But wasn’t he personally entertaining and sexing up half of Europe at the time? Sure, they’d let him slide with a lame excuse. Ol’ Benny knew how to throw a party and he didn’t mind enabling the laughter at his expense — he cheerfully wore a coonskin cap to play up the perceptions of hillbilly Americans. In short, Ben…

I believe you have identified the key dividing line between excellent schadenfreude and “oh, hell, this asshat is just gonna go bigger next time.” I applaud your work and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

My MFA and paintbrushes stand ready to assist!

Daaaamn. I mean, deservedly so, but daaaaaaamn.

Uphill, both ways, with a paper card catalog. :)

Thank you very much! May the universe pony up the caffeinated beverage I’d buy you if only I could.

Hey. Upthread you implied you teach rhetoric. I have a lit degree, write for a living, and, yet, never formally studied it. I may have been horrifically wrong-headed idea of what “rhetoric” entailed until The Elements of Eloquence, during which I muttered, “Oh! That’s what we call that thing” quite a lot.

I would add that that argument also implies that whatever thought that the speaker wanted to express around that word is worthy of sharing. Nope.

You are correct. Thank you. I know better, I was just having a long, crappy day and my defenses were low. Migraines and mandatory diversity training should be legally disallowed to happen on the same day.

Yesterday, I endured “diversity training.” The facilitator told a story of a manager having to navigate a white subordinate directly asking a black coworker “why he couldn’t use that word, too.” She stated the question “could have been coming from a genuine place of curiosity.”

But, he’s intentionally misquoting Tolkien and misunderstanding the context, to boot. It’s hard, when you’ve had a rough day and people are wrong on the internet. Would it be so wrong just to fix the damn quote? Pleeeeease?

There’s always one. What is it with some being so very covetous of the slightest hint of implied permission to use that word?

“Young, Ethnic Dems: are they too inexperienced to be effective in D.C.?”

You think Trump had someone read him the Constitution and actually was still paying attention to the amendments? He was off showing how his marker scrawl “signature” is bigger and more beautiful than John Hancock’s before the first sentence was read.

Sadly, Trump would notice:  no actual wall, no actual grift. The man’s as dumb as a pile of rocks, but he’s all about the grift.

So, you’re saying that “Idiocracy” wasn’t scathing enough to depict the very depths to which we, an uneducated, gluttonous mass of racism and ignorance, known as “Americans,” might squelch our way to achieving. Good to know. Great.

I’d settle for a good defenestration.

You win the award for “things I’d never thought I’d star.” Take your star. I feel dirty.

Because, somewhere along the way, the bizarre notion that poverty and sickness were visited upon people as a direct result of a moral lacking (and, therefore, the inverse is also true, i.e. wealth and health were “rewards” for morality and goodness) crawled up their collective asses and metastasized. Therefore, it’s…

What about some sort of psychic bitch-slap? I know all sorts of people deserving of that! Except, there are so many...