There are not many things concerning this administration* about which I could not care less. The venality is so vast, and the contempt for democratic norms so general, that it's not easy to keep up. We try, though. But I absolutely decline to give a rat's hindquarters for this damnable puppet show involving El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and the Conways.

The state of play seems to be that Kellyanne Conway continues her implacable lying on behalf of the administration*, while hubby George calls the president* insane on the electric Twitter machine and the president* himself pretends he's never heard of either of them, and then makes up a boring story about how Pops Conway wanted a job, but he didn't give him one, and so much winning, right? He then went on the rave like a subway lunatic about Robert Mueller.

Lord deliver us from this upholstered kindergarten.

Mostly, though, as much as I wish the 2016 presidential election had not happened in my personal timeline, my disgust with the family Conway goes back to the days when they were both central to the elvish ratfcking that sabotaged the Clinton presidency. (That George has roots in Central Massachusetts aggravates me even further.) The Washington Post provided a good summary of Conway's dirty work a while back.

His unpaid work — research, legal briefs and organizing moot courts for the team to practice their arguments — had him working alongside fellow GOP lawyers Ann Coulter, the future arch-conservative pundit, and Jerome Marcus, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s State Department. Coulter offered a nickname for their clique of off-the-books workers: “the Elves.” And they had a mischievous side. When it appeared as though Bill Clinton and Jones might settle out of court, Conway and Coulter were determined to prevent that. “It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the president,” she later told the journalist Michael Isikoff, as reported in his book “ .”

So to keep the story alive, they started leaking.

George Conway attends the 139th Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House April 17, 2017. Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

“The distinguishing physical characteristic that Paula Jones says she believes she saw is that Clinton’s penis is curved when erect,” George wrote in an email to Matt Drudge, according to “The Hunting of the President,” by Gene Lyons and Joe Conason. “If she is correct, then Clinton has a urological condition called Peyronie’s disease.” Several critics argue this was a violation of the gag order, though Conway denies it, noting that he was not technically the attorney on the case nor privy to protected details. It was also never corroborated. But according to Coulter, that was never the point. It would “humiliate the president,” Coulter told Isikoff — and keep him from settling, she reasoned. George says now he has no recollection of sending emails to Drudge and denies he was “out to get” the president.

And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

Meanwhile, Kellyanne—nee Fitzpatrick—was one of several personalities who suddenly popped up all over the nascent cable-news universe spinning all kinds of slanders that originated with the work done by her future squeeze and the rest of the elves. This was a marriage made several degrees lower than heaven, a mating ritual of the ratfcking species. Now, we have three people—the two Conways and the president*—jawing at each other, and none of them ever has drawn a breath of air that did anything but damage the republic and make its politics fouler and more ignoble. The three of them deserve each other, and the rest of us don't deserve any of them.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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