Political Football: Jacksonville Jaguars vs. Houston Texans

Houston update: This is the closest NFL city to the Mexican border where the American republic will apparently die. Karma’s a bitch, huh? We came along and stole a good deal of Mexico for ourselves, and now we’re imploding over it. As this is written, the government is about to be shut down because the President of the United States’ main sales pitch to his supporters was that he would solve a 21st-century problem—folks increasingly moving toward a better life—with a 14th-century solution: a big wall, presumably because his supporters were intimidated by the technological wonder that is a moat. If you remember, the hateful twerps who elected this bag of rocks—with 3 million fewer votes—really liked it when he said he would make Mexico pay for the wall. They ate that shit up; chanted it, put it on bumper stickers and signs, announced it to whoever would listen, right up until their hero announced by Mexico he meant us and that we were now stuck for the $5 billion bill for his little bit of the Dark Ages. They thought this was a great idea, you know, him doing the exact opposite thing he said he would do. They loved it so much that when Congress refused to pay, these beauties contributed to a Go Fund Me effort, raising $13 million for a wall in a couple of days. That may sound impressive until you realize that at that rate, it will take 35 years for them to reach the $5 billion necessary to build the wall. Also, there is a competing Go Fund Me effort to raise money to buy ladders for people to scale the wall. America!

Jacksonville update: A few days ago, someone related to me a horribly comic news story that involved criminal behavior, death, nakedness and drugs, and when they said all the above did not take place in Florida, I not only refused to believe it, but I also became quite angry, having been trained to believe that when anything really fucked-up happens, it could only happen in America’s penal colony.

Root for: Houston. So, around the same time that the government was to shut down, Trump’s lawyer was sentenced to serious prison time, his former chief of staff stood before a judge for his own sentencing, his current defense secretary quit because he just couldn’t take it anymore, and his “foundation” shuttered because it was a sham. To be fair, this kind of shit isn’t unprecedented in an administration; it happened with Nixon. Thing of it is, with Nixon, it happened during the Watergate era, a period of years. What I described happened last week.

Steve Lowery