31 May—The big news today is that yesterday in Palm Springs, Flake State, some 1,037 schmucks each paid 75 dollars to register and receive a white dress, a platinum-blonde wig, and other relevant tchotchkes to celebrate Marilyn Monroe’s centennial, which is actually tomorrow. (For the benefit of Trumpistas, Marilyn Monroe was born 1 June 1926, a centennial is a hundredth birthday, yesterday is the day before today, tomorrow is the day after today, Flake State is California, and you wouldn’t understand a definition of tchotchkes. And, of course, Connecticut is Flake State East.)

The purpose of the Palm Springs Marilyn centennial celebration was actually to set a new Guinness world record. And that it did, easily eclipsing the puny Australian 254-strong event in 2020. You’ve got to wonder, what hath Guinness wrought?

It’s not clear whether the Marilyn-costume components, including the tchotchkes, were kept by the record-setting schmucks or returned to the promoter to be used in the next Guinness record-breaking farce.

Moving from farce to travesty, then, last week Donald Trump boasted, “Netanyahu will do whatever I want him to do.” Is that Trump or is that Trump? And the bellicose pacifist-in-chief may—just may—not be talking through his MAGA-moron hat. Because Bibi’s office didn’t provide a formal rebuttal and Israel’s self-protecting warlord-in-chief tactfully acknowledged that Israel “has no maneuver to influence the president right now.” In competitive diplomatic pussyfooting, that’s a sure winner. But consider the implication of “maneuver” as opposed to, say, “intention.”

The fact is that Netanyahu will do whatever it takes to prolong hostilities with whomever—preferably the despicable likes of Hamas and Hezbollah, of course, but any Arab or Muslim will do—to delay his pretty certain conviction for corruption. Because Israel’s supreme court isn’t as accommodating to a corrupt president as America’s.

While on the subject of corruption, just the other day Texas Representative James Talarico, who’s the Democrat running against Republican and Trump’s latest BFF Ken Paxton for the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Trump’s latest victim John Cornyn, called Paxton “the most corrupt politician in America.”

Without question, indubitably, and most certainly, Paxton is demonstrably, profoundly, disgracefully, prominently, and inveterately corrupt. Everybody knows it. And not only should he not be Texas’s attorney general, but he should be behind bars. Or, better yet, on a chain gang. (Doubtless one of Paxton’s attractions for Trump.) But even given political rhetoric and the not entirely inaccurate aphorism that all politics is local, does Talarico really and truly believe that Ken Paxton is more corrupt than Donald Trump?