(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog Favourite Living Canadian)

ATLANTA—Enemy Of The People here.

I look at the phrase in print the way you'd look at a lizard in your bathtub and, probably, the lizard looks back at you. Neither one of you expects the other one to be there. Nothing in your experience, and certainly nothing in the lizard's, prepares you, one for the other. So I call up this phrase on the electric computer machine and study it for the vast amount of pretension that is contained in every syllable. It should be carved in marble, but it also should be carved out of cream cheese.

"The deconstruction of the administrative state."

When White House senior political strategist Steve Bannon, the last heir to House Harkonnen, dropped this little bomblet on the adoring throngs at CPAC, it occasioned an outburst of punditry that probably startled astronomers on Alpha Centauri. It was enough to bring Jacques Derrida back from the dead. If you are the superhero of your own comic book, as Bannon apparently is, "the deconstruction of the administrative state" is the way you say, "Hey, gonna fck stuff up just because we can." Yeah, like this is a new idea in Republican politics.

Doesn't anyone remember James Watt, whom Ronald Reagan hired to deconstruct the Department of the Interior's administrative state? Or Anne Gorsuch, mother of Judge Neil, who was hired to do the same to the EPA. Putting proven vandals at the head of agencies you want to vandalize has a long and proud history among GOP presidents. Now, I will grant you that the current administration has taken this to a considerable…coughBetsyDeVoscough…extreme, but it's nothing new and certainly nothing revolutionary. Steve Bannon is the guy at the end of the bar transferred to the height of political power. But he's no Lenin. He's more like a lonely guy waiting at the stage door for Lenin's autograph.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Show Your…" (Egg Yolk Jubilee): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives:Here's a kid wearing Frank Nitti's old hat reciting all 48 of the states in one breath. And, also: "If you think that's good, you oughta hear what my mother can say to my father in one breath." Yoicks. This reminded me of nothing more than this classic civics lesson. History is so cool.

There is no major journalist most obviously incapable of handling the sui generis nature of the current administration than is my man Chuck Todd. Every day, he asserts that the problem with the country is that both parties are being pulled to their extremes. He's stuck in an old paradigm that no longer is valid. And you can see him struggling with it every time the president* goes sailing into the izonkosphere again.

I'm not as outraged as I probably should be by the fact that Sean Spicer shut some big time media out of his gaggle today. If I swung the clout of any of those operations, I would be saying to myself, "OK, Sparky. You want a war? You've got a war." The whole White House press corps is a strange critter anyway. I know a lot of really good reporters who despise the beat. In Tim Crouse's classic The Boys On The Bus, the late Russell Baker calls it a "strange, airless" existence. I can't help but think everyone in the business would be better off if people treated the WH press room merely as some place to get out of the August heat.

I have very little to say about the president*'s speech to CPAC on Friday morning until I see the PET scans of his brain. I'd hate to be unfair in my evaluation without knowing all the facts. I watched it with a bunch of Democrats who expressed serious concern that it is not possible to run against a guy so utterly unmoored from visible reality. They should probably figure that out pretty quickly.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Guardian?

It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

It seems that dinosaur embryos spend a long time in the egg, in fact a very long time. The two dinosaur species assessed took between three and six months to develop and hatch, comparable to the largest reptiles and far longer than birds (which range from 11 to 85 days in the eggs). Comparing like-for-like based on the sizes of the eggs, dinosaurs took about four times longer to develop than do similarly sized birds, a huge difference. That has some major implications for dinosaur behaviour and ecology. We know adult dinosaurs often cared for their hatchlings, but would parents guard nests for months at a time beforehand? Various dinosaurs are thought to migrate large distances each year to forage in new areas but could they do this if their eggs needed attention for so long? Critically the authors suggest this might have implications for theextinction of the non-avian dinosaurs(and some of the early birds) at the end of the Cretaceous. With long development times in the nest, dinosaurs would be vulnerable to the kinds of major climate change associated with the mass extinction event.

You mean climate problems can lead to species extinction? Unpossible! We are still fortunate that dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

I'll be back over the weekend in my capacity as Enemy Of The People to report on whoever it is that the Democratic Party settles on as a chairman. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline or I'm sending Steve Bannon to your local to scare all the regulars.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page.

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

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io