(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week By The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

There are two things I decline to do about the departure of Sean Spicer from behind his White House podium: 1) Care, and 2) Sympathize.

As to the first, it doesn't matter a damn to the country who the next marquee liar representing Camp Runamuck is. Any TV reporter who starts talking about how the "messaging" will now change under the watchful eye of Anthony Scaramucci is telling you that they think the administration's lying will now be smoother and more telegenic. The president will continue to be an unqualified, undereducated dolt. The policies, such as they are, will continue to be retrograde and cruel. Bob Mueller will shrug and get back to work until El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago fires him. The public face of this particular administration is doomed always to be more of a useless bobo than all the press secretaries who have come before. None of that will change.

(The new guy, Anthony Scaramucci, came out on Friday afternoon and said that Donald Trump had "some of the best political instincts in the world." Aces, all of them, all the way down.)

As to the second, we're already starting to hear folks talk about what a good guy Spicer is, and how he can get back to being the good guy he always was. The hell with that. Spicer took the Dolt's Shilling. On his first day on the gig, he willingly lied about the size of the inaugural crowd because the president*'s ego couldn't handle its actual size. He then repeated whatever nonsense he was told to repeat until he became a figure of fun and ridicule. And how are we supposed to believe he left because he was dissatisfied with the fact that he has a new supervisor?

"I will lie and degrade the public discourse more than any living human being, but I cannot work with THAT MAN." (Sean Spicer's Last Lament, 2017.)

Yeah, that'll fly.

I still think they should have let him meet the pope, though. That was unkind.

One of the most remarkable events of my lifetime was the sudden explosion of democratic energy in Poland in the summer of 1980. Yes, it all began before St. Ronnie got elected. (During my alternative press days, I used to wear a Solidarnosc T-shirt when I played softball. Not a big deal, but I liked it.) This is why the events in Poland this week had some serious resonance around the shebeen. The new government there leans a bit too far in the direction of non-Communist authoritarianism for folks who still remember what life under actual Communist authoritarianism was like. And they're in the streets again. From CNN:

Tens of thousands of Poles gathered outside the presidential palace in Warsaw on Thursday evening, just hours after the lower house of Parliament passed a bill that would give the populist government the power to push all of the country's Supreme Court judges into retirement. The government-controlled upper house of Parliament could vote on the bill as soon as Friday. Videos shared on social media captured the moment when protesters assembled in the capital sang a resounding version of the national anthem, waving Polish and European Union flags. The public outcry over efforts by Poland's ruling Law and Justice party, or PiS, to curtail judiciary independence has flown largely under the radar amid recent high-profile visits from US President Donald Trump and the British royals.

Layabouts of many Western governments may not notice, but Poland is slipping toward a very bad place.

Which brings to mind this interesting column from Tiger Beat On The Potomac. I agree with a lot of it. Many conservatives and Republicans have demonstrated a serious man-crush on Vladmir Putin and, yes, it does conflict with a great deal of conservative rhetoric over the past few decades. But I just can't get with this part.

What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin's Russia. My message for today's GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 called—it wants its foreign policy back… How did the party of Ronald Reagan's moral clarity morph into that of Donald Trump's moral vacuity? Russia's intelligence operatives are among the world's best. I believe they made a keen study of the American political scene and realized that, during the Obama years, the conservative movement had become ripe for manipulation. Long gone was its principled opposition to the "evil empire."

History is not the friend of those assertions. Even back in the glory days of Ronald Reagan, conservatives and Republicans loved authoritarians. They just didn't like the Communist ones. They were fine with Pinochet, and the Somozas, and Rios Montt in Guatemala, and Galtieri in Argentina. The Shah was fine with us for decades, and so was Saddam Hussein, now that I think about it. Jeane Kirkpatrick, that splendid meathead who was proven wrong almost daily in the 1980s, most particularly in places like Poland, made her fortune drawing distinctions between Pinochet and Ho Chi Minh. And, for an awfully long time, this was a distressingly bipartisan phenomenon.

Pinochet's people committed an act of murderous terrorism within sight of the U.S. Capitol. The United States government continued to support him for 14 years. In 1980, the American-trained national guard in El Salvador raped and murdered four American nuns. Kirkpatrick intimated that the four nuns had been fighting with the guerrillas in the hills and Alexander Haig speculated that they had died in a running gun battle. I don't recall a great deal of outrage from the ascendant American Right about either the crime or the slander of the murdered women.

In fact, President Jimmy Carter shut off military aid to the El Salvador government, a policy that Reagan reversed almost as soon as he got in the door. Carter was roundly ridiculed by that ascendant Right for making human rights an essential part of his foreign policy, even though his commitment to that principle was admittedly spotty. (The Democrats developed something of a conscience on the issue that never sprung up in the Reagan administration.) Putin has a lot more in common with Pinochet and Galtieri than he does with Andropov or Khrushchev, even though he works in the same office space. If we're all on the same page regarding authoritarian governments oppressing the democratic rights of their citizens now, I rejoice.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Crab Rangoon" (Mike Dillon): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's presidential press secretary James Hagerty landing in Japan to an enthusiastic welcome. Sean Spicer should consider himself lucky. History is so cool.

My friend Alex Beam, columnist for the Boston Globe and distinctive voice of grumpy contrarian opinion, writes about the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau by giving the famous Concord layabout the hiding he richly deserves. This guarantees Beam the hatred of college sophomores in perpetuity.

I'd like to congratulate the satellite radio folks for the launch of the Beatles Channel. I've heard a lot of stuff I hadn't heard in years, especially the early stuff. (I've always had a love for any single that showed what a kick-ass bar band they must've been in Hamburg. John Lennon's cover of Barrett Strong's "Money" in particular.) I am constantly amazed by what we would call "market penetration" today. Two notes into most cuts and I know all the damn words.

Also, there's nothing that gets a day off to a good bouncy start than hearing Loretta Lynn sing "Fist City."

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Fox News? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

(Even on Fox News!)

Jude Sparks was hiking the rugged New Mexico desert some five miles east of Las Cruces by the majestic Organ Mountains in November with his parents Kyle and Michelle and brothers, Hunter,8 and Rhett, 5. Jude said he and his brothers were checking their hand-held radios when he tripped on something. "I tripped on the bottom of the tusk and fell flat on my face," Jude told Fox News. When he turned his head he was looking directly at part of what looked like a jaw bone. "It looked like large chunks of bone."… When Houde arrived at the site he was amazed at what young Jude tripped on. "I think this is only the second full Stegomastodon skull found in the state of New Mexico," Houde said. There was another found at Elephant Butte State Park just north of Las Cruces about two years ago. "That one lacks the jaw and it appears the ends of both tusks were broken off," Houde told Fox News. "Ours includes the jaw but is missing one tusk so far - we may find it yet."

Tell me this isn't the dream of every American kid of a certain age. You literally fall into a dinosaur. This is an excellent demonstration of how dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now.

The committee was overwhelmed this week. Top Commenter Dan Yeager went on a complete tear and there was no option but to find one of his comments that would sit as his Top Comment as Top Commenter of the Week. We settled on this short drama.

On one of his lonely walks around the capital, instead of running into one of his Russian "friends", Dana Rohrbacher is surprised by a little green man who has jumped out of the bushes and landed directly in his path.

LGM: Take me to your leader!

(After some momentary confusion as to which one…)

Rohbacher: Uh, you must mean the President. Sure, follow me.

LGM: No need. Hold onto this orb with me and…

(Suddenly both materialize in the Oval Office)

Rorhbacher: Here he is. I'd like you to meet…

(Both the Green one and the Orange one jump back in surprise.)

LGM: Gah! You must be kidding!

Orange Man: Sessions? Is that you?

(to be continued…)

One can only hope. The committee loves cliffhangers. Meanwhile, 92.11 Beckhams to you, good sir.

I'll be back on Monday, when we'll roll the shebeen's food truck into the nation's capital for whatever fresh hell they're brewing up down there. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or there will be a little something-something from Sean Spicer's abandoned desk that may crawl up your leg.

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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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