BY MAX BURBANK | Everybody hates Mondays, but the first Monday after vacation is the worst. That’s pretty much every Monday for poor old Donald Trump, who couldn’t catch a break if it was chained to his ankle and dead. But this Monday? Yowza. It’s still got to be stinging like a shaving cut sluiced in Old Spice “Sea Salt ’n Vinegar” scent.
In five and a half hours of testimony before the House Intelligence Committee (oxymoron), FBI Director James Comey upended the “Santa Sack of Crap” he seems to always have with him and directed it toward the Trump administration’s collective fan. In an extraordinary (yet by now signature) move, Comey revealed his agency is investigating whether members of President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
If this doesn’t seem like an earth-shattering development to you, I understand. It’s a little like the FBI investigating whether grass is green. It’s the official, under-oath testimony that makes the difference. It’s all a matter of degree. Sure, everyone already knew this was happening — but on-the-record testimony is like Comey threw the administration on the ground, put his knee on its neck, and ground its face into said grass until the administration looked like former Batgirl actress Yvonne Craig on that one “Stark Trek” episode where she played this sexy green homicidal maniac… ’cause in this metaphor, see, the grass stains would turn the administration all… green. Shut up, it’s an awesome analogy.
Representative Adam Schiff, the committee’s top Democrat, sketched out a lengthy, suspicious, and deeply depressing timeline of contacts between Trump aides and the Russians, and then posed the rhetorical question, “Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated, and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible.” He went on to conclude that it was also possible that he was about to grip a rose in his mouth and lead a conga line of pigs for a dance around the room, but that it was highly unlikely and pig dance fetishists should not be holding their breath. Those may not be Representative Schiff’s exact words, but I feel I’ve adequately conveyed their flavor.
In a sure sign Trump’s handlers are either literally insane or have zero influence over him whatsoever, the president — you guessed it! — live tweeted the hearing, leading to a bizarre sequence of events. The leader of the free world tweeted, “The NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence electoral process.” Representative Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, read the tweet aloud and took the opportunity to ask Comey if that was true. “It certainly wasn’t our intention to say that today.” Allow me to translate: “POTUS Dick, the Great Orange Whale, just sprayed a bilious cloud of lies out his inflamed blowhole.”
As if to drive home the point that the president and tweeting mix like corn liquor and cotton candy, Comey also testified that there was absolutely no evidence that President Obama had “wires tapped” (sic) Trump Tower. This means it is now the official, on-record opinion of the FBI that our president is a liar, and that he would be well-advised to “stop, drop and roll” before his golf trousers are reduced to smoldering ash, leaving him unpleasantly exposed from the waist down.
Republican House members fruitlessly toed the White House line, insisting the “real problem” was not the possibility that Trump & Co. had traded the American Presidency to Vladimir Putin for a handful of magic beans, but that unscrupulous Obama holdovers and despicable Deep State bureaucratic creeps were illegally leaking about the deal to the lügenpresse who happily regurgitated it as FAKE NEWS! If only someone had locked Deep Throat up, the Watergate break-in would retroactively never have happened!
Check these concurrent headlines: Our nearly empty State Department announced that Trump’s human dry-erase board Rex Tillerson will not be attending the first meeting of NATO since Trump took office. He is going to be tied up hitting the links with Chinese president Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago and then jetting off for a quick trip… TO RUSSIA!
And what’s-his-face, Michael Flynn? Former national security adviser? Yeah, turns out he was supposed to have registered as a foreign agent working for Turkey but he didn’t get around to it until last week.
Oh, and Paul Manafort? The guy who ran Trump’s campaign between loose cannon, New Hampshire backwoods redneck Corey Lewandowski and Stepford serial liar Kellyanne Conway? Less than 24 hours after the Comey hearing wrapped up, The Washington Post reported Manafort allegedly laundered payments from the party of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, well-known surrogate and stooge for, say it with me now, Russia.
But the saddest American betrayal of all? This tweet, dated Mon., March 20, 2017: “I had said Friday was the worst day of Donald Trump’s presidency. I was wrong. It is today.” You know who wrote that? Charles Joseph “Joe” Scarborough. Co-host of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC — once our president’s second-favorite show after “The Apprentice.” I remember when Joe used to look at Donald like a 14-year-old girl all hopped up on soda and Pop-Tarts looking at a Zayn Malik vine. Now it’s all gone. One Direction. Vine. Joe and Don. We were all going to Make America Great Again! But it was never real. Donald’s tiny black heart has always belonged to a shirtless equestrian Russian dictator who shall remain nameless, but rhymes with “Pladimir Vutin.”
