Send In The Clowns
How many bozos does it take to wreck an administration?
Editor’s Note: Have a question about what the administration now calls “so-called war plans.” (So-called, because they were plans about our war.) Don’t ask Matt. Ask Pete Hegseth, who will likely be TikTokking them later this afternoon, right after he gets another tattoo. This one, a tramp stamp of Will Cain’s face. Ask any other questions that don’t require a security clearance/put the lives of American pilots in jeopardy at askmattlabash@gmail.com
Dear Matt,
These days, when I read headlines about our current clown-show administration, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Which do you prefer?
Yours,
Margaret B.
Well, Margaret, I’m from the Yogi Berra school of hard decision making: when you see a fork in the road, take it. Which is why I prefer laughing through salty tears. Or salty liberal tears, as the beer koozies say at the CPAC merch stands. Even though I’m not a liberal. Unless you count being strongly against power grabs orchestrated by misanthropic authoritarian-sniffers whose name rhymes with “Russell Vought” as being liberal, which plenty in the MAGAverse now do. In which case, I guess I’d qualify by that specious definition? Which is fine, I’ve been called worse.
But by any definition, I am salty. Particularly when glowing with perspiration after my morning Tae-Bo workout.
When I was a wayward youth who went by my Indian Guides’ name of “Red Eagle” (as a seven-year-old, I fancied myself of warrior stock, even if by cultural appropriation), my life was a nonstop swirl of kickball games and “Smear the Queer.” The latter of which should not suggest homophobia. It was a different time, one we called “The Seventies.” And back then, as second-graders, we thought “queer” merely meant we should smear the peculiar fellow who had possession of the football.
But once a year, my military father would break me out of my backyard gladiator games to take me to see the rodeo in downtown San Antonio, where he then had us stationed. I loved everything about the rodeo: The plastic cap-gun six-shooters my pop bought me, which would probably earn him a visit from Social Services today. The smell of cotton candy commingled with livestock dung. The chance to witness real-life violence, when an angry bull decided to shish-kebab a cowboy who failed to hang on for eight seconds of glory before getting bucked off. (An act I’d later come to know as “marital relations.”)
But was I ever truly worried for the dirt-eating bullrider? No. Because with him in the arena were rodeo clowns, to distract the bull from goring him to death. And who doesn’t like a clown? Well, plenty of people don’t. Actually, coulrophobia (fear of clowns) is a very common one. And sure, clowns tend to have unruly hair, while wearing too much makeup and ill-fitting shoes. So I get the clown contempt. Still, back then I figured if clowns are present, how serious can the trouble be?
Well, I’ve changed my tune a bit on that. For when I look at this administration, I don’t really see any courageous bullriders. (Not to be confused with bullshitters, of whom there are plenty.) But I do see wall-to-wall clowns. And they’re not here to save us, but to assist the angry bull.
By now, you know their names. I don’t even have to mention them. Though I will mention a few, because I’m a firm believer in gratuitous humiliation when it’s been so hard-earned: Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Pam Bondi, Ka$H Patel. But of course, blaming them for their incompetence/all-around ridiculousness is a bit like clucking about a Gambino soldier falling in with the wrong crowd. It should come as no surprise that when you join a crime syndicate, committing wrongs is sort of the entire point of the enterprise.
The problem with being perpetually surrounded by so much ridiculousness is that the ridiculous tends to become commonplace. What we once found stupid, reckless, or immoral now just feels like business as usual as we read our newspaper/phones over morning coffee. (Honey, pass the half-and-half and a Zoloft, please.)
The prophetic words of the narrator in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, released in 2006, no longer plays like futuristic dystopian comedy but present-tense dangerous reality:
As the twenty-first century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But, as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.
How bad is the collective clown show? Well, bad enough that when a friend wrote me the other morning to tell me that she couldn’t wait for my column on JD Vance taking over the National Zoo/Smithsonian, I thought she was joking. Yeah, funny! What’s he gonna do? Deport the woke, Asian pandas to bring in ‘Murican ones? Exchange eye-liner tips with the lemurs?
But then I remembered that bad jokes tend to become reality in this administration. And sure enough, while I wasn’t looking, the Bozo di tutti Bozos did indeed issue an executive order directing Vance to crack down on “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, including its zoo.
There is now so much clownishness, that it’s hard to get your arms around it all. But the other night Rachel Maddow and her producers (who deserve combat pay), valiantly tried. After Trump complained that the Signal security breach (in which half of his cabinet discussed highly sensitive upcoming military strikes in Yemen in a loosey-goosey group chat on a commercial messaging app that inadvertently included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) was being made a big deal out of because the administration has otherwise had “two perfect months,” Maddow and her wrecking crew dedicated a good half-hour of show to documenting so many of the ways the last two months have been imperfect. Some highlights:
* Trump’s huckster head of the White House Faith Office, Paula White, offering “seven supernatural blessings” for a four-figure contribution – which includes “taking your sickness away” – even as the administration announced it is cutting more than a billion dollars in vaccinations in poor countries, which will likely result in the estimated death of 1.2 million children in the next five years.
* Meanwhile, with a measles outbreak at home, unvaccinated children are now experiencing liver damage upon following the advice of Trump’s clownish Health Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr., after taking too much Vitamin A, which he promoted as a cure.
* A week after being sworn in, when a jet carrying 64 people collided with an Army helicopter over the Potomac River, killing everyone on both aircraft, Trump had to rescind his threatening attempted buyout of air traffic controllers.
* It was revealed that some of Elon’s child soldiers at DOGE, tasked with amputating entire limbs of the government, had problems of their own, like promoting racism and racial breeding tactics through eugenics on social media, and previously being fired from a cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets.
* Clown car inhabitants fired staff from the nation’s nuclear security agency who oversee our nuclear weapons stockpile, then scrambled to hire them back, though many couldn’t be found since the clowns had forgotten to collect contact information before cutting workers off from their government email accounts.
* Cutting and then having to rescind the cuts at the CDC (in charge of tracking our ongoing bird flu outbreaks), our national parks, and the FDA.
* DOGE clowns boasting of, then quietly having to disappear, the five largest cuts on their website, which turned out not to be so. They then had to erase another big cut, after claiming they’d found $2 billion in waste and fraud at Veterans Affairs, which, as Maddow put it, “turns out a lot of that money was for stuff like, oh, I don’t know, medical services for veterans, cancer programs for veterans with cancer, burial services for veterans who die. Boy, that really does sound wasteful, right? So yeah, again, oops.”
Maddow went on for about ten minutes more. (That only took us up to early March — one perfect month, instead of two.) Her list is by no means comprehensive. With a little diligence and some Googling, you could easily write a hundred additional clown-car citations of your own. But even if it is damn near impossible to keep the entire list in your head, the important thing is to keep one. To not let the slow accumulation of absurdities cow you into thinking that insanity is the new sanity. To remind you that this insane clown posse is not worth laughing with, but at. Regularly and loudly.
At this point, doing so is practically an act of good civic hygiene. For most clowns of the authoritarian stripe fear being thought ridiculous more than they fear being feared. So even if your worst fear is them, reciprocate, be selfless, and help them realize their worst fears by laughing at them through your salty tears.
Bonus Book Plug: The other day, a gorgeous coffee table book arrived unbidden in the mail. Which is a gift I no longer take for granted. The mail, I mean, not unbidden gifts. Since I expect DOGE to eliminate the U.S. Postal Service any day now. It was Waypoints: Flyfishing The World, by Jim Klug. Jim is not merely a Slack Tide subscriber, or the proprietor of Yellow Dog Flyfishing — a worldwide fishing travel outfit based out of Bozeman, Montana — or a man whose art hangs in my house and whose photos I have used in these pages before. Jim has one of the best eyes in the business as an outdoors photographer, and takes astonishing snaps. Yesterday, I even walked into the living room, and saw my wife — who cares as much about fly fishing as I do about quilting — paging through Jim’s book, mesmerized, saying, “Goodness, these are beautiful.” An additional bonus? It contains a foreword by Jim’s friend and mine, the great Tom Bie, editor of The Drake, the world’s best (and most beautiful) fly fishing print magazine. You can buy Jim Klug’s Waypoints here
Bonus Tracks: Yeah, sorry, I had to include this. It’s in my dutiful-pundit contract (the never-pass-up-a-headline-tie-in clause). Even though I don’t have a soft spot for this Stephen Sondheim’s 1973 song, I do for Sinatra and this stripped-down piano version of it:
It’s shad season, so I’m (happily) up to my armpits in the poor man’s tarpon these days. Meaning I’ve been listening to a lot of river music, like this song from Patty Griffin, featuring Robert Plant, “Ohio.”
And speaking of Patty Griffin and Rachel Maddow, here’s my very favorite version of my favorite Patty Griffin song, “Crying Over,” coincidentally performed on Maddow’s old Air America show many years ago. I never listened to Air America — I told you I’m not a liberal — so don’t know how I ever found it, but I’m glad I did. If the time code doesn’t hold, forward to the 5:10 mark.