's face.

Then the boredom, tapping his fingers impatiently on the lectern.

Now Trump's impersonation of his excellent son, BARRON.

Now Trump staring in boredom at the ceiling in the corner of the Roosevelt Room.

Trump looking around and nodding randomly –– as if he speaks Turkish and thinks, "That is so true."

Now a leer. Now a broad grin and a nod to somebody in the audience. Now bored and waving his head from side to side. "Wonder what Barron's doing now."

                                      "I'd better nod again now."

We were at CarMax in Burbank yesterday in the waiting room and CNN was on. Trump said something about the justice services representing a line "between civilization and chaos" and I laughed out loud. Then I gulped, noting that there were other people in the waiting room, unknown quantities to me, possible "bad actors," and I tempered my laughter. I was watching particularly closely the overweight man in the khaki ballcap –– a classic Trump voter look.

Weirdly, in the next line Trump said something about a policeman killed in the line of duty. I made sure that I had a face of appropriate gravity and moral rectitude at this tragic news factoid, but then Khaki Ballcap, the Trump voter in the room, laughed hysterically. I was perplexed. Sean Spicer came on and was saying that there was no need for a special investigator into the Russian collusion controversy. Khaki Ballcap started shouting at the TV his support for this remark and I became uncomfortable. Then we were called through into the main room and that was that.

Apparently the CarMax in Burbank is the largest in the entire country!

What's On Russian TV?"

"General" Flynn it was revealed had appeared on Russian TV with Putin. The state-sponsored morning show.

This was seen as shocking and dodgy. He was paid for it, didn't declare this to his superiors.

This was the political side of it. My thoughts went elsewhere. Russian TV must be strange. Imagine the Russian people sitting on their uncomfortable dun-coloured couches dully flipping, no unable to flip channels because there is only one channel on TV, the Putin channel.

[In my patented bad Russian accent:] "Oh cool! Look, Vlodvadina! Come quickly! There's an American general on TV!!"

Russian TV sounds almost as odd as French TV.

"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?"

"Bobby Charlton Was On Anderson Cooper."

Drumpk went off on a tear, all red-faced and in a mega-confused tizzy, calling Kim Jong Un "a tow-headed tearaway with a whole lot of spunk," then praising Andrew Jackson for his expert handling of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Everyone was outraged on CNN and the next day it was like they had forgotten all about it and were talking about new Drump doings. On the stroke of midnight the slate is all wiped clean.

That's how OVERCOMBER works –– he piles on the infamies so thick & fast you can't keep track of them all and you throw your hands up and give up and say fuck it you know what I'm going to vote for him and then commit suicide.

I was in Goodwill on Hollywood Boulevard and somebody had got rid of their Nixon ana collection. I bought three volumes of a vintage magazine just ennumerating Nixon's disgraces, all listed and illustrated. Somebody should do this with the Overcomber Don John.

MATTERS AT HAND

1. Drumpk at the lectern when somebody else is talking is a classic thing –– he just don't know where to look. His son BARREN has better self-control and focus than the father. It is well said that verily the egg don't fall far from the mothership.

2. Mike "Pfennig" Pence was saying that Drumpk is "literally each and every day frankly fighting the gale force wind of the establishment here in Washington." Firstly, why the "literally" and "frankly". Unnecessary fluff to cover up a hollow vapid core: THE BRAIN OF PENCE. But everybody is saying "frankly" this season, as I noted before so so what. Secondly, Trump is the FUCKING PRESIDENT. If he ain't the "Establishment" pray who is? Do "John" Trump and "Couldn't Give A" Pfennig still like to pretend they're alternatives, punk radicals playing in a noise band on the outskirts of town? G.G. Allin and Bloody F. Mess?

"The Oval Office."

3. Speaking of recent cliches "on the Hill," here are some that have really been doing the rounds:

"There is no there there." (Al Franken said to Big Jim Comey yesterday that "There is a there there.")

"Strongmen" –– Putin, the Filipino nutter and Kim Jong Un are all apparently "strongmen" and this is a technical term in frequent usage. Since when? I found it in a New York Times article and then everybody on CNN wanted to say it.
"Trump likes strongmen."
"Yes, but his preference is for clowns."

"Disrupt" –– when I wrote my PhD everybody loved to speak of "subversion" and "transgression" and now they vaunt "disruption" but really it's all the same fucking thing, innit? Ivanka talks about "disrupting" things in her new book. Time to stop disrupting right now methinks. What's the opposite of disrupting? Like Pete Seeger says, "ORGANIZE!"

4. I was watching the CNN pundits. They come and they go in rapid rotation. It's dizzying. They do the circuits. Jeffrey Lord must get home to his centenarian mother in the Chesapeake Bay so he doesn't do Don Lemon. But I was shocked and stunned when I saw SIR BOBBY CHARLTON the Manchester United and England veteran serving as a pundit on Anderson Cooper.

It was shocking because I had no idea Bobby Charlton was an expert on Trump targeting libel laws. 

"Is It Bush?"

I saw this in a State Parks shop in Joshua Tree and I had to ask:

     Is it Bush?

     I could be off on this one. I openly concede it. 

     I also used to think that Bush looked like Ahmadinejad –– and that both looked like my Polish landlord in Brooklyn.