Experiment #1

Methodology: Open the front door.

Result: Cat does not go out. Nor does cat stay in.

Conclusion: Cats are incapable of making up their own damn minds.

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So, it’s been a week.

What do we know?

Nothing, really.

We know that William Barr issued a tightly worded letter claiming Robert Mueller found no evidence to support the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russian government, and punting on the question whether Donald Trump’s actions regarding the investigation amount to a legal case for obstruction of justice.

We know that Barr himself is someone a courtroom drama would call a hostile witness, someone whose word is not to be trusted.

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• The dog ate it.
• The shark ate the dog that ate it.
• Zombie John McCain ate it.

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It’s that time of year again, and— wait, what year is this? Really? Is he still President?

Jeezus.

Well, since we seem to be stuck in this Timeline for the duration, why not enjoy some Bread & Circuses & Hoops & Armageddon &—

Are you sure he’s still President?

Damn.

Nancy’s not gonna help us out of this one, and Beto’s busy prancing on every tabletop in the room, so we might as well endure the Stinque Braquet, hosted as ever by Braquet Dowager Mellbell.

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The world should be reacting in horror.

It is not.

Not all of it.

And that’s the problem.

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Years ago, back when we were in grad school, studying Kant and Descartes and Aristotle and Plato, a friend of ours had an interesting remark:

A philosophy of comedy needs to be funny.

What was interesting about his remark, besides its cleverness, was what he was getting at: The essence of something needs to be what it is. If you’re getting at the essence of comedy, what it’s about, how it works — which is what you do in philosophy, and why philosophers get laid so hard — your understanding of it needs to be funny itself. Which is the classic problem with explaining a joke: There are the ingredients, but where’s the soufflé?

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We’ve been thinking a lot about Blazing Saddles lately. We’ve been thinking a lot about it for the past ten years, actually, in different ways at different times.

What first started bringing it to mind, was, well, the obvious: The Sheriff is near. The Sheriff was Barack Obama, and you couldn’t help playing it out from there. (Okay, and Biden is Gene Wilder, and Madeleine Kahn is — maybe we should just keep that one to ourself.)

And if that’s the reason Blazing Saddles came to mind, it should have stopped coming to mind two years ago, with Sheriff Barack and Joe driving off into the sunset in a Secret Service limo.

But it didn’t go away. It keeps coming back.

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