March 26, 2018: Children should be shot and not heard

According to WordPress’ analytics, The Jourmudgeon’s readership has built steadily to where it now occasionally reaches the high single digits. So it is time for The Jourmudgeon to share with his reader(s) a professional secret: The Jourmudgeon asks Mrs. Jourmudgeon to read his columns before he posts them, to keep The Jourmudgeon from truly embarrassing himself. This week, Mrs. Jourmudgeon’s critique was characteristically pithy: “If you had made this up, it would be funny.” So it goes.

1. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them elementary and high school students, descended on Washington D.C. and other cities to march for gun control and chastise President Trump and legislators for doing nothing to stop the carnage in the nation’s schools. Trump didn’t hear them, because he was playing golf in Palm Beach, about 25 miles from where 17 high school students were slain on Valentine’s Day by a former student with an assault rifle. And members of Congress didn’t hear them, either. They had fled the capital for their home districts so they could suck up to the NRA for more money to get re-elected.
2. In a vote that was carefully engineered in Moscow, Russians elected Vladimir Putin president of the United States. Putin immediately credited the tireless work of his campaign manager, Donald J. Trump. “Rule Russia, rule U.S.,” Putin declared. “Thanks to my friend Donald. Is good to be the king. Again. Still.”
3. Despite Putin’s praise, Trump sued Putin over a nondisclosure agreement in which Putin’s lawyer paid Trump $130,000 to keep silent about a torrid bromance the two have engaged in for several years. “He also promised me I could open a hotel in Moscow, but he lied,” Trump whined. “He promised he’d never lie to me, only to everybody else. And he said I could have the world exclusive rights to lying.”
4. The White House and Fox News issued a joint announcement of a wholesale job swap, in which Fox’s entire stable of commentators will go to work directly for Trump instead of their current freelance status, and several former top Trump administration officials will find work at Fox News. “I will pay more attention to them now that they are on TV than I did when they worked in the White House,” Trump tweeted.
5. The revolving door at the White House included Secretary of State ReXxon TilleXxon, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Trump lawyer John Dowd, National Economic Director Gary Cohn, and White House Communications Director and Head of Eyeliner and Foundation Hope Hicks, who was pushed out after she forgot to order next week’s supply of Diet Coke. Trump appointed Stormy Daniels to replace Hicks. While she is a newcomer to Washington, Daniels is said to have plenty of experience serving under Trump in a variety of positions. It was revealed later that Stormy Daniels is the stage name of a porn actress whose real name is Partly Cloudy with a 60 Percent Chance of Evening Thundershowers Daniels. Democrats in Congress argued that Daniels would have to appear before the Senate Committee on Artificially Sweetened Beverages and face confirmation by the full body. Or maybe they said they would need her full body to appear before them.
6. Trump moved quickly to replace the other fired staffers as well. He appointed CIA Director Mike Pompeo to run the State Department – a move akin to naming Jesse James to lead the Quakers – Joseph E. diGenova, who looks like a mafia hit man, though not as polished, to replace Dowd, and John Bolton, who looks like Captain Kangaroo with a bad case of gas, as National Security Advisor. Trump had considered appointing Bolton to something in the past, but – The Jourmudgeon has seen this widely reported – he apparently did not like Bolton’s mustache. At the weekend, a White House spokeswoman announced – with a straight face — that diGenova would not be joining the administration after all because of a conflict of interest.
7. Upon his appointment, which Senators quickly acknowledged is not subject to examination of his full body, Bolton immediately renounced his past advocacy of launching a pre-emptive strike against North Korea. “Now that I have the president’s ear, why not go straight to full-scale nuclear war,” he said.