HHS Is Now The Department Of Disease Efficiency

Alexandria Petri (The Washington Post) satirizes Kennedy's pick to head HHS: 

Well, President-elect Donald Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “He wants to do some things and we’re going to let him go to it,” Trump said. “Go have a good time, Bobby.”

Everyone who is an HHS employee and is not the measles virus: You are on notice! We’re taking this department in a new direction! Measles, stand back and stand by. It’s about to be your time.

We’re doing our best to give the people what they want. For many years we thought what they wanted was clean drinking water, safe and tested vaccines to drive down deaths from childhood diseases, and food that is produced in sanitary conditions so the people who eat it don’t get sick. But we were wrong, and the change starts now.

Similarly, we mistakenly thought that finding a dead mouse in your frozen ravioli dinner was a shock. Now, we know better. It’s a surprise! People love surprises. People love danger! Our ancestors didn’t stare down death every time they went out to hunt and eat food that had not been subject to Food and Drug Administration inspection so we wouldn’t have to stare down death every day as we went out to buy food that has not been subject to FDA inspection. You want to consume a can of beans and live? TOUGH LUCK! THIS IS DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA!

In light of this, and of the nomination of RFK Jr. as our leader, we at the Department of Health and Human Services are announcing a rebrand as the Department of Disease Efficiency. Given our new mandate to root out expertise wherever it might lurk and replace it with Something That Came To RFK Jr. In A Dream Once, we felt it was proper to release “Health” and “Human Services” back into the wild, where maybe RFK Jr. can hunt them down with his falcon and eat them before they have undergone an FDA inspection.

Look, most Americans are not equipped to test food safety or vaccine safety on their own. And that’s because, unwisely, we have delegated these tasks to the FDA. It’s time we gave them back to the people. Every citizen should learn to inspect his own meat, like the Founders did. George Washington (who apparently only had one real tooth left at the end of his life) did not drink fluoridated water. Abraham Lincoln (one of whose children actually made it to adulthood!) never gave his children safe, routine childhood vaccinations. Franklin D. Roosevelt (who had polio) had polio. It’s time we went back to that.

Now is not the time to rest on our laurels. Now is the time to throw our laurels away. We’re going to think outside the box. For too long, our ideas have been limited to “things medical professionals recommend” and we have mistakenly viewed each death as a disgrace and failure. Now, it’s time to abandon that hidebound, old-fashioned thinking. Maybe disease is an ally, not an enemy! Maybe we can attract a new consumer, someone who is as excited as RFK Jr. is to wonder if water is turning children gay.

Gone are the days when we saw tainted food as something to be eradicated and roadkill as something to be driven past and not consumed. No longer! We are EATING roadkill. If anyone gets a brain parasite, we are CELEBRATING them, not shaming them. Who is to say it is better or worse to have more functional brain and less disease? The point is, there are no bad ideas in this new department. We can’t wait to hit the ground running, like that cockroach in your pasta sauce.

For too long, American citizens have been complacent, having fewer and fewer children, under the misapprehension that if you like your child, you should get to keep your child. And what’s to blame for that? Safe, accessible vaccines that mean nobody gets measles. What better way to drive up birth rates (don’t interrupt me, JD Vance) than to increase the rates of childhood deaths? Also, maybe we can stop approving birth control! None of it seems safe. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, using science — or something that is just as good as science: nothing.

Every time you get to do something as simple as sit down with your healthy family and eat food from a grocery store, it is the result of a cavalcade of miracles. Each health and safety regulation that made your food safe to eat, each childhood vaccine that means you are at the table with Tiny Tim and not his Sad, Empty Chair and Abandoned Crutch, is the product of decades — no, centuries! — of painstaking effort. And these efforts came from all kinds of people: brilliant, dedicated medical minds, crusaders who were sick of finding dead mice in their lunch meat and just ordinary families who were willing to do whatever they could not to lose their loved ones. Well, we’re going to take those decades of painstaking, breathtaking achievement and treat them as RFK Jr. treats a bear carcass: dump it somewhere, for no reason, after it has been struck by a car.

Finally, we can declare victory in the long, bitter war against lifesaving human innovations like pasteurization and the polio vaccine! I don’t know why we want to declare victory in this war, but I guess it’s what we’re doing.

Who Needs Three Branches Of Government Anyway? (SATIRE)

Alexandra Petri (The Washington Post) satirizes the way both Congress and the Supreme Court are "bending the knee" to Donald Trump - effective merging the three branches of government into one (the Trump Branch):

I don’t know who thought that the Senate’s “advice and consent” role was going to survive the Trump Era: Part Two, unscathed. Of course, Donald Trump is opposed to obtaining consent.

This news, like the news that the president-elect will soon be putting a dogecoin in charge of the federal reserve, is disappointing but not surprising. You would think that of all the scenarios in which Trump has to obtain consent, this would be the most palatable: asking consent from a body of older Republican men who already agree with him. But even that is too onerous!

And the Senate seems fine with it. All the next president had to do was post (on Truth Social, no less) that “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments” and bang! all three front-runners for the Senate majority leader gig emitted statements saying that this sounded fine. (Some more enthusiastically than others.)

So, there you have it. How many branches of government do you need, anyway? In theory, we have three, so they can check and balance each other. But that was a long time ago, before we realized that this would just make things more difficult for Donald Trump.

Why is the Senate trying to involve itself in Trump’s plans, anyway? Well, the Senate, for those not paying attention, is a body that was designed by the Founders so that Mitch McConnell could have somewhere to sit and gloat that his plans were coming to fruition. The U.S. Constitution, which is very big on the idea of separation of powers for some reason, came up with lots of fun little tasks for the Senate to get to do. It is supposed to approve treaties and confirm Supreme Court justices and sign off on the Cabinet appointees of each president. This is important because it keeps the senators busy; otherwise, they would just fundraise and filibuster all day long, reading “Green Eggs and Ham” to one another until they lost interest, or sit grumpily on Joe Manchin’s boat.

I’m confused what senators expect to do with their time if they are willing to ditch the advice-and-consent thing. They haven’t declared war since the 1940s, and most legislation is now passed in a fit of blind panic via mysterious bundle in the middle of the night in what is known as the “reconciliation process.” I guess they can hold hearings and convict impeached people, but after they failed to remove a president who refused to accept an election’s results, I’m not sure their hearts are in it.

Do they remember that Congress is supposed to be one of three equal branches of government? Maybe they are tired? This is why it is so bad that our government is, on average, so old! If I only had one job, I would not want to just hand it over to Donald Trump to do. But maybe if you have been in the Senate for approximately 830 years, you just want to lie down and let all the appointments happen during recess. (Recess appointments sound like you’re meeting Katie near the swings to eat sand and fall off the Ominous Metal Structure, but actually, they mean that you have just abdicated your responsibility to the American people to make sure that the president’s appointees are not Way Out Of Line. This makes it easier for him to replace the Education Department with a gun wearing sunglasses.)

And what’s wrong with that? Look, the Constitution was much too hung up on this separation of powers thing, on the grounds that you didn’t want one branch of government acting without checks and balances from the others, lest it start abusing its power and eroding the people’s rights and freedoms. But who needs the people’s rights and freedoms? After all, we can rest assured that as long as Trump is acting in his official capacity as president, nothing he can do is a crime. The Supreme Court, which also used to be an independent branch of government, was very clear on this point!

This Is What Went Wrong In The Election (SATIRE)

When something terrible happens, a person can either laugh or cry before starting the long battle to correct it. Alexandra Petri (The Washington Post) gives us the chance to laugh, because laughter is necessary and therapeutic even in the darkest of times. She writes:

Like lots of people on the internet right now, I am certain that the thing that went wrong in the 2024 Harris campaign is the very thing that I have been going on about for years, but unlike everyone else on the internet, I am right. I know what went wrong. Okay, I will tell you: not enough texts and emails from the candidate.

Every time I got one of those on my phone or in my inbox, I felt fired up. And I’m sure that’s how everyone else receiving them also felt. So why were we only receiving (and this is a rough estimate; I think I am lowballing it) 346 of them per hour? That wasn’t enough. We needed more.

Do not say to me: “Your assumptions are wrong. Obviously, we tried the strategy of sending more texts than any human being could possibly want to receive from a candidate in the course of a lifetime, and that strategy failed.”

False.

It has not yet been tried. We received only a countably infinite number of texts. We should have received an UNCOUNTABLY infinite number of texts. What were they even doing at headquarters?

How could this campaign have hoped to win the election unless every second anyone in America was looking at a phone, that phone was dinging with news that the candidate’s college roommate’s parrot was worried that not enough money had been poured into the campaign yet? If your phone is not wrung out and shuddering from the effort of fielding all the texts, running through its battery power, begging some unknown force to make it stop, then you weren’t getting fired up enough!

Emails from the candidate. Emails from the candidate’s running mate. Emails from the candidate’s spouse. Emails from Barack Obama. Where were emails from people with even more tangential relationships to the candidate? Their neighbors? Their dog walkers? People who had once visited an Airbnb right after they’d visited it and felt that it had been left in excellent condition? People who sat behind them at a screening of “Top Gun: Maverick” and thought that their verbal responses were appropriate? If we had had my way, everyone in the country would have been required not only to receive these texts but also to send them.

Also the subject lines of the emails weren’t dire enough.

What evidence do I have that my strategy would have worked?

Well, it seems to me (without much evidence; I did Google it, but that just meant that an insufficiently intelligent AI sent me a few sponsored results that were not entirely germane) that fewer people complained this year than complained in previous election cycles about the sheer volume of unrequested campaign emails and texts. This, to me, is an important signal.

Such a conspicuous lack of complaint, if it happened at all, which I am choosing to believe that it did, was not because we are just used to the world being marginally worse now and have stopped complaining as we stroll uneasily through 80-degree temperatures in November, tip at all transactions and accept that we are all 40 percent microplastics. No, it was because we liked it. The number of texts and emails was finally approaching the number of emails and text messages that it is ideal to receive from your candidate of choice. There is no ceiling. That is what I have always been saying! If we had just gotten a few more, we could have clinched this thing.

I know that some people are saying, “Your prescription is the opposite of what is true. You are just bringing a bad set of assumptions to a situation where there is no evidence that your suggested course would have made things any better!” To them I say: No! Try it! Only one way to find out, and that’s to try it! More texts! More emails! Midterms are right around the corner! We’d better start right now!

Humor Columnist Makes The Endorsement The Washington Post Wouldn't

The following is from the humor columnist of the Washington Post (Alexandra Petri):

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.)

We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!

Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.

But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.

Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world.

Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out.

The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.”

“But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on!

Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.

Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know.

I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so.

That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!

Where Is The Room Where They Control The Weather? (SATIRE)

 

Alexandra Petri's latest bit of satire (in The Washington Post) pokes fun at the Republicans who believe our government is controlling the weather to punish them.

of course you know that weather control is one of government’s primary functions

we just have to find the room where it is happening and stop them. this is what i am always saying

any time things get bad

but yes there is a room i’m almost certain of it

there is a whole department of weather charged with inflicting weather on —

not even the president’s enemies, exactly, just people

it has to seem random, you see

it has to seem like the kind of thing that might just happen

or the people will find out and become incensed

even the president doesn’t know, although Donald Trump has started to suspect

when Trump moved that hurricane with a sharpie i bet they all looked up and took notice

people make a lot of mistakes about who controls the weather

they’re not political appointees, of course

the most senior one has been there since the Reagan administration. his name is Dennis (he won’t give his last name)

he keeps saying he’s going to retire, the commute is getting to him

they operate out of Abraham Lincoln’s eye (the left one) in Mount Rushmore and getting there is just impossible

the office politics are a mess, too

Dennis is all about waterspouts

Sheila has her heart set on derechos for everyone and she won’t take no

Karen on the other hand favors haboobs

(they choose them based entirely on how much fun they are to say)

most days they don’t agree on any weather at all

but when they have a big deadline coming up they stay late and order in sandwiches and you can see the eye shining late into the night

don’t tell FEMA about us, they are always saying. FEMA will be so upset that we exist, all those hours of work they put in, trying to help people

or the National Weather Service, says Karen

oh god, Sheila says, imagine the weather service finding out!

trying to track storms, trying to get good information, when all they need to do is come here and grab a sharpie

it’s a good thing for us that everyone who has been looking for a group of people controlling the weather has been so antisemitic, says Dennis. this is the last place they will think to look

that is a common mistake

if anything the office is a little too Christian for comfort

there is a bible on a shelf marked open to the flood for easy reference and sometimes for inspiration Sheila goes and flips through Revelation

but yes they move hurricanes all over the map

that’s the primary thing that they do

the second one is decide what to order for lunch

this often takes a long time

it is not that they’re indifferent to human suffering exactly but they have a quota to reach or they don’t get paid

and Sheila needs the health insurance

a few years ago they had budget cuts and it was just awful

so little weather

and once, drawing some winds on the map, they ran out of ink and a gale died down and several boats that had been about to founder on Lake Michigan were saved

it’s not really political although they are prepared to be political if given direction

there is a big chart in the office listing who voted how and if you call your congressman he can try to get them to stop the winds

so far no congressman has succeeded

only one ever even managed to call and they were so surprised they picked up

but then they just sat on the line saying nothing and finally he gave up

they’re honestly mostly good community members although Karen has been volunteering less

she says, because of Everything That’s Going On and won’t elaborate

Dennis goes online and gives without apparent irony to the gofundme’s of the victims of his storms

and then he shows up monday and gets back to moving them around

i think Donald Trump will come shut them down

if he can find them

he has to know where to look

when Donald Trump gets back in power he is ending the whole enterprise for good

or sending the worst storm that he can think of to his least favorite people

he’s still making his mind up which

of course they’re real

(as real as the button that you push for economic prosperity. big and red and in the oval office. you can’t miss it)

sometimes people talk about climate change but we know nothing we can do makes any difference, we can’t even get them to keep serving breakfast at taco bell

all the important decisions are made in rooms we aren’t in so we can’t possibly impact the weather

but the government can and they are

there’s a room somewhere

we just have to keep looking for the room