Make it stop. Just ... make it stop. Fox News (trigger warning: Steve Doocy) has discovered the newest mini-scandal to come out of the Obama White House, and it is ... using paper clips:

Paper clips. Or binder clips, or whatever: that's what we're going with. All the unemployment problems are solved; all the banks, solvent; all the deficits are undeficited; the one problem America continues to face is shockingly inappropriate paper consolidation technology.

Now, I am intrigued by this notion that the president of the United States must never be tainted by the nearby presence of a mere paper clip. I am further intrigued by the next obvious question, which is whether staples are better or worse than clips, and whether the binder clip is more acceptable in the up position or the down position, and whether doing all government reports as illuminated manuscripts would be considered government waste or would be all right, so long as there were little doodles of Jesus in the margins.

You know what we need, right? We need a damn chart. We need congressional hearings, and perhaps a Super Duper Committee, and they will be tasked with coming up with the official hierarchy of all the ways to hold papers together, ranked in precise order as to their preferability in given situations. Bat guano glue: not acceptable. Staples: very tacky, unless you use Trump brand gold-plated staples, which are just like regular staples except for yellow and shiny and therefore better. Tying your papers together using only the detached umbilical cord of a newborn pure red heifer: the best, unless the apocalypse has already occurred, in which case it should be done only after Labor Day.

Then we need individual states to get outraged over the government-enabled heirarchy of clips and clipping, and pass legislation saying that I can very well paste reports together using bat guano glue if I damn well want to, because Paul Revere and the First Amendment and stuff, and before long every presidential candidate will have to give their opinions on whether the federal government should have a say in how papers are attached to other papers or whether it should be left to the states to decide. Because that's what we do, here in America, and if you don't like it than you can move to some country where they don't give a damn how their papers are put together.



In the end, we are left with this sole lesson: The people at Fox News are the dumbest people on the planet. I'm sure Roger Ailes or someone looked at a picture of the president and vowed on their mother's grave that by God, they would find something in that picture to be outraged at, and some other ass said "paper clip, maybe?" and everyone just went with it because it was early in the morning and there were shows to put on. It was either that or talk about why tea party audiences seem to have an insatiable appetite for blood, and nobody wants to listen to people talking about tea party blood lust over their morning toast and eggs, not even tea partiers.

There are 14 months to the next election. Just contemplate that for a moment. That's 14 solid months in which our national discourse can do nothing but get worse. By next summer, we may be looking back fondly at the time when our supposed punditry was debating topics as weighty as paper clips.

