by Eric Wilson

“Maybe if I take a day off, I won’t have to write about Giuliani?” I thought to myself.

Life had been kicking me in the shins for weeks, and my legs were starting to buckle. It would be an ancillary benefit while hibernating and trying to nip this cold/flu in the bud — the coughing fits alone had me at the brink of exhaustion. Surely someone this revolting and stupid will implode and go away if I just slept for a few days?

“Nope,” said the Universe.

Instead, each coming week I will expect Giuliani to be a tornado touching down during an earthquake in the middle of a raging brush fire during a biblical flood — at least until Trump shitcans the idiot for what I could only imagine to be practicing law without an intellect.

Perhaps this relatively quiet week from the president’s new lawyer is a sign he is fading into the woodwork already… it’s Tuesday, and I’ve barely heard a peep.

Well I’m not biting.

Besides, he is definitely going to do something even dumber than he already has, which for an average idiot, I wouldn’t even consider possible, what with the hush fund and slush fund gaffes. Rudy Giuliani is no normal C-grade idiot though, so it’s a near-certainty this limelight hog is going to fuck up even worse (given the chance) and it seems that ol’ Trumpy is willing to keep Giuliani off the executioner’s block — for now.

Perhaps it’s part of the Don’s master plan — a plan that as much as we can piece things together, seems to center almost entirely on using the presidency as a front for mafia-like activities.

Which is of keen interest to American Shithole, this revelation that goons involved in the Trump campaign were running an extortion racket for an all-access pass to the presidential signing pen. The same pen he uses to chicken scratch his name on all manner of obscene laws and executive orders — producing a series of sharp vertical  lines that look less like a signature, and more like a problem child’s drawing of the Gates of Mordor.

Good lord, did you hear his Mother’s Day message? Mom was “basically a nice person?”

Donny, can you show us where your mother never touched you?

Everything Trump does is like a comical, farcical, exaggerated take on our already over-the-top villains of film and literature, so it’s easy to dismiss some of his actions in the wake of so many others. Everything he does is some varying degree of terrible. He is the great eye, lidless, wreathed in orange flame.

Which I suppose makes Giuliani the Mouth of Sauron — I mean, he is a dead ringer.

I’d like to have been a fly on the wall during conversations with his dentist.

“Now about your teeth Mr. Giuliani, it appears that you have been chewing on broken glass and petrified dog shit for 70 years, so I have surgery scheduled for…”

“No, I’m good.”

“OK, well, at least let me set some dentures for your uppers?”

“Fine, but you’re ruining my Halloween costume.”

Meanwhile, in Mordor on Monday afternoon — thousands injured, 60 dead and counting during protests at the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, and Washington is focusing on the first lady’s kidney operation.

Gosh, I hope she’s OK. Be Best, kidney!

Mordor by the way, is what the Trump Effect feels like for me at times: a painfully long slog through the shittiest part of Middle-earth. Somewhat like watching the films. Randomly fast-forward to a point in any of the three LotR movies, and more often than not, you will land on a scene of people walking somewhere.

I’m worried the Mueller investigation hasn’t even reached Gondor yet. The fucking congressional hobbits are still dicking around with the Nazgul at Weathertop? Shit, we’ve got months, maybe years to go.

Perhaps there is hope in this analogy as the Mouth of Sauron doesn’t appear until near the end of the Lord of the Rings saga.

Anyway, instead of dragging Giuliani through the mud prematurely, I’m going to focus briefly instead on this past week’s big reveal: presidential protection for your business interests is not only available; it’s quite affordable by today’s measure of corporate expenditure.

Hell, it’s a fire sale.

At least two separate LLC shell companies were created by different members of the Trump organization (Lewandowsky; Cohen), apparently in part, to shake down American businesses and industry. Both of which attempted to extort money from AT&T (Cohen was ultimately successful, where Lewandowsky was not), with the likely promise of favoritism from the administration for the Time Warner merger that Trump nixed anyway.

I don’t know how many times I am going to say it, but are you fucking kidding me?

I foolishly thought I was done being surprised by this embarrassing presidential failure of epic proportions only America could muster, but we have dropped trou for all the world to see — and the festering boils on our wrinkled, flaccid democracy are cause for retching from here to Timbuktu.

And it wasn’t just AT&T, it was everybody.

They shook down the auto industry, the pharmaceutical industry — they pimped access to Trump as if the Office of the President of the United States of America were simply some glory hole for anyone that’s got the cash and a stiff business proposal.

Essential Consultants LLC, Cohen’s limited liability corporation that paid Stormy Daniels the hush money, also received funding from Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, Novartis, Korea Aerospace Industries, as well as AT&T —  and these are likely just the tip of the iceberg.

Also, was Cohen looking at his daughter’s Barbie Dream House when he named that fucking company? Is there a Ken working the phones at Essential Consultants?  

"Essential Consultants, this is Ken speaking, how may I direct your bribe?" 

Holy fucking shit. I am sick to my stomach just writing about this latest addition to the shame bucket. Nothing shames these people. Absolutely nothing.

Which brings me to my missed deadline, and what I plan to do about it in the future. First, my apologies, if you were looking forward to a fresh American Shithole last week — for whatever reason, I was unprepared. As I previously imagined, there are going to be weeks that I just don’t want to write about these evil fucking assholes. I may be under the weather, but let’s be honest here:

Writing about these evil fucking assholes every week, is quite often just as much of a slog as living with these evil fucking assholes every week. It’s not cathartic; most of the time I feel like I’m cleaning an outhouse with my brain.

So, between coughing fits and Nyquil-fueled fever-dreams, I figured on occasion I would write about the things in America that are amazing to me. The beautiful things that are not tied to this fucking nightmare we are living through. I’ve tried this before, but I always seem to be waylaid with fresh hell in the news cycle each morning on my now broken toilet.

The Beautiful Things will be an occasional, sporadic reprieve from Komàndant Bonespurs and his daily efforts to ruin my once blissful morning dumps. It will be an exploration of old and new, of the simple pleasures, and the timeless beauty of various creative efforts that for me, make life worth living.

It is my hope that you too, dear reader, will occasionally need a week away from the insanity; where together we can celebrate our artistic beauty unscathed by the ravages of this administration. This will also serve as an opportunity for me to pen a few backup articles that can be published in a pinch, the next time Ari brings the walking death home from one of her business trips — or the next time I don’t care to write about one of Trump’s boot-licking sycophants.

C’mon Mueller, throw the fucking ring into the fires of Mount Doom already.

B. S. Report

Heroes meeting heroes. Let us all celebrate Emma Gonzales meeting with James Shaw Jr., as the Parkland survivors gathered to celebrate another brave American. As the voices of our youth unite across our country, I worry less and less about the deadly opposition they face. Once a towering impenetrable monolith, the NRA of today seems more like a soon-to-be abandoned outpost of a dying empire.

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